Napa at Last Light

by James Conaway

  He described himself in the pages of the Dallas Morning News as chairman and chief executive officer of Hall Financial Group. Many who knew him in Napa didn’t think much about his complicated financial affairs and believed him when he said he had no intention of building houses on Walt Ranch. But then the Walt Ranch project began to cause public ill will, not just toward the Halls but also toward the valley’s wine industry.

  A friend told Craig bluntly in late 2015, “If you bring criticism down on the vintners, they’ll throw you under the bus.”

  As the Halls tell the Walt Ranch story in A Perfect Score, they were simply trying to plant vineyards on property zoned for agriculture. But because part of it was above 5 percent grade they had to do an erosion control plan as well as the Environmental Impact Report. Their water “experts,” according to Craig, told the Halls that they had one of the best “water areas,” that their erosion control plan was “similarly positive,” and would actually improve the quality of Napa’s water, something the city’s quality control manager denied.

  Few people seemed to believe the Halls’ assertions. After the draft Environmental Impact Report was released in 2014—1,500 pages—a public meeting was held at which a man told Kathryn Hall she was the devil, and overnight a dead rabbit was left in the winery entrance.

  * * *

  Craig and Mike Reynolds wrote to the county protesting the “ever-increasing burden” applicants face. “Changes to the process as have been experienced in this application will only serve to discourage future applicants for agricultural uses and may lead to challenges on the viability of the Agricultural Preserve.”

  People reading that took it as another threat. Some, looking further out, thought that if Hall didn’t get his way he was willing to bring down half a century’s worth of invaluable land protections, changing more or less single-handedly the very nature of the valley and sullying the vaunted Napa Valley brand. Rather than risk being thrown under the bus by Napa Valley vintners, Craig Hall seemed on the verge of throwing them under the bus.

  Unlike most, he had the resources to simply pull up stakes as he had elsewhere and move with his recently procured assets to some other beautiful place. Valley residents were reminded of the planet’s new class of refugee fleeing neither religious hatred nor wars but the ordinary restraints of civics. Drifting one percenters increasingly seemed unburdened of scruple, accountability, and any sense of the past. Politically invested, adept at converting others to a singular purpose with money, out of the reach of irate citizens, befuddled officials, and often the law, they perceived the very Earth through the bars of a dollar sign.

  Sometime after the hearing took place on Corporate Way, the planning department announced that the absolutely last, decisive hearing on Walt Ranch would be held in early April 2016. Final comments on the revised Environmental Impact Report would be received at that time and a decision made by Dave Morrison as to whether or not the Halls/Walt Ranch/Hall Brambletree/hidden investors would get a permit. Until then, there was nothing for the principals to do but jockey behind the scenes until the real fight began in court, where everyone knew by now it would eventually land and where the testimony of “experts”—a highly varied concept—would be very important.

  4.

  He walks into a café where he is guaranteed anonymity and orders tea. He stipulated earlier by phone that his name cannot be associated in print with what he’s about to say, a carefully considered decision to speak out about what’s happening in Napa and surrounding counties by a seasoned professional, despite risk to his livelihood.

  “Deep Root” isn’t his choice of pseudonyms, but it will suffice. He is one of hundreds of “experts” in planned development that include geologists, hydrologists, soils and climate adepts, even landscape designers and assessors of prospective vineyard sites in rough terrain, and also an accredited preparer of Environmental Impact Reports who knows more about such things than most of his competitors. Deep Root has a long history of assessing the effects of development in the wilds of the North Coast counties, “and really knows,” as a friend puts it, “how the mountains move in Napa.”

  Deep Root has less interest in wine than in land’s ability to recover from what people do to it. Also an abiding belief in the ethics of the various professions, and a passion for natural balance that soon burns through his caution, leaving in its wake an altered view of reality in anyone who might be listening to him parse the damage done to remaining pristine meadows and woodlands, all in the hope of providing those parcels at least a chance of survival.

  “If you leave a landscape alone for forty years,” he says, “it will actually get back to being one.” He redesigns them on paper to accommodate the unrealistic desires of owners and developers, and is daily stressed by the collision of ignorance, greed, and enormous sums of money.

  “If a guy shows up in a $130,000 Tesla and asks me for help, I say, ‘I’ll take a fifty-thousand-dollar retainer and talk to you tomorrow.’ There’s a lot of that type out there, and it’s scary. They know almost nothing, and a lot of them see vineyards as a way out of their financial problems because vineyards are all about real estate, not wine.”

  He’s well acquainted with big developmental projects in the Howell and Vaca ranges, the classic middleman in an increasingly uncomfortable position. “The rich need a fall guy, so that if the project blows up, they can ‘disburse.’ The money isn’t real to them. They recruit local people as shepherds and fall guys, and after the deal’s done they either buy them out or eat them up by contributing to their difficulties and then taking them over.”

