The card in your mailbox

Somebody spent real money this week to put a glossy tri-fold in every mailbox in Yountville, and the least we can do is take it seriously for a few minutes before deciding whether it deserves the blue bin or the black one.

The front announces, in large type, that Yountville Deserves Better. Inside, Wasteful Spending appears in letters big enough to read from across a tasting room, accompanied by four tidy icons of the kind that come free with the software: a dollar sign, a magnifying glass, a clipboard, and two hands shaking. Beneath them are four complaints: wasteful spending, lack of transparency, poor priorities, and broken trust. Each complaint gets one sentence, and each sentence repeats the complaint in more words. Tax dollars should be used wisely. Decisions should be made in the open. Leaders should listen. No member of the Town Council has ever campaigned on a platform of reckless spending, secret government, bad priorities, and deliberate betrayal, so the card is, technically speaking, a list of things everyone in town already agrees with, printed in the colors of a wine you cannot afford.

The building that is not there

The fun begins with the photograph. It shows a handsome timber sign reading Yountville Commons, a smaller sign beneath it reading Community Center, an arrow pointing toward a curving drive, a flagpole, and a lodge with a broad glass gable that looks like what would happen if a ski resort designed a public library after a long lunch. None of it exists. More to the point, none of it was ever proposed. The actual site is the former elementary school on Yount Street, where the old snack shack is now the Farmstand, the old library is now Yountville Fit, the dog park is in daily use, and the remaining school buildings look exactly like what they are, which is old school buildings waiting for their next chapter.

The mailer confesses in the fine print, where California law makes it confess: Ad generated or substantially altered using artificial intelligence. So the principal image on a card accusing the Town of wasteful spending is a computer-generated picture of a building the Town never designed, professionally printed and delivered at bulk rate to every voter in Yountville. If you are looking for a working definition of unnecessary spending, it is glossy, it is two-sided, and it is currently lying next to your grocery coupons.

Below the imaginary community center, the card pauses for something solemn. Thank you to our amazing veterans. Your service. Our gratitude. Always. The veterans are thanked twice, once in italics and once with a decorative star, which turns out to be the full extent of the mailer’s policy for them. We will come back to that, because the California Veterans Home is not a prop. It is the town’s defining institution, its largest employer, and a place whose future depends on the same housing problem the mailer has reduced to an icon.

Who signed the check

The most revealing part of the card is the smallest. At the bottom it reads: Ad paid for by Build a Better Yountville, Sponsored by The Club Yountville, LLC. Not authorized by a candidate or a committee controlled by a candidate.

That last sentence is doing a lot of work. The mailer names no candidate, endorses no measure, and identifies no proposal. It tells us something has gone badly wrong in Yountville, reminds us to vote on November 3, and declines to say for whom or for what. This is the political equivalent of a man standing in the middle of Washington Street waving both arms and shouting that something terrible is happening. Ask him what, and he gestures at the horizon and says, in effect, you know.

We wondered what The Club Yountville, LLC might be, and the honest answer is that an LLC filing tells the public exactly as much as its organizers are required to tell it. The Moon has already reported at length on the people and the money behind the petition and the broader effort to stop the Commons, and readers can draw their own line from the fine print to the record. We will merely observe that the card’s burgundy and gold would not look out of place on a private wine club brochure, and leave the interior decorating to the reader.

The plan nobody wrote down

The larger omission is not who paid for the card but what the card proposes, because it proposes nothing, and that is the entire argument. The complaint is that the Town has spent too much. The implied cure is to stop spending. The quiet next step, the one that never appears on a mailer because it would lose an election, is what happens to 7.5 publicly owned acres in the middle of one of the most expensive small towns in California once the Town decides it has no further use for them.

Yountville bought the school property in 2024 for $11 million. It is flat, served by every utility, central, and rare. A private developer looking at it does not see a creek walk, gardens, civic buildings, and homes for people who work in town. He sees one of the last developable parcels in the Napa Valley. Forty expensive houses are not hard to imagine. A guest cottage behind each one is not hard to imagine. Buyers whose primary residence is somewhere else are the easiest thing in Yountville to imagine, because the town already has more experience with that model than with any other. A developer could build beautiful houses, sell them for extraordinary sums, and make a perfectly rational business decision while adding almost nobody to the number of people who live and work here year-round. That does not make the developer wicked. It means the market has one set of incentives and a town has another.

The people demanding a different future for the Commons never describe that future with the precision they demand of the Town. If the public plan is wrong, they owe the town the replacement. If the site should not stay a civic asset, they owe the town the alternative. If the complaint is spending, they owe the town a sentence about what to do with land it already owns. The card has a clipboard icon instead.

