Napa at Last Light

by James Conaway

  Mike Hackett, on the other hand, was interested in conifers, specifically the towering Douglas firs that screen Angwin’s environs from the otherwise inescapable sun. He and Jim Wilson talked about these different species—the leafy and needley—and came to the decision that tree protection as it existed was insufficient and destructive of headwaters. Trees fed downslope rivulets that joined each other, in season, ever-burgeoning freshets on facing sides of the Howell and Mayacamas ranges and all ending up in the Napa River.

  A strengthening of county law limiting tree cutting was desperately needed, particularly for oaks and conifers, and expanded protection for stream banks—so-called setbacks where, if nothing was cut, vernal wetlands and streams would survive and prosper. That meant changing the law. Since that was impossible with the current makeup of the board of supervisors—a local reflection of the dysfunctional U.S. Congress, they would have to get the initiative before the people. That meant hiring lawyers to draft it, collecting signatures, and putting the whole question on the ballot in the November 2016 general election. To fail at this, many thought, would be a crime against nature and humanity.

  * * *

  Looking back, Mike would see mistakes made from the beginning, proof of their own naiveté. They talked to Chris Malan about the initiative and Mike wanted to bring her, with her knowledge, experience, and contacts, into the crafting of a voter initiative. But publicly banding with her meant they would lose a lot of support within the industry, so it was agreed that she would act in an advisory capacity only.

  The real problem was Napa’s byzantine political power conglomerate: the Napa Valley Vintners, svelte corporate outgrowth of the old coalition made up of Louis Martini, John Daniel Jr., Robert Mondavi, Fernande de Latour, and a few others who in 1944 signed a formal agreement to promote Napa wines; the Winegrowers of Napa County, the gilded husk of Jack Cakebread’s old ad hoc breakfast club; the Napa Valley Grapegrowers, Andy Beckstoffer’s early cause that had since trended toward development; and the Farm Bureau, the last holdout for family farms, such as they were. In recent years even the Farm Bureau had begun to lean away from environmental safeguards and toward developers. That catchall category included vineyard creators, the difference being that now the development itself was the prime objective because these properties could be more easily flipped, with huge profits. Farming was the trailing, even ancillary activity. And developers were elbowing their way onto boards and committees all over.

  Mike Hackett readily joined Jim Wilson as an emissary, assuming—knowing, he thought—they would find some support in all the groups, with the possible exception of the reactionary Winegrowers. Also that real stewards of the land—there were many, though they avoided the spotlight—no matter which organization they belonged to, would approve of tightening controls on clearing land that resulted in runoff and make their voices heard.

  Better regulations would improve the river, Mike thought, conserve water, and help offset climate change, something the governor had mandated statewide. In view of all this, the initiative would seem to admirably meet the needs of the age. So he turned on his cell phone and called the Vintners’ government relations director, Rex Stults.

  They met at Cindy’s Backstreet Kitchen, and Stults—self-assured and, despite his inflated title, respectful—seemed genuinely interested in the idea of the initiative. Mike told him why he and Jim Wilson thought limiting the cutting of trees and increasing buffer zones along streams would better protect the county. Before leaving he asked Stults to run the idea by his executive board and get back to him.

  Meanwhile proponents of the initiative had begun raising money. Randy Dunn gave them $5,000 seed money and they hired Shute, Mihaly & Weinberger to draft a resolution, which was submitted to the county for approval. After the initiative had been reviewed, the backers would gather the required number of signatures—roughly three thousand—from registered voters in favor of the initiative so it could go on the general election ballot the following year, November 2016, when a new president was also to be chosen.

  But Stults didn’t call Mike Hackett back. So Mike called him again and was told, “We’ve budgeted a quarter of a million dollars to fight this.” But Stults seemed to suggest that if changes were made to the requirements of the initiative, the Vintners might support it, or at least remain neutral.