  He’s talking about vineyard developers and land evaluators who readily lend themselves to distortions and inventions of the geomorphology to make their clients’ projects look benign on paper. “Water is allocated that doesn’t exist. Some investors buy a water right just to shoot up the value of the property then sell. It’s all about making a lot of money off the land, not about the land itself, or wine, which have become part of the smokescreen.

  “More than ever, it’s about what’s passed on to later generations. Or isn’t passed on because it no longer exists.”

  The only solution to rampant development, he believes, is to make pristine land as valuable as so-called improved land, taking the incentive away from those who care about nothing but making more money at the expense of all else. Local government agencies that should protect the land, he adds, mediate on a constantly shifting front, too many elected and appointed officials failing to live up to expectations of the people and often subverting the spirit of the law, if not the law itself.

  “The planning commission’s objective is to wear people out so they will eventually go away and the agencies can take the easiest way forward to give developers’ clients what they want. The supervisors tell the planning commissioners what to do, the planning commissioners tell the head of the planning department what to do, and he tells the professionals beneath him what to do. The latter all drink beer and hate vineyards not because of all the work but because vineyards introduce an alien culture, not agriculture, but ‘lifestyle.’

  “Planners see wineries as speculative ventures to be flipped, forcing the planners into the role of abetting speculation. It goes against the mandate inherent in their jobs, which is to preserve agriculture. This works well for owners and developers because most people don’t care, but the trouble in Napa County, from the speculators and developers’ point of view, is that people do care. They’re pissed, and many have turned into hawks.”

  An initial permit is inestimably valuable and, for the most part, the beginning of the end of that piece of land. “No one ever goes back to monitor—ever—what’s been agreed to, and that’s when the real damage is done. Vineyard managers clear-cut trees they shouldn’t, then sit back and wait to see if anyone objects. The force of law should be felt by the property owners who pay for this, but it isn’t. Then in ten years they flip the property—lately to the Chinese, the new class of the rich an
d inexhaustible.

  “Napa Valley’s an eighteen-billion-dollar economy based on tourism, and they’re at the point of running out of resource. So it’s all about adding value and leverage to existing real estate,” that is, event centers, new wineries amid converted vineyards, de facto restaurants, new transient occupancy tax–reaping hotels, houses, and ranchettes.

  Most property owners in Deep Root’s experience need a lot of money to support extravagant lives. “Most own property elsewhere, too, and are maxed out. They have no cash. The Halls are different—they have real money. For them, it’s the ranchette game. As soon as he gets a permit for Walt Ranch vineyards he’ll create thirty-five limited liability corporate entities, each with its own name, roads, and leech fields already put in, then add more roads to accommodate houses. Twenty years from now the payback will be enormous.

  “When the possibility of a Walt Ranch development first came up, some professionals wouldn’t touch it. There were very real problems, including ‘ice cream terrain’ ”—too unstable to be built on—“and the presence of huge ancient live oaks whose complex root systems essentially hold the landscape together.”

  In the beginning “an engineering company went in and built access roads, took water, and messed with the wetlands. It cost some engineers their jobs if they objected to cutting into the ground so close to wetlands that the water drained away.” The initial Environmental Impact Report “contained inaccuracies and false claims,” he says, “that could eventually be blamed on the engineering company if need be.

  “Cutting thirty thousand mature oaks, some with diameters of close to two meters, is unconscionable. Some oaks were three, four hundred years old because, by chance, no catastrophic event had occurred there during all that time, including no big fires. The roots held it all in place during earthquakes, so even cutting one big tree could destabilize a sizable piece of land.

  “No one wants to think in terms of land forms now. It’s too much trouble to discern them, so instead they use one law to fit everything, which is fundamentally the problem. The rich take as much advantage of the rules as they can, that’s just what rich people do. What’s criminal is that the state agencies in charge don’t challenge them. Instead, they cave.

  “There’s just too much power here—Nancy Pelosi, Mike Thompson, so much influential wealth invested in Napa. Starting in 2009 during the recession, horrible decisions were made by the county because no one was paying attention. To update the Environmental Impact Report the county employed third-party corporations that were also working on vineyard projects. And many of those companies were eventually swallowed up.”

  During that time the county provided money to update the General Plan, the same process that altered the definition of agriculture to favor tourism. “That changed everything. The former planning director wanted to balloon to 12,500 acres of new vineyards, the big question being who was behind it. Real estate developers, that’s who. They said they had done analysis, but it was often based on faulty science. And the laws had changed because of greenhouse gases. But the real problem was that they didn’t involve the public in these decisions. As soon as the EIR on Walt Ranch was done, and the county cranked up to handle the new thirst for vineyards, residents started waking up. Opposition to the wineries in general grew out of that.”

  Deep Root watched prospective developers use regional instead of specific analysis, which is more restrictive. “They targeted blue oaks first because that’s the species that indicates the best vineyard land.” That was stopped. “So now they’re protecting blue oaks and killing the rest. It’s all about massaging the resource. When the state fails to provide the best science to stakeholders, local government, and environmentalists, there’s no way to locally enforce regulations. Since the state doesn’t engage with the public, or effectively communicate with other government representatives, we have chaos, lawlessness, and continued degradation of the land.”