The law that reads the fine print

There is a further problem with the daydream of a future Council quietly selling the place and getting the money back, and the problem is that California wrote a statute for exactly that daydream. It is called the Surplus Land Act, Government Code section 54220 and following, and it governs what a city or town may do with public land it says it no longer needs despite RHNA assessments and the obvious housing crisis throughout Napa County. The law exists because the State does not want valuable public ground converted into private subdivisions before public agencies and middle class housing builders have had their turn. Any candidate proposing that idea should be asked, on the record, whether they have read the statute, and if the answer is yes, whether they enjoyed the part where the State of California takes 30 percent of the sale price as a penalty and the affordable housing requirement stays on the deed anyway.

Before the property could be sold, the Council would have to declare it surplus in public, with written findings. The Town would then issue a formal Notice of Availability through a state-regulated process, and the notice does not go to a broker. It goes to the State, to every public agency in the county, and to every certified housing sponsor that has asked for surplus public land. Somebody would answer, because seven and a half flat, serviced acres in Napa County are not gathering dust. If an eligible party responds, the Town must negotiate in good faith for a prescribed period rather than pretend to negotiate while a preferred buyer waits in the parking lot. Even if negotiations fail, the statute can attach affordability requirements to any later residential development on the ground. The Department of Housing and Community Development reviews the transaction and carries real penalties.

Anaheim learned all of this during the attempted sale of the Angel Stadium property, the most prominent Surplus Land Act fight in California. Yountville is not Anaheim and the Commons is not a ballpark, which is precisely the point. If the State was willing to step into a transaction involving hundreds of millions of dollars and a Major League Baseball team, nobody should assume seven and a half acres of public land in the Napa Valley can slide across a closing table because a future Council changed its mind.

What the land already owes

The school property also carries a history the mailer would rather you forgot. Measure S, the one percent hotel tax surcharge approved by 74 percent of Yountville voters in 2018, was written to address the town’s workforce housing problem, and more than $3 million from that fund went into buying the site. The property came from a school district through a public disposition process that itself gave preference to public agencies. After the June repeal of the Commons zoning, the site did not become unregulated dirt waiting for a subdivision map. It remains in a zoning category that permits public and civic uses, including publicly owned housing, through the Town’s own land-use process.

The public bought the land, with public purposes attached to the purchase, and it sits under layers of state and local law designed to keep public land doing public work. None of this fits comfortably under a dollar-sign icon, which may be why the dollar-sign icon was chosen.

The woman with the breakfast tray

Now, the veterans. The Veterans Home does not run on gratitude. It runs on people. Nurses, nursing assistants, cooks, drivers, groundskeepers, orderlies, therapists, the aide who helps a man out of bed in the morning and the one who answers the call light at three. Roughly a thousand people work there, and very few of them can afford to live in Yountville. That is not a talking point invented for the Commons. The Town’s own housing work documents it, and so does every hiring manager at the Home.

Consider a nursing assistant earning about $20 an hour, or $41,600 a year before taxes. There is no version of the Yountville rental market in which she can live near the people she serves. So she commutes, from American Canyon or Vallejo or farther. She drives in before dawn, spends a shift caring for veterans, and drives home after dark. On the way in she passes hotels where a room costs $821 a night. On the way out she passes houses whose owners will be back on Friday. That is not an accusation against hotel guests or weekend owners. It is the economy Yountville built, and it has consequences.

The Commons was one attempt to face that without handing the school property over to housing alone. The plan used a limited share of the site for homes and kept most of the land for the public: open space, gardens, Hopper Creek, walking paths, civic buildings, and places to gather. The homes were meant for the middle-class people who make Yountville function: teachers, hospitality workers, Town employees, health care workers, and the staff of the Veterans Home. It was not a plan to solve the Bay Area housing crisis. It was not a plan to make Yountville unrecognizable. It was a modest, phased attempt to build some homes for people who work here on land the public already owns, while keeping most of that land open to everyone.

Gratitude, printed

That is why the veterans message deserves more attention than the people who designed it intended. The same political effort that fought the Commons now sends the veterans a printed thank-you while calling the spending that would have housed some of their caregivers Wasteful. The Home does not run on printed gratitude. It runs on the woman with the breakfast tray, the aide at the call light, the nurse on nights, and the maintenance man fixing the wheelchair lift. Every year those workers drive farther to get here, every year they are harder to hire, and every vacant position lands on a resident. The Commons would not have solved that. It was one concrete answer to it. Calling that answer Wasteful Spending on one side of a card and printing Our Gratitude. Always. on the other is not a policy position. It is a bribe made of ink, and the people it is aimed at have been thanked by professionals.