  Mike offered to come down to St. Helena and this time he took Jim Wilson with him, not to Cindy’s but to the Vintners’ industrial-chic headquarters in St. Helena across the street from the public library. They found not just the government relations director waiting but also the Vintners’ attorney, Richard Mendelson, one of Napa’s many winery advocates, and David Graves, cofounder of Saintsbury Winery and a member of the Vintners’ board. Mike and Jim felt ambushed.

  Making the best of it, Mike offered adjustments to the setback requirements in the initiative. The presentation went well enough, he thought. In closing, Mike said, “Help me here. I need an answer from the Vintners,” adding, “if I were a vintner, I would want this.”

  He went home with the impression that they might reconsider their position. He and Jim returned once more and told the Vintners’ reps—a changeable lot—that in essence they weren’t anti-vineyard or anti-winery and just wanted to stop loss of forests and water. But Stults still didn’t call. Mike assumed that the Vintners, preeminent powerhouse in the valley, had just wanted to see what the initiative proponents might be willing to give up. Both Mike and Jim figured they had been played.

  3.

  Next they went to the Grapegrowers, who wanted to meet at the winery belonging to Don Munk, Craig and Kathryn Hall’s vineyard manager. The assembled growers seemed to question the need to clean up the river. Mike could usually stop a conversation anywhere by asking if defenders of the river’s condition would let their grandchildren play in it. But this time a developer said, “Yes, the river’s cleaner than it was thirty years ago,” what had become the stock response.

  It soon became clear that the Grapegrowers were anti-regulation, period. The executive director, an outspoken young woman named Jennifer Putnam, objected to the use of the term clear-cutting because, in strict forestry parlance, leaving any trees at all disqualifies it as a clear-cut. “I have a degree in forestry,” she added acidly, as if this was relevant; the initiative proponents were wasting their time.

  Mike set up a meeting with Hugh Davies at Schramsberg, confident of finding support there. Climbing the wooden steps next to the magnificent eucalyptus that drops graceful sheaths of bark year-round, he saw a now historic winery lovingly maintained and still breathing of the past.

  Hugh received Mike not in his office but in the Tower Room on whose wall were framed letters of appreciation and memorial photos of Jack and Jamie Davies, even Ronald Reagan. Hugh listened to Mike’s pitch and said, “If I wanted to expand sometime, this initiative would make it impossible.” It had never occurred to Mike that expansion here on the mountainside could be a consideration.

  Hugh then asked for proof that the river was in worse condition than it had been a decade before. Mike thought, “Anyone can see by looking at it that the river’s still a mess.” Demanding new, conclusive numbers was a common stall by those opposing regulation, and Mike was surprised and disappointed that Hugh was using it. Forty years earlier, the Environmental Protection Agency had classified the Napa River as impaired by sediment washing down from development above and including pathogens and chemical fertilizers that deplete oxygen in water. Algal growth exacerbated an ongoing problem, as did polluted runoff during storms and the occasional release of raw sewage. Fish remained seriously affected, native coho salmon having gone extinct in the 1960s, and Chinook salmon were now endangered. Steelhead, the oceangoing trout, had been threatened for years and now numbered fewer than two hundred adults. Reputable biologists believed the steelhead, too, was on a path to extinction if stream and river flows didn’t increase.

  Ignoring the baleful impact of all these things on the riv
er, after decades of study, seemed cynical to Mike Hackett. Yes, the river was cleaner than it was thirty years ago when raw sewage went into it as a matter of course. Since then, the exemplary efforts of the Rutherford Dust Society had been exploited by some outside that organization claiming the organization’s restoration efforts proved the river was “getting better” and no further action was needed.

  Mike departed with a very different idea about Schramsberg than he had brought with him up those rough steps, under the spreading branches of the huge old tree.

  Mike was given an intern by one of the initiative’s support groups, Forests Forever, to help come up with the new figures Hugh had asked for. But before they could be compiled Hugh called Mike and told him he was dropping out of Save Rural Angwin. Now Mike was dumbfounded. This scion of the Schramsberg Davieses, long associated with environmental safeguards, founders of the Jack L. Davies Agricultural Fund, and a former disciple of Volker Eisele, should have been a natural ally. Not so long ago Hugh had openly challenged his fellow vintners to accept unpopular environmental restraints, but no more.

