27 January 2003
Dawnine Dyer, Past President
Clay Gregory, Current President
Bob Steinhauer, Current Vice-President (Community & Industrial Issues Chair)
Napa Valley Vintners Association
Dear Dawnine, Clay and Bob,
This is an important message. The NVVA has allowed itself to become involved in a public relations nightmare from which it must recover immediately. The problem is the NVVA support of the ill-conceived Stream Setback Ordinance (SSO) that very few want and nobody needs.
Please let me explain, because circumstances have changed, considerably, since the SSO was being put together last Summer and Fall with the aid of some wine industry insiders.
When the Watershed Task Force was last considering a setback ordinance, the following circumstances and assumptions prevailed:
- Mel Varrelman was in office, dominant as a Supervisor, and pushing for an SSO with the loyal assistance of the local Sierra Club, the Farm Bureau, and the County staff;
- Guy Kay was expected to be Mel's successor, expected to remain loyal to the wine industry, and the Vintners in particular, and expected to pick up the reins of Mel's power at the County level;
- The local Farm Bureau, one of Mel's allies, was still pumping out Volker Eisele's stale mantra that the County had better adopt its own environmental restrictions or the State or Federal Government would do it for them:
- Chris Malan and her wing of the Sierra Club, another of Mel's allies, had suddenly become aggressively litigious and seemingly invincible, in a way that caused the County government to become defensive against this former ally;
- Jay Hull, the County Executive, was the acting head of Mel's County network, assuring that public employees would execute on Mel's commands;
- The Sierra Club was circulating an initiative petition with extreme restrictions on land use, (it created a mandatory no-plant zone 350 feet from Napa streams and 1000 feet from wetlands or a neighbor's house), as a means of extorting from the Supervisors a less harsh but nonetheless extreme SSO;
- The State appeared to be safe for Democrats and their environmental agenda in the upcoming election;
- Congress looked to be headed for a Democratic majority in both Houses, thus assuring a continued Federal pro-environmental bias in regulations;
- Jim Conaway had not written about the Napa Valley for almost 9 years; and
- No one in political life had ever heard of nor considered the political clout that could be orchestrated by a contractor named George Bachich.
So a small coalition of Napa Valley vintners and grape growers, working to protect existing vineyards from being hampered by stream setback restrictions, took it upon themselves to negotiate with the seemingly intransigent Sierra Club people and the County people that Mel could control, and had themselves exempted from an SSO that was being drafted in the waning days of Mel's tenure as a County Supervisor. The Sierra Club was willing to make this concession to this vintner-grower group to remove their opposition to the SSO and make it easier to get that ordinance approved by the Supervisors.
Well, Mel's SSO didn't get enacted before he left office, and since then those earlier circumstances have changed and those assumptions of the Fall turned out to be wrong.
(1) Mel left office defeated and lacking the last-minute clout the vintner-growers thought he could muster;
(2) Guy Kay, with heavy vintner support, failed to get elected to succeed Mel, losing to a new face in Napa politics who had very little vintner support, and, in winning, spent just over half the campaign funds Guy spent in losing;
(3) The mantra that the County had better adopt its own environmental regulations or the State or Federal Government would do it for them, still being recited the uninformed, such as Mike Napolitano, became laughable as the State and Federal tides shifted; (see (7) and (8) below);
(4) Proving they are no longer the power they seemed to be, Chris Malan and the insiders of the local Sierra Club lost the suit they brought against Beringer's South County warehouse project and its EIR after turning down a 50 to 1 pro-environment mitigation offer; Chris' insiders now appear to be engaged in an internal power struggle, while their reputation as honest environmental enforcers has withered away;
(5) The County has a new Executive Officer, an outsider without connections to Mel, who was selected over Mel's inside candidate for that position;
(6) The Sierra Club's Initiative is now to be on the ballot in March of 2004, but it is so extreme that it discredits its organizational sponsor and looks as though it cannot sustain a legal challenge even if it does get enough votes;
(7) The State is so badly short of money that it would have to release prisoners in order to raise the cash to pay for the enforcement of any more environmental regulations;
(8) Congress was taken over by Republicans, and, reacting to that encouragement, the Bush Administration is looking for ways to water down Clinton-era environmental regulations that are a drag on the economy;
(9) Jim Conaway's The Far Side of Eden was published, a book about Napa that makes personalities from the local Sierra Club, the local Farm Bureau, the County Government, and a whole lot of vintners look arrogant, self-satisfied, and petty;
(10) George Bachich, making exceptional use of the Internet, has demonstrated considerable organizational skills in marshaling hundreds of protesters against the SSO and creating a force that elected officials must now recon with at their peril, a force much larger and potentially better funded for political battles than those vintners supporting the SSO in the name of the NVVA.
It has become increasingly clear that the exemption of vintner-grower replants from the SSO would be at the expense of the little guy. It is always dangerous for an organization that possesses political clout to use it to advance its interests ahead of others; it is suicidal if it uses that clout in ways that its advantage is at the expense of an organized gang of little guys.
There is no useful value in what remains of the SSO. There are far better and more effective ways to protect the environment of the Napa watershed. With the local Sierra Club looking more like a paper tiger than it was last year, and Mel now out of the picture, an honest watershed protection ordinance can be crafted, one that applies sensibly and evenly to everyone without exemptions and one that does not call for discretionary permits from the County's elected officials. There is good reason to believe that, given time, a majority of the supervisors can be persuaded to proceed in this better direction. This should be the goal of the NVVA. It should back off of its continuing support of the Sierra Club and an SSO with too many exemptions.
Without strong support from the wine industry, the SSO has no chance of passing, except as an interim (4 to 8 month self-terminating) ordinance. With wine industry support, it has a small chance of passing, but continued vintner and industry support for the SSO would necessarily cause the rest of the property owners of Napa County, the ones still affected by the ordinance, to have to demonize and discredit the wine industry for its morally indefensible position in order to win over the votes of the majority of supervisors. Those property owners already have access to the services of a political consultant and a public relations firm and have undertaken a letter writing and e-mail campaign to undermine the moral authority of the vintners, and that campaign won't remain targeted against the generic "vintners" if it appears to be more politically effective to attack individual vintners and their labels. Over time, and as the next elections approach, the supervisors will find themselves in a particularly uncomfortable spot: having to choose between the County's primary industry and some of its stars, and a big mob of angry voters. That is not a situation into which anyone with political savvy wants to place its elected officials. That is particularly true if that industry can no longer rely on even a single supervisor vote.
The NVVA must publicly withdraw its support for the SSO, except as a short-lived, interim measure, or face the public relations nightmare that is already gathering momentum.
Sincerely,
(Bill Jaeger)
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