Still waiting for the better idea

The final problem with the mailer is the absence of an alternative. We looked. There is a list of qualities the sender would like in a leader: listens, manages, plans, delivers. Those are fine qualities. There is nothing to manage, no plan, nothing to deliver, and no sign that the sender has sat through a dozen public comment periods or the thankless, unseen work a Council member takes on with the oath of office. If the Town spent too much on the Commons, the card owes us the item it should have skipped. If two years of community meetings, design work, environmental review, budgeting, phasing, and public hearings produced the wrong answer, the card owes us the right one. There was plenty of room for it where the imaginary building went.

This is where the mailer accidentally gets one thing right. Yountville does deserve better. It deserves better than slogans without proposals. It deserves better than computer-generated pictures of buildings nobody designed. It deserves better than the pretense that a hard argument about housing, public land, municipal finance, veterans, and the future of a small town fits under four icons and a burgundy headline. It also deserves elected officials who can be criticized when criticism is earned, because no public project should be above scrutiny. But serious criticism has to do more than name a mood. Sooner or later it has to answer the question every architect, builder, business owner, and homeowner already understands: if not this, then what.

Tired is the strategy

The real danger in Yountville right now is not wasteful spending or broken trust. It is exhaustion. People are tired of the petition, tired of the hearings, tired of the arguments, tired of being told the town they love is about to be ruined or rescued depending on which postcard came that afternoon. Campaigns understand fatigue, because tired voters stop asking the second question. They see BROKEN TRUST in capital letters and assume somebody must know what it means. They see WASTEFUL SPENDING and forget to ask compared with what. They hear that Yountville deserves better and do not notice that nobody has said what better looks like. A tired voter reads four icons, nods, and stays home. That is the plan. It is the only plan on the card.

Go look at the model

The antidote is not another slogan. It is memory. In 2018, nearly three-quarters of Yountville voters approved a tax to help house the middle-class people who work here. The Town bought the school site. Residents spent two years arguing over what should happen there. The plan that came out was not perfect, because no public plan is, but it was real. It was detailed. It was phased. It kept most of the property for civic and public use and allowed a limited amount of middle-class housing to be built in increments as financing allowed. The quality of the place was never negotiable. The pace was, on purpose. That is what planning looks like when a town is trying to solve a hard problem without pretending it can predict the future.

One side of this argument has drawings, budgets, acreage, public meetings, environmental review, financing studies, a phasing strategy, and an actual piece of land you can walk across this afternoon. The other side has mailed every voter a picture of a building that does not exist. That does not make the Commons plan right in every particular, and it does not make every critic wrong. It does set a useful minimum standard for the next seven weeks. Anyone who wants Yountville to choose a different future should have the nerve to describe it.

Keep the mailer if you still have it. Then go to Town Hall and stand over the site model. Compare the two. One is the product of two years of public argument, compromise, design, revision, and civic work by your neighbors. The other was generated by a computer for people who would rather you stayed tired and indifferent. This town has already decided what it wants to be. It voted for it, bought the land for it, and drew it. On November 3, the only thing left is to stop apologizing for it and vote for the people who will start building it.

☾

Brendan Kelly’s firm, Kelly + Morgan Architecture, served as the Town’s Owner’s Design Consultant on the Yountville Commons project. That scope is complete. The Yountville Moon is independent, free to everyone, and accepts no advertising or fees. The Moon will be reporting on the Candidates Forum on September 21.

Thank you to the hundreds of people reading, including the three of you who disagree with us. Disagreement is not the opposite of community. Indifference is. Stay informed. Read the Moon.

Amie MacPhee is the founder of Cultivate LLC and served as the Town’s lead landscape designer on the Yountville Commons project. Brendan Kelly’s firm, Kelly + Morgan Architecture, served as the Town’s Owner’s Design Consultant on the project; that scope is complete.

Summary: The Yountville Commons has become known for the thing people fought over, which was housing. The drawings describe a different project. On the 7.5-acre site, civic buildings occupy about 6 percent of the ground and all of the homes together occupy about 12 percent. Roads and parking, set on permeable paving, take another 17 percent. The remaining 65 percent, nearly five acres, was reserved as open public landscape: a creek walk, meadow, gardens, groves, courtyards and a dog park, open to every Yountville resident and visitor. The plan was also designed to be built in workable increments as financing allowed, with each phase completed as a real piece of the Commons. The pace could adapt. The quality of the civic place at the heart of Yountville was never supposed to be bargained away.

What the Argument Obscured

After a long public fight, a project tends to be remembered as the thing people fought about most. In Yountville, the Commons became synonymous with housing. Unit counts, building heights, parking, financing, traffic, density, and the proper role of local government consumed almost every other part of the conversation. That is understandable. Housing was the controversial part of the proposal, and controversial things absorb the oxygen around them. Over time, however, the argument produced a distorted picture of what the Town, through its elected Council, had spent more than two years planning. The Commons was never conceived as 7.5 acres of housing with public amenities scattered around the edges. It was conceived as a public place, on publicly owned land, with civic uses, gardens, paths, gathering spaces, and middle-class housing integrated onto the site of the former elementary school.