  Had the St. Helena fight been so painful as to permanently turn Hugh against the things he once ardently supported? Or did he accept the inevitability of the harvesting of the last resource? Only time would tell.

  * * *

  The Winegrowers of Napa County never invited either Mike or Jim Wilson to come talk about the initiative. Mike went to see Diane Dillon, the up-valley supervisor and a veteran of the land-use wars, and explained the initiative and the difficulties proponents in her constituency were having. He asked if she thought the industry had been essential in her getting reelected, a naive question from her point of view. Without answering she got down a map of Napa County north of the city and spread it out before Mike. “Seventy-five percent of the wineries are in my district,” she said. Mike was wasting his breath.

  * * *

  Surely, he thought, the Farm Bureau will support this. After all, the organization’s made up of farmers. The oldest of the four organizations wielding the most influence—the Vintners, the Winegrowers, the Grapegrowers, and the Farm Bureau—the Bureau had backed Volker Eisele and Andy Beckstoffer when they launched the Winery Definition Ordinance in the 1980s.

  That had imposed the 75 percent rule and limited promotional activities at new wineries, both necessary rules in the minds of most players and observers at that time. But the Bureau had been a battleground ever since. Good land-use stewards in prominent positions over the years had dwindled in number and influence and were now in the minority, and Mike and Jim Wilson were troubled as they drove down to their headquarters in the city of Napa.

  The board was waiting. At first they were respectful, but as the discussion progressed Mike noticed that Craig Hall’s vineyard manager had brought along more developers and they smirked and made snide remarks. The executive director, Sandy Elles—“a Kumbaya type” in Mike’s opinion—asked why Mike hadn’t come to the Farm Bureau first, and then sat silently while the vineyard developers expressed opposition. He left with the impression that the Bureau had made up its mind before he and Jim ever got there.

  Later, they redrafted the initiative to garner support, reminded that Volker had done the same thing when drafting the resolution for Measure J back in the late 1980s. It had given voters final say in how agricultural lands were to be developed, and Measure P had extended that law for another fifty years. To casual observers those initiatives were often confusing, but both J and P had been stunning achievements and, considering the direction the valley was going, now seemingly miraculous.

  The primary problem with the new initiative remained the size of stream setbacks, so-called water quality buffer zones. Mike and Jim went to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife on the Silverado Trail and other agencies to find out if smaller setbacks could still be effective. And Randy Dunn took all the available information about developed parcels in the county to a mapper to see exactly how many would be affected. The answer was that half the designated parcels in the county would be, and 80 percent of all undeveloped land. Class I, II, and III streams were everywhere, it seemed, and suddenly more important than ever.

  Scientific studies stated that a minimum of thirteen hundred feet from development is required to protect wetlands, and three hundred feet for all stream classes. Could these be responsibly reduced? they wondered. Looking further into the question as the initiative gathered strength, they began to worry that ordinary voters might not support this, and in the end they reduced the distance of the setbacks from streams down to fifty feet and then to thirty-five, a major concession but a political necessity.

  Over the next few weeks, outside supermarkets, libraries, and elsewhere, they and others gathered signatures and e-mail addresses. Other environmental organizations pitched in, the most basic expression of democracy the valley had seen in years. It promised at long last meaningful if modest limits on a process that was denuding sections of ridgelines and high valleys and imperiling streams, facts few of their opponents on the other side even bothered to deny.

  The economic argument—“It’s too expensive”—had become the only one that mattered to the industry. Mike heard that the Vintners’ board had sent a mass e-mail to the entire membership saying that Vision 2050—and Chris Malan, a red flag waving in the face of male vintners—was trying to impose an unnecessary rule on the county. The Vintners would have nothing to do with it, and upped the amount of money it was willing to spend in opposition to half a million.

