WIDOWS AND ORPHANS
Widows and Orphans. It's a term of art used mostly in legal circles to describe the disenfranchised and destitute. It reeks of hyperbolic lawyerese. Maybe that is why the Supervisors always roll their eyes at me when I try to explain that that is who actually owns the land up here.
Seems each time there is some type of land use moratorium comes before the Board of Supervisors it is always couched as a way to put the brakes on Dot Comers; International Wineries which have raped Mom and Pop operations and turned them into global conglomerates; or a landed gentry which is so decadent that it has resorted to alcohol farming to garner fat profits from a trusting and unsuspecting public. But who it really affects are the Widows and Orphans.
Finally, a Napa Valley Paper (The Star)
actually reported on this a couple of weeks back.
. after a weekend of storms, 69-year-old Patti Gray's riverfront property
was devastated. Her house sat in a pond of water, a mature oak lay sprawled out
across the lawn, and a trailer filled with her daughter's most precious
belongings was drenched.
This was exactly what she had been trying to avoid when she had her hired
consultant submit a building application on June 19, one day after the interim
urgency setback ordinance became law and more than two years after she had
begun trying to make improvements to the property.
What did she ever do to deserve this?
An isolated case? Hardly. The new Stream Setback ordinance will go 150 feet in either direction wherever there is a stream or a ditch capable of traces of aquatic life. That means every ditch along every road in the Valley could be classified as Class IV and (depending upon slope) no activity: no well, no lawn, no basketball hoop, no paved road, no adding on a bedroom could take place within 150 feet of it. Who do you think that affects? Not Dot Commers who have just moved here.
Now those of us who love the Valley, and have spent the better part of our lives attempting to preserve it, realize that we got to where we are today by rational cooperation between public and private entities. Over the past 40 years, local land owners and farmers worked closely with enlightened elected officials to create and sustain an Agriculture Preserve that promoted our life blood, Agriculture, but maintained a decent respect for the rights of land owners as well.
The original Ag Preserve never said you couldn't build a house on your own property. It never tried to dictate what kind of house you could build. It never got into architectural styles, colors, or materials you could use. With the exception of some reasonable height limitations (no sky scrapers allowed) and minor setbacks from boundary lines, you could build what you wanted where you wanted it. The original concept was to encourage people to build in the hills so the fertile floor of the Valley could be put to agricultural use. We were following the European Model of Castles in the Hills, crops on the flat
The Winery Definition and the Hillside Ordinance were to follow later. Both were very contentious issues, but both eventually were accepted because they never stopped everything. You could build a winery, but it had to be on at least 10 acres, 300 feet from some roads, 600 feet from others. No public tours and tastings etc. Restrictive, but fairly reasonable--and once again, better than the alternative of a strip zone of Wineries up and down Highway 29 selling tee shirts and featuring lap dancers.
The Hillside Ordinance was again, good public policy. It never said you couldn't plant grapes. It just said you have to jump through some hoops to do so. By in large, it was a smash success, reducing erosion from 14 ton per acre to 3 ton per acre (Mother nature erodes at 2 to 7 tons per acre "naturally").
It never occurred to anyone that the time would come when someone would say, "we don't like the look of grapes--that we prefer the look of trees--trees that weren't even "native" to the area in the first place--but grew up after vines had been removed during prohibition. But I digress.
Reasonable regulation can be tolerable. But certain trust fund babies and radical members of the Sierra Club have resorted to legal bullying that doesn't affect Dot Comers (there aren't 35 in this Valley anyway); Global Wineries or the landed gentry. It hurts, truly hurts the little guys--the widows and orphans, that make up this Valley.
Contrary to what they would have you believe this Valley is populated by ordinary folk--not millionaires. They don't live on "Estates". They live on the least valuable land--the land near ditches and streams which aren't suitable for grapes, nor have huge vistas for "Estates". They live on Mt. Veeder, Wooden Valley, Diamond Mt, Pope Valley or Berryessa--not in the high rent districts of Oakville and Rutherford.
There is not a drop of Scientific evidence that stopping a widow from adding a bedroom on to her 1200 square foot cabin, paving her driveway or sinking a well will put a dent in the Steelhead population. But the trust fund babies would stop her--for the reasons they always have--not because it is right--but be cause they can--and that's wrong.
Jeffrey Warren
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