The proportions make that distinction easier to understand than any adjective can. About 65 percent of the Commons was reserved for open space and landscape: walking paths, gardens, Hopper Creek, play fields, the dog park, courtyards, groves, and other shared outdoor spaces. Another 17 percent was devoted to roads and parking, set on permeable paving. About 6 percent accommodated dedicated civic uses, including Town Hall, Yountville Fit, the Farmstand, Schmitt Hall and related public facilities. Residential buildings occupied only about 12 percent of the site. The part of the Commons that now dominates the political argument stands on roughly one-eighth of the ground. Nearly two-thirds is intended to remain open public landscape, a clear priority by the hundreds of residents who participated in the two-year-long planning process.

Those numbers are worth revisiting because the argument around housing has lasted long enough to begin replacing the project in public memory. For residents who supported the Commons, the drawings included in this essay are a reminder of what more than two years of public meetings, workshops, revisions, and compromises produced. For residents who doubted it, they are an invitation to see the proposal as it was: a workable civic plan designed to be financed and built in increments, with later phases informed by what the Town learned from the first. Looking closely does not require anyone to endorse every decision. It simply allows the project to be judged by the plan itself rather than by campaign material, petitions, or someone else’s description.

Before There Was a Housing Fight, There Was a Commons

The Town purchased the former elementary school because 7.5 centrally located acres of public land in Yountville represented something exceedingly rare: the opportunity to create a large civic asset in the middle of an already built town. The earliest physical changes reflected that purpose. The fences came down, and the grounds opened for public use. Yountville Fit moved into the old library, the old Little League snack shack became the Farmstand, the new dog park established a regular daily use, and Schmitt Hall rejoined the civic inventory for public events, including popular Kids Camps during summer and school holidays. Residents who had spent decades passing an enclosed institutional campus began crossing it, walking through it and using it.

The name Commons was therefore more than branding. It expressed the premise of the undertaking. This was no longer simply the former elementary school, nor land held for one narrowly defined municipal function. It was meant to become shared ground at the center of Yountville, where civic life, recreation, landscape, movement and residential uses could coexist rather than being sorted into separate compounds. Housing entered the conversation because Yountville faced an increasingly obvious problem: many middle-class people who work, manage businesses, care for residents, staff the Town, raise families and keep the community functioning could no longer afford to live here.

The proposal did not answer that problem by consuming the Commons with housing. It attempted something more difficult. It asked whether homes could be introduced without surrendering the qualities residents most feared losing: openness, trees, gardens, walkability, small buildings, views through the site, informal gathering places and a landscape that felt recognizably like Yountville. Many objections were ultimately physical. People feared three-story buildings, exposed parking lots, and a project that would read as dense development rather than an extension of town. The Landscape Workbook prepared by the design team addressed precisely that concern, and the images of that public document are part of this essay.

The Housing Was Inside the Commons

None of this means the housing was incidental. Middle-class housing was an important part of the plan, and one reason the Commons became politically difficult was that the Town chose to finally address a problem that had grown for decades. Yountville has become increasingly impossible for ordinary working and middle-income households to enter, and increasingly hard for younger families to remain in. Adding deed-restricted homes on public land that could not be converted to vacation rentals or second homes was an intentional response to that condition. Measure S passed in Yountville in 2018 by 74% of the vote of the town to fund exactly this kind of effort.

But physical importance and political controversy are not the same as physical dominance. The amount of land dedicated to this important new housing component occupied only about 12 percent of the site, distributed within a larger system of paths, gardens, civic uses, parking groves, creek landscape, and public open space. The Commons is a public place that includes homes, not a housing development that included some leftover open space.

Recovering that distinction does not require anyone to change positions. A resident can still object to the number of homes, height of buildings, financing, ownership, or the pace of progress. Those are legitimate subjects for argument. The more useful first step is to stand over the Town’s site model and see the proposal as a whole: the limited building footprints, the continuous public landscape, and the sequence in which complete phases could be built. The model was made so the plan could be seen rather than imagined.

The Landscape Comes First

The workbook’s premise appears near the beginning: the plan is about extending Yountville’s small-town heart by threading together a sequence of meaningful places that feel as though they have always belonged. The workbook does not begin with buildings and ask what landscaping can fit in the spaces left over. It begins with the landscape and uses it to determine where buildings, streets, parking, and civic uses belong.

That difference is easy to underestimate. On many development projects, landscape architecture arrives after building footprints, parking, fire access, utilities, and economics have narrowed the choices. What remains becomes the landscape. It may look attractive in a rendering, but it has little authority over the plan because the decisions that matter were made before it arrived.