  But the voters seemed enthusiastic. The signatures of more than six thousand had easily been gathered, almost twice the number required, and were proudly presented to the county for verification well before the deadline.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN:

  Chinatown

  1.

  What was a victory procession in the minds of the organizers of the Water, Forest and Oak Woodland Protection Initiative and of the signers of the petition, was a march to the gallows in the collective mind of the opposition. Proponents didn’t yet suspect the full extent of the industry’s hatred of the measure and of them, or the extent to which the leaders would go to kill it.

  Proponents had become upstarts and worse in the industry’s mind, daring to challenge the county’s collective power structure and bound to feel its wrath. Audacity was the word used most often by leaders of the Vintners, the Winegrowers, and the Grapegrowers. Even the plodding Farm Bureau, more annoyed by political neophytes than offended, signed on to a joint steering committee whose objective was preventing the initiative from finally reaching the ballot, though its supporters thought it already had. For, once there, it would probably prevail and so hamper looming projects, the most important—the only—true consideration in leadership’s collective mind.

  A new politics now prevailed: Increased environmental hardship to come was an accepted reality, but public admission of it was not. Climate change remained as socially and politically untenable as it was scientifically undeniable, and “global warming,” with its suggested human complicity, an outright pariah.

  Most annoying had been the discovery that voters were eager to sign the petition and align themselves with the inevitable climate change disasters to come. Didn’t the signers know the gift they had been given, surrounded as they were by luxurious spin-offs of wine production and their adoring visitors from all over the world, as well as endless vines wherever they looked, including—increasingly—upward, a plethora of good restaurants, neighbors who worked for large corporations, grand spas that made the fusty hot springs and mud baths of old Calistoga anomalies? Didn’t they have the opportunity to visit tasting rooms whenever they liked, when other Americans had to travel dozens, hundreds, even thousands of miles for the experience? Where was the gratitude?

  It never seemed to occur to opponents of the initiative that many Napans cared deeply about the fact that the county’s cancer rates were among the state’s highest and that they were surrounded by the residue of Roundup a
nd pesticides applied by the ton, as well as by dust, automotive exhaust, smoke, traffic, strangers, outsized new structures, high prices, ineffective, indifferent, and possibly corrupt public officials, condescending “vintners” who weren’t, and a constantly disrupted landscape. The contrast was stark.

  The Grapegrowers called a special meeting of the steering committee at their headquarters in Napa. A survivalist impulse had quickly seized the collective leadership, with early discussion of dirty tricks to thwart the initiative, including sabotaging the signature-gathering process before it succeeded. Jennifer Putnam of the Grapegrowers said they had to get the word water out of the original name of the initiative “because ‘water’ is a trigger with voters.” Debra Dommen, sturdy puller of the Orwellian plow, according to two attendees, told the assembly that she had called Stu Smith, the bearded, highly vocal private-property-rights advocate, and told him to reactivate his followers. “They’ll act so wacko they’ll make us look good.”

  The Farm Bureau’s Land Use Committee members were largely silent. Their director was offended because Mike Hackett and Jim Wilson had gone to the Vintners and the Grapegrowers first, and this caused loss of face inside the collective organizations’ inner world. Some on the Farm Bureau board thought the organization should preserve what was left of its independence. A second steering committee meeting was called at the Farm Bureau, and unaffiliated experts brought in for advice, including Phil Blake of the Resource Conservation District who said that the initiative, if passed, would have no real effect on agriculture.

  But what no one said aloud was that farming had become the easiest and most acceptable cover for all sorts of development. The Napa Valley Vintners had, in a meeting of its Community and Industry Issues Committee, referred not to the Water, Forest and Oak Woodland Protection Initiative, but to the “Anti-Farming Initiative,” more Orwellian doublespeak without mention of wackos or dirty tricks. When a Farm Bureau representative dared ask aloud, “Do we really want this fight? We’re already seen as big ag and big water consumers,” the Winegrowers and the Grapegrowers ignored her. They wanted blood.