©2011-15 Save Rural Angwin

Save Rural Angwin
       Protecting Ag Land and Angwin's Rural Character

"It is time we steered by the stars, not by the lights of each passing ship."

   General Omar Bradley

Issue Alerts

 

ALERT :   General Plan Action Item AG/LU-114.1 reads as follows - "Undertake a planning effort to re-evaluate areas of Angwin designated Urban Residential after June 2010, with the objective of re-designating areas to better reflect land uses existing or authorized at that time."  Why is this Action Item in the General Plan and why is it important?

HISTORY: The current Napa County General Plan was fully updated in a process that occurred in 2005-2007.  One topic - the issue of 12 so-called "urban and residential bubbles" (loosely drawn configurations on the Napa County Land Use Map indicating roughly where communities of people resided in the unincorporated areas of Napa County) - was held over to be addressed as a General Plan Amendment.  That process required another year (2008-2009) to deliberate; at its conclusion, 11 of the 12 "bubbles" and a portion of the 12th "bubble" (Angwin) had been resolved.  At the time of the Amendment discussions, there was an active development application on file with the County that related to about 100 acres in Angwin.  To allow full consideration of that development application (the "Eco-village"), the Board of Supervisors expressed their intent in Action Item AG/LU-114.1 to complete the Land Use Designations for Angwin at some appropriate time in the future.  On July 22, 2014, following a 5-year hiatus, the Board heard public testimony and discussed this Action Item.  The Board directed County Planning staff to prepare specific recommendations for the five areas in Angwin for which Land Use Designations need to be completed and bring the report back to the Board at a yet-to-be-scheduled future public hearing. Though both the Planning Director and Board of Supervisors vowed their intent to resolve General Plan Action Item 114.1 (“the Angwin issue”) prior to the end of 2015, January 2016 arrived with the Action Item un-addressed and it remains un-scheduled for Board action.  “New" and other long-standing issues raised at and subsequent to the March 2015 “Growth Summit” have taken priority.  SRA will continue to lobby for the Action Item to come back on the Board’s schedule.



 

DISCUSSION POINTS:

  • To review Napa County land use history and important landmark events and legal actions pertinent to this future discussion, a timeline history of Land Use in Napa County and the challenge to maintain the rural character of Angwin is provided HERE .

  • For the Board of Supervisors to determine appropriate land use designations for the approximately 100 acres under discussion, key land use tenets must be  considered: 

    • CA Government Code Section 65300 requires each county and city to adopt a General Plan and Land Use Map "that expresses the community's development goals and embodies public policy relative to the distribution of future land uses, both public and private." 

    • Land Use Designations (aka Categories) are a system for classifying and designating the appropriate use of land areas.  Land Use Designations are not "parcel specific". The County has the power to change land use category designations and zoning because such designations are not a property right.  The Land Use Map takes a long-term outlook designating land use categories for the good of the community as a whole, not for any single property owner, and the land use designation provides the guide for determining appropriate zoning.  

    • Ultimately the Supervisors must determine to what extent the unincorporated area of Angwin should continue to attract proposals for fundamentally inappropriate and unsustainable development projects.  The cumulative effects and impacts of building an urban satellite remote from public infrastructure would be very costly to the taxpayers of Napa County.

    • This discussion should not be about Pacific Union College or property rights; the discussion should be about completing the Land Use Designations left incomplete at the end of 2009.

 
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