The Commons was organized in the opposite direction. The public realm was drawn as a continuous system of outdoor rooms, paths, groves, gardens, and civic spaces, and the buildings were arranged to reinforce it. The landscape would determine how a person moved through the site, where shade fell, where neighbors might stop, how the creek was protected and experienced, and how a three-story building could sit within a much larger setting rather than dominate it. The distinction between 65 percent landscape and 12 percent residential footprint is therefore not merely statistical. It describes the design philosophy itself.

The Three Fabrics

The Landscape Workbook organizes the Commons into three interdependent layers, or fabrics: green, gray and built. The order is deliberate.

The green fabric comes first, and on this site it carries a second job. For decades the school grounds were mostly asphalt and lawn, an institutional surface with many heritage trees only at the margins, and the green fabric is the plan’s answer to that condition. More than 400 new native trees are proposed across the 7.5 acres. Hopper Creek, long treated as the edge of the property, remains an integral part of a walking network of the site. Open space is not a leftover lawn or one park in a corner, but a sequence of places distributed across the site. The Meadow and the Oval create larger communal spaces, while courtyards and paseos provide smaller ones. Orchard groves, edible gardens, the Farmstand Garden, dog parks, and shaded pedestrian connections give each part of the site an identity and a reason to be used. Together they form a network of outdoor rooms, so walking through the Commons would feel like moving through a small district rather than crossing a housing development. That is how most historic towns came to fit their natural settings, slowly and by accumulation. Here the accumulation begins by putting the ground back in working order.

The gray fabric describes movement: streets, lanes, parking, service areas, and paved connections. Parking sits beneath orchard-style tree canopies rather than in broad asphalt fields. Permeable paving softens surfaces and keeps stormwater within the visible environment. Low walls, planting, trellises, and changes in paving screen service functions without creating fortified backyard zones. Narrow water runnels were proposed through selected courtyards and walks, recalling Hopper Creek through sound and cooling. Even the parts devoted to cars were made to participate in the landscape rather than interrupt it.

Only after those systems are established does the workbook describe the built fabric. Buildings define outdoor spaces, reinforce street edges and shape transitions between public, semi-public and private areas. A porch can address a courtyard rather than a parking lot. A lane can widen into a plaza. A civic building can share a landscaped space with homes. Along Yount Street, the Arcade and Schmitt Plaza were conceived as the Commons’ public face, stitching civic, residential and neighborhood-serving uses together through shade, planting and pedestrian movement. The buildings were meant to support the experience of the place as a whole.

What Three Stories Are Supposed to Feel Like

Some opposition focused, understandably, on height. Yountville is a low-rise town, and three-story buildings suggested to some residents large apartment blocks rising above open parking lots. The Landscape Workbook allows that fear to be tested against the plan rather than against an imagined version of it.

The buildings were deliberately small in footprint and distributed rather than consolidated into one or two large structures. Tree canopy mediated scale. Courtyards, groves, porches and planted edges created distance and layers between pedestrians and building faces. Streets and lanes were narrow and landscaped, and parking was broken into shaded areas. A three-story building remains a three-story building, but the design placed it within a mature spatial framework so height would be experienced together with shade, trees, open space and the horizontal continuity of the landscape.

That approach is familiar in Yountville, because some of the town’s most carefully designed places already use it.

What Yountville’s Hospitality Landscapes Teach

Visitors rarely describe Yountville by listing the square footage of its hotels. They remember the spaces between the buildings: trees arching over paths, stone walls softened by planting, courtyards discovered through narrow openings, fountains heard before they are seen, garden rooms, gravel walks, trellises and vines. Those qualities did not happen accidentally. The town’s best hospitality properties understand that landscape is part of the product they sell, and they invest accordingly.

At a good hotel or inn, landscape is not what remains after the building budget is finished. It is part of the reason someone books the room. Trees are allowed to mature, courtyards receive real materials, planting is layered rather than residual, and water, lighting, furniture, and paving contribute to the experience. The spaces between buildings receive the same seriousness as the buildings because hospitality understands something civic development often forgets: people experience places at walking speed.

The Commons borrowed from that tradition with one important reversal. The intended beneficiary was not reserved only for the paying hotel guest. The Commons landscape was designed on public land for residents first, while remaining open to visitors, neighbors, and anyone moving through town. The creek walk requires no room key, and the gardens, meadow, dog park, Farmstand, and shaded paths sit behind no gate. The Commons applied Yountville’s familiar seriousness about private hospitality landscapes to ground that belonged to the public and for it to be protected in perpetuity.

A Working Landscape, Not a Decorative One

The planting strategy reached backward into the agricultural history of the valley. Orchard groves, citrus allees, edible gardens and fruit espaliers were incorporated as living parts of the site, not historical props. The Farmstand Garden was meant to remain productive. Fruit trees could provide shade and food at once, and trellises could mark thresholds while supporting vines. Agriculture would remain visible within daily civic life rather than serving only as scenery beyond town.