  To Deep Root, long committed to environmental protection, Walt Ranch represents the biggest, most lucrative real estate pivot the county has seen since the change in the definition of agriculture, and of great symbolic value. “Hall said he subdivided land for vineyards, but I think it’s really a real estate scheme, even if it takes twenty years to bring off. The fall guy was the planning director who had had a conversation with the board of supervisors, done what they wanted, and stepped down.”

  After Morrison arrived, according to Deep Root, questions arose about the amount of wetlands on the property. “The Halls cleaned up their EIR, and the director of the board of supervisors ordered it released.”

  Deep Root believes Morrison “saved the asses of the board of supervisors by taking on the project. If he hadn’t, opponents would have gone to the state and showed them the EIR that generated thousands of letters because it was so bad.” But the objections took more than a year to read and respond to. “Then the county cleaned up the EIR and announced that there’s to be a review in April 2016,” only months away. “What’s needed to kill it is lawyers working with red meat from people like me, who know the land and are no longer under confidentiality agreements because the process has taken so long. If the county doesn’t kill it now, they’re done. The people won’t stand for it, and the paper trail’s too long to cover up. A court of law would eventually force out the truth.”

  For wineries, he adds, other large problems loom. “They still aren’t acknowledging the methane that comes from all aspects of making wine, which is huge. So is the biomass left over. For years it was hauled to Oakland, with more huge emissions. Insane. Napa Valley wineries have ten times the carbon footprint of comparable European ones and they have done everything so as not to have to calculate the real footprints. But now that agencies can focus on individual wineries with satellites and other tracking methods, behavior’s going to be affected. Public data will change everything.”

  His tea has grown cold and the morning regulars have all gone home.

  “Don’t entirely blame the rich, just pity them their vanity. It’s a Disneyland, and it’s all business. Better to look at your own life, do due diligence on yourself, and take their money.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN:

  Enocracy

  1.

  Twenty sixteen had promised to be the hottest on record as early as February, with buds appearing a full ten days early. El Niño refilled the reservoirs after five years of drought, but the rains stopped temporarily in January and the sun climbed the southern sky with a determination more summery than springlike.

  Other forebodings hung in the air. It was a year of presidential election, candidates calling for revolution, but quite different kinds, and global warming still the unmentionable specter for many. Strands of pale blue smoke rose against the deep green of the Mayacamas, through air utterly still, as the vines were pruned and discarded shoots burned throughout the lengthening days, their smoke visible all over the valley.

  Those seeing them tended to fall into three distinct groups. The first, composed of workers, property owners, and the downstream beneficiaries of the life wine had wrought, saw the smoke as a sign of a necessary natural process. The second, visitors and the romantically inclined, perceived physical beauty and a reminder of an ancient practice that transcended time. Third, those concerned with the future of the valley and the world into which it was so fortuitously set saw the release of life’s most basic element—carbon—into an atmosphere that grew more dangerous by the day.

  * * *

  The second—or was it the third?—public airing of the Walt Ranch project was presided over by the planning director, Dave Morrison, and so many people packed into the board of supervisors’ room that they spilled out into the hall and threatened to block the elevators. More than a hundred people rose to speak, most of them in condemnation, but one of the most interesting—and unexpected—statements came from a lifelong Napa resident who did not speak but who had provided each of the planning commissioners, the night before, with packets containi
ng the most riveting documents in the fight so far.

  Her name was Lois Battuello and she included maps in the packet that once superimposed on the vineyard plan seemed to clearly point to potential house sites. She added that any effort the supervisors could lend to opposing Walt Ranch “would be appreciated by those who have not been given a voice otherwise allowed by the normal process for development schemes.”

  At the end of the hearing Dave Morrison announced that his decision was being postponed—again. New material had come to light, he said, and the planning department had to deal with it. Craig Hall and Mike Reynolds cried foul, claiming that all relevant facts about the proposed development had been amply aired. But Morrison stuck to his decision: He would wait until the new material had been absorbed, and announce his final judgment on June 13, 2016.

  Morrison had grown up in Fresno, one of the Central Valley’s sprawling metropolises built around farming. It had turned into another struggling mass of urban problems caused by the failures of corporate agriculture, with decreasing profits for the small farmer. His father had been a truck driver and his best friend’s father a crop duster, but Dave majored in anthropology and economics at Fresno State, with a minor in studio art. As a planner, the Walt Ranch proposal was the biggest thing he had dealt with: three volumes of regulations and five thousand pages of comments that had to be read and answered. And new comments and information kept coming in.

  In some ways, Dave Morrison felt, Napa was following the example set by the founding fathers who established the tradition of deliberative debate. But some applicants were unfamiliar with that tradition. They tended to condemn the idea of global warming, whereas others espoused it furiously. Out of curiosity Dave did some research and discovered that only about 20 percent of the countries of the world had done anything at all about global warming, including America. More surprising, only about 20 percent of California had done anything about it. So Napa County was a minority within a minority.