Why should small parcel owners or residential property owners not be satisfied with a residential exemption or a small parcel exemption? In a nutshell, exemptions are unfair and too risky.
Exemptions just shift the burden of the ordinance to other people. Why are they not exempt, as well? Taking an exemption that benefits ourselves at the expense of others just lowers us to the same status as the grape industry titans who wanted to burden the rest of us with the ordinance while getting their own exemption. We don't want to be like them. We want no ordinance at all.
Exemptions are easily revoked. An exemption might make this ordinance seem more palatable now, but once in place, this ordinance cannot easily be repealed or loosened; it can only be tightened, and we fear it will be tightened. This is an interim ordinance, and staff has made it clear that when the Conservation Regulations are re-written, restrictions will not be loosened; only tightened. The exemption would probably be eliminated when the Conservation Regulations are rewritten.
Supervisors could revoke the exemption at any time without notifying all effected property owners, just as they did not notify all affected property owners that they were about to pass the Stream Setback Ordinance. If the property owners were to find out about the revocation afterward, it would be too late, because the exemption would not be restorable without an EIR and resulting mitigations. As a practical matter, once revoked, the exemption would never be restored.
The Sierra Club could obtain a court order to revoke the exemption on the grounds that a residential exemption makes residential use a favored use in the agricultural zone, or on the basis that there is no scientific basis for an exemption, or on the basis that so few landowners are left to bear the burden of the ordinance that it can be found to unfairly discriminate against them.
Or the Sierra Club could blackmail the County into revoking the exemption as a part of settling some other dispute.
On December 10, Chris Malan made it abundantly clear that the Sierra Club's unstated goal of separating landowners from their land takes priority over its stated goal of enhancing the watershed, when she told Board Chairman Dodd on the record, during the public hearing, that even as an incentive for property owners to restore, create, or enhance riparian corridors, she and the Sierra Club would not allow the County to reduce setbacks even marginally below the levels in the 1991 Hillside Ordinance. You will recall that this made Chairman Dodd visibly angry.
The Napa County Board of Supervisors unwisely put all County landowners in jeopardy by passing the 1991 Hillside Ordinance, which opened the door to Sierra Club lawsuits. In the first round of Sierra Club lawsuits, only the County and a few landowners were sued, but all were, and still are vulnerable, and still may be sued, at the whim of a few extremists in control of the Sierra Club. Such a suit would be devastating to most small property owners.
Passing this new Stream Setback Ordinance just provides the Sierra Club with more opportunities to do the same mischief. The current Board of Supervisors should not repeat the mistake made by that 1991 Board. As long as the Sierra Club maintains an adversarial relationship with County landowners and with County government, it should be given no further opportunity to harass any of us. Passing the Stream Setback Ordinance in any form would be playing right into the Sierra Club's hands.
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