The detail matters. A project can be called landscaped while containing little more than lawn, foundation shrubs and young street trees at required intervals. The Commons imagined distinct plant communities tied to the uses around them. Hopper Creek was not the Farmstand, a parking grove was not the Meadow, and a residential courtyard had a different degree of enclosure from Schmitt Plaza. Those differences created variety within one coherent place. The ambition was not grandeur, but familiarity, texture, and accumulated detail: the qualities that allow a new place to become part of a town without feeling as though it arrived all at once.

Phasing Without Compromise

Landscape is usually the most vulnerable part of a project when budgets tighten. Buildings must stand, units must meet code, fire access must work, and mechanical systems cannot be omitted. The pieces most easily called optional are the mature trees, better paving, generous planting, trellises, furniture, and courtyards that made the drawings appealing. A deeply shaded grove can become a handful of saplings if the landscape budget is treated as the contingency account.

The Commons tried to prevent that by making landscape organizational rather than decorative. If the green fabric determines where buildings go, it is harder to remove later without unraveling the plan. Outdoor rooms are no longer filler between structures. They are the reason the structures occupy those positions.

The proposed phasing reinforced the same discipline. Housing was divided among smaller buildings that could be financed and constructed incrementally. Each phase could deliver its own finished landscape, paving, courtyard, and public space instead of postponing those elements until the end. The Town could see what an increment actually cost, learn from it, and adapt later increments as financing and experience allowed. That flexibility was practical, not an invitation to unravel the framework or dilute its standards. If the public landscape was a central promise of the Commons, each piece had to be completed properly, even if that meant building more slowly.

Public Ground Has a Higher Obligation

Ordinary landscaping would not have been enough because the grounds were not intended as private amenities for a housing development. A conventional apartment courtyard can belong primarily to the tenants whose doors face it, and that is appropriate for many private projects. It was not the Commons.

The creek walk, Meadow, Oval, gardens, lanes, Farmstand and groves were intended to belong to Yountville’s daily life, serving people in the new homes and the much larger population of visitors that did not live here. A resident could walk a dog without living at the Commons, a visitor could cross from one side of town to the other, and a civic event could spill outside beneath the trees. That public character raises rather than lowers the standard. A civic landscape occupying most of one of the Town’s most important properties must earn its place in everyday life.

A Gathering Place, Not Just a Development

Hopper Creek Trail, from the Landscape Workbook. The path runs the length of the site’s eastern edge between the creek and Creekside Village, under new oaks and sycamores, with seating tucked along the way and small entries leading into the village. The creek’s riparian habitat is restored rather than fenced off, and the trail connects to the Town’s existing path network and the bridge at Finnell Road. A place many residents already walk was to be protected and made better, and it was drawn as one of the main ways into the Commons for everyone.

Look closely at the images, and what remains is not primarily a unit count. It is a creek walk, meadow, parking groves, dog park, trellises, courtyards, water channels, edible gardens, and paths offering several ways through the site. These are not amenities sprinkled around development. They are the structure of the proposal, covering nearly five of the site’s 7.5 acres.

The Commons imagines shared places woven into ordinary life: a morning walk beside Hopper Creek, a picnic on the lawn, a conversation outside Yountville Fit, children crossing on bikes, a book club or knitting group near the Farmstand, a shaded route home, an evening gathering beneath trees that grow more valuable as they mature. The buildings matter within that composition, including the homes, because they give shape and activity to the spaces between them.

What Two Years Produced

The Commons that emerged from more than two years of public work was not a finished monument awaiting construction in one enormous act. It was a workable civic framework designed to grow over time. Financing, construction methods and the precise program of later increments could respond to what the Town learned from the first phase. That is a strength of the plan, not a sign that its central commitments were provisional. The open public landscape, civic uses, limited housing footprint and careful relationship among them gave every phase a common direction.

The former school site remains one of the most consequential pieces of public land Yountville is likely ever to control. The plan gives the Town a sound place to begin: nearly five acres of public landscape, civic uses at the center, housing within a limited footprint, parking treated as a landscape problem, and a sequence of increments that could be financed and completed without pretending the whole site had to appear at once. What was never supposed to be bargained away was the level of quality: the trees, gardens, paving, courtyards, buildings and careful relationships that would make each increment feel complete and worthy of public land and civic uses.

Residents do not need to agree on every unit or every future appropriation to recognize the value of that achievement. They need only see the plan for what it is: a public place that can grow deliberately, one well-made piece at a time. Yountville has the land, the framework, and the capacity to build it well.

