The Ugly Truth





29 March 2011
Why Napa Sucks! Part Three: They Actually Planned These Disasters

Napa's Downtown is all but deserted, vacant storefronts proclaiming failure from every block. The refurbished Opera House limps along with public subsidies and mostly empty seats. Copia, the American Center for Wine and the Culinary Arts, languishes in bankruptcy. Next door, the Oxbow Market struggles bravely on, despite the ceaseless road work that renders the complex forever only half-accessible. New vendors come and go, but mostly go. Everywhere you look, a sign warns you against straying across this line or that, or you're breaking a liquor law, a health law, some regulation someone dreamed up somewhere.

Wine bars proliferate, where you can buy a glass of grape for 12 bucks if you're lucky, 30 if you're not. They're usually empty. Restaurants have started closing for lunches, and otherwise reducing their hours.

Detours abound due to the ceaseless construction boondoggles--more free public funds from somewhere--but you can't get there from here. It's out of business anyway. Despite the endless public work, giant potholes dot major roads.

Tourists wander around bewildered; where's that Historic Downtown they heard about? They tore it down, so you point out the mural based on an old photograph.

That was the situation before the New Depression started

Napa County touts itself as a world-class resort destination, but a more charmless, pretentious Valley does not exist. While some may still find it a nice place to visit, Napa dooms to disappointment any traveller of discernment who recognizes phony exclusivity, extortionate prices and second-rate service.

In any case, you don't really want to live here.

One can't fault Robert Mondavi for recognizing the Valley's potential as a great wine-growing region, nor those who followed his lead. Sometime in the mid-'60s, however, when Bob Mondavi began his wine industry campaign, The Powers-That-Be in Napa Town and County jumped on his bandwagon and started their own parade.

They not only accepted the idea of wine and tourism, They welcomed it, They embraced it, They determined to enslave the County to those interests.

They started planning for our future, planning to avoid all the problems they envisioned, planning to take complete control over the affairs of the County. The County would get rich on wine and tourism, and if that meant displacing or harrassing the people already living here, No Problem. They would submit or suffer.

I can't exactly say who "They" are, but they exist, in a conspiracy of mutual interests among various predators. Bureaucrats who want more control, taxes and bigger budgets; politicians who cater to them to get elected and share the loot; developers adept at working the system; an army of "Public Servants" who like playing boss; gangs of consultants, lawyers and non-profits taking their cuts.

The current end result is clear enough, though. Badly maimed town and county, many rich, more poor, fewer middle-class; high-crime despite brutal police; big projects on the way to bankruptcy everywhere you look. Shopping centers, traffic snarls, suburban sprawl.

Napa County is a monument to the bureaucrat's art, the most over-planned, over-priced series of disasters, I believe, to befall any region in the United States.

They accomplished all of this in the name of Slow, Well-Planned Growth.


The General Plan and Slow Growth

The General Plan and Slow Growth emerged as notable Napa topics in the mid-'70s, and it's probably within these arenas that the County and City of Napa coordinate their efforts and compromise their respective desires. I was gone many of the intervening years, and God only knows all the twists and turns that brought us to our current pass.

The guiding philosophy was to restrain growth and plan it so we would have a better community than that which might just happen. But every growth limit turned into a goal, and with new voters, they set new "limits" and reached new goals. Since the 1970s, the City of Napa's population, I believe, has more than doubled, from 30-35,000, to more than 70,000.

So, in order to slow growth and maintain the agricultural nature of the town, it absorbed ever more of the county into its limits, and allowed hundreds of houses to be built in Browns Valley, replacing orchards, and just beyond it, out on Buhman Road, McMansions on unstable hills which used to be cattle pasture.

Then, wherever they could shoe-horn them, they allowed the building of multi-unit apartments and townhouses, all in the name of slow, planned growth, and affordable housing.

After destroying the Downtown to save it with their urban renewal money, they made the Downtown more irrelevant by building the factory outlets by the freeway a mile away. Then they lured as many big box stores to Napa as possible, like Target, WalMart, Office Depot and Home Depot, to sprawling suburban shopping centers, many just down the road from the last new shopping center, wherever that is, now struggling.

They mangled Downtown traffic, with one-way streets that confuse even the locals, and they made it impossible to drive from the blocks south of First Street to the blocks north of the artery without driving a half-mile maze. We spent fortunes on new bridges for First and Third streets, yet you can't cross them coming from Highway 29 without navigating yet another maze. Jefferson Street, a major thoroughfare, just kind of disappears into a tract north of town and east of Highway 29; good luck finding your way without dead ends and backtracks.

This traffic chaos all derives from these elaborate planning processes that were meant to provide us with rational growth, presumably to enhance the quality of our lives.

They inflicted on us instead all the suburban sprawl that can fit in the narrow confines of the Valley.

Now the City wants to promote a thousand-home development on Foster Road, toward the south end of town where it meets the Carneros Hills. Yet more rural land--in this case dairy-oriented--is destined for new homes that won't sell any time soon. That's roughly three or four thousand new people, and two thousand cars, plopped down by the major routes to San Francisco by either Bay Bridge or Golden Gate, making the traffic congestion even worse on all the exit points from Napa.

All in the name of slow, planned growth, to save the countryside.

The County did its part by promoting the wine industry, and between the late '70s and now, the number of wineries has exploded from fewer than a hundred to a thousand or so, all taking water from somewhere and generally lowering the aquifer and replacing fresh water with brine. They increase erosion with furrowed rows of bare dirt, and they fill our roads with commercial traffic. And gaggles of minions who contemptuously refer to locals as "Napkins," appropriate insofar as we are expected to clean up their problems before they throw us out.

Meanwhile, the same County agencies who find the wineries so eco-friendly harrassed the sheep, cattle and horse ranchers out of business with environmentally contrived demands, though they'd been here forever, actively engaged in the community over years, and did not attract outsiders by the millions.

The County promoted growth in the south end by uniting us with Vallejo and exurban creep from the Bay Area. American Canyon, a whole new town, came into being with slow-growth, and business parks dot the former sheep ranges in between there and Napa. Now, no doubt in the interests of slow-growth and maintaining the rural atmosphere, County flunkies are the biggest shills for 3,000 new homes along the river, 8,000 to 10,000 new people and 5,000 new cars, just a few miles from the City's pet project on Foster Road. Both projects depend on the already overburdened Highway 29 for access.

Neither the residents of town or county want either development, so the City and County officials compromise by trying to sabotage each other's pet project in order for each to build its own. The voters don't count at all, considering the permit fees and taxes at stake, and bureaucrats already spent the loot on their unsustainable salary and pension packages.

The only time slow-growth policies are evident is when you try to build a new garage, or an extra unit in your backyard for your kid or mother-in-law, or attempt a simple remodeling job. The average citizen discovers that everything he does is ultimately illegal, or too expensive, or not allowed, at least for him.

The simple fact is that anyone can build anything they want in Napa as long as they budget three or four times as much as they think the project will cost, and are willing to spend small fortunes on permits and consultants along the way as they find that they can't build what they wanted after all.

Even the rich guys can't buy a guarantee, and everyone else is hopeless.

Only the bureaucrats continue to thrive and prosper. All according to plan.

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