The Meadow, from the Landscape Workbook: an open, gently sloping green of native grasses and wildflowers, edged by sycamores and running from the Central Oval to the Dog Patch and Hopper Creek Trail, unfenced and open to anyone who walks in. It is one of several outdoor spaces drawn before any housing was placed on the site. The phasing was designed the same way, with each increment delivering a finished piece of the public landscape for every resident of Yountville, wherever in town they live.

Summary: Napa County schools counted 832 homeless students last year, more than double the figure from five years ago, and four in five of them are living doubled up with relatives or other families. Working from Tim Carl’s reporting in Napa Valley Features, this essay sets that number beside the state’s new population data, which show every Napa County town shrinking except Calistoga, the one town that opened a workforce housing project. Yountville’s planned Commons would not solve the valley’s shortage; the point is that no single project would, and that housing gets built one parcel and one phase at a time. The essay argues that after a certified Housing Element, a voter mandate, and years of Council planning, the recurring call for “another study” is not a request for information but a another request for endless delay without addressing such an obvious crisis. It closes by crediting Carl and asking readers to subscribe to his newspaper.

Eight hundred thirty-two children in Napa County’s public schools had no home of their own last year. Most of them slept in somebody else’s house. A grandmother’s back bedroom. A cousin’s couch. They got up in the morning, went to class, and gave the front office an address that was not theirs.

Nobody called a press conference. The number sat in a school district file, open to anyone, and for a year it attracted remarkably little attention. The week it finally surfaced in the local press, another paper led with a garden party.

The man who opened the file is Tim Carl. He runs a small paper called Napa Valley Features, mostly by himself, and for the Upper Valley it is one of the few places where somebody still seems willing to read the state spreadsheets, follow the footnotes and tell readers what they actually say. This week it was the children. This column is about what his last two reports say when you set them side by side, and about what those numbers mean for a valley that has spent years studying a problem it already understands.

The children

Napa County schools identified 832 students as homeless last year. Five years ago the number was 369. Four out of five of those children are not living on the street. They are doubled up, meaning their family lost its own place and moved in with relatives or another family. The federal school definition has counted those children as homeless since 2001, so this is not some new trick with words. It is the same definition, and many more children now fall under it.

Most of those families probably would not describe themselves as homeless. They have jobs. A parent may work at a resort, a winery, a restaurant, a school, a hospital or one of the businesses that keep Napa Valley functioning. Many earn too much to qualify for deeply subsidized housing and too little to rent or buy a home of their own in the communities where they work. They are part of the larger population California’s housing mandates are intended to keep from being priced completely out of places like Napa Valley. In Yountville, a substantial portion of the housing the state has required the Town to plan for falls squarely in that middle-income range.

Those 832 children go to school in Napa Valley Unified. That is the same district that closed Yountville Elementary in 2020. The Town bought the empty school site in 2024. The Commons was planned on that ground.

The one town that grew

In May, Carl read the state’s new population numbers. California shrank. Napa County shrank. Napa city shrank. St. Helena shrank. Yountville shrank the most of anyone, losing 51 people which was a combination of the CalVet population continuing to decline and more existing homes being turned into vacation rentals. One town in the county grew, and it was Calistoga.

Calistoga grew because it opened one building: 78 workforce apartments on Lincoln Avenue, paid for partly by a small hotel tax that Calistoga voters approved in 2018. Hotel guests paid. Working families moved in. The town got bigger. Carl, who has hardly been a cheerleader for the North Bay housing pipeline, nevertheless wrote that the model “functioned as designed.”

So here is the county in one sentence. The town that built housing grew, while the towns that did not build enough housing continued to lose people.

The dent

Now comes the part that deserves to be understood clearly.

Suppose the petition to repeal the zoning for the Commons had never been filed. Suppose the Town could build all 75 two-bedroom apartments in the design tomorrow and hand out the keys by Friday. Line up the 832 children from Carl’s report in the old school gym. Give an apartment to the first 75 families in line. Then turn to everyone else and explain that hundreds of children are still sleeping in somebody else’s house.

That arithmetic is not an argument against building 75 homes. It is the argument for building them. Housing shortages are not solved by discovering one magical project large enough to erase decades of scarcity. They are solved the ordinary way: one parcel, one building, one phase and one town at a time. Calistoga built 78 homes. Yountville proposed 75. Neither number fixes Napa Valley. Both numbers matter.

The Commons was never going to solve the valley’s housing crisis by itself. It was going to make a meaningful dent in it. It would have provided homes for middle-class households on land the Town already owned, inside a larger civic project that preserved most of the site for open space, public uses and community amenities. It was designed to be built in phases as financing allowed, adapting over time without bargaining away the quality of the place itself.

That effort did not begin with the Commons. In 2018, Yountville voters approved the measure supporting middle-class workforce housing by roughly 74 percent. That vote established something important: residents wanted people who worked in Yountville to have a realistic chance to live in Yountville. But the vote did not design the Commons, choose the school site or create the plan that followed. Those decisions required a Town Council willing to take the public mandate seriously and turn it into an actual project.

The Commons was the result of that work. The current Town Council took a broad community direction and tried to put it on the ground. It acquired the school site, conducted years of public outreach, commissioned planning and design work, examined financing and infrastructure, and produced a phasable civic plan that included housing as one part of a much larger public place. That distinction matters. Voters supplied the mandate. The Council supplied the vision and did the difficult work of turning an idea into something that could actually be built.

And then 235 signatures, about one voter in ten, put that work on hold last spring.

The oldest trick in the book

There is nothing wrong with studying a difficult problem. Serious public projects should be studied. The question is what remains unknown.

Yountville’s Housing Element has been studied and certified. The regional housing allocation has been calculated. Consultants have measured demand. Financing specialists have modeled costs. The Town has spent years on planning, design, environmental review and public meetings. Meanwhile, the evidence outside Yountville keeps getting harder to ignore: the county is shrinking, the one town that recently added a meaningful block of housing grew, and 832 children in the local school district are living without homes of their own.

“Another study” is not a request for information. It is a cynical play to delay building housing that people need, and to delay it indefinitely. Nobody has to say no. Nobody has to identify land, money, buildings or a construction date. You simply say the issue deserves more study. It is the public-policy version of “let’s grab lunch sometime.” Everyone can agree to it, nobody has to commit to anything, and a year later everyone can be exactly where they started.

A study names no land, commits no money, builds no housing and houses no child. That does not make studies useless. It simply means that after years of analysis, anyone asking for another one should be able to explain precisely what question remains unanswered and what decision the answer will change.

Otherwise, the study becomes the decision.

Yountville has been discussing middle-class housing since well before the school site became available. Its voters endorsed the goal in 2018. The Town Council eventually turned that goal into the Commons through years of planning and public work. Eight years after that vote, the underlying problem has not become more theoretical. It has become more visible.

The children are still sleeping at their aunt’s house.

Credit where it is due

Tim Carl is the reason any of this is getting legible to the local population. He did the work. He showed his sources. He read the fine print and told readers what it said. That is what local journalism is supposed to do, especially when the numbers are uncomfortable or inconvenient. This week he added the children to the record. He deserves to be read.

Napa Valley Features runs on subscriptions and little else. If you read one local paper for the Upper Valley, make it his:

https://www.napavalleyfeatures.com/

It costs less than the wine you just purchased at the local garden party.

Eight hundred thirty-two children. Seventy-five apartments, on hold. And somewhere this month, a well-dressed person in Yountville will raise a glass and with a smile in her eye, suggest one more study.

Disclosure: The author is an architect and principal at Kelly + Morgan Architecture and served as Owner’s Design Consultant on the Yountville Commons for approximately two years. That engagement is complete. He writes here as a private citizen.

Sources: Tim Carl, “Under the Hood,” Napa Valley Features, May 14 and September 3, 2026; California Department of Finance E-1 Population Estimates, May 2026; Town of Yountville 2023–2031 Housing Element, Table E-1.

A Wonderful Night for the Veterans

Yesterday the Yountville Sun put a genuinely cheerful story on its front page. Gary Jabara had invited approximately 150 friends, neighbors and veterans to The Estate Yountville for dinner, drinks and an evening of Frank Sinatra performed by tribute singer Jeff Wessman and a six-piece band. Residents of the Veterans Home received a particularly warm welcome. Jabara told them how much he enjoyed having them there and how much he learned whenever he talked with them. There is no reason to be cynical about that affection. The Veterans Home has been part of Yountville since before there was an incorporated Yountville, and its residents deserve every invitation, dinner, concert and glass of wine the town’s businesses care to offer them. The veterans had a lovely evening, Jabara had the pleasure of hosting them, and the Sun had the sort of warm community photograph small-town newspapers have been putting on front pages for generations.

Look at the same photograph again after asking one additional question, however, and the evening begins to tell a considerably stranger story. Who will be caring for those veterans when they return up the hill? Not in the sentimental sense, but literally: who will be there for the overnight shift, the morning medications, the transfer from bed to wheelchair, the complicated wound care, the dementia patient who wakes frightened at three in the morning? California has spent hundreds of millions of dollars creating a new 240-bed skilled-nursing and memory-care complex at the Veterans Home, but CalVet has also struggled to recruit and retain the nurses, licensed vocational nurses, certified nursing assistants and other skilled employees required to operate that capacity. Staffing has constrained admissions. A skilled-nursing bed without enough skilled-nursing workers is not healthcare capacity. It is an expensive piece of furniture.

That is the fact that makes the party more than a pleasant society photograph. The veterans are visible; the caregivers on whom their daily lives depend are largely outside the frame, often beginning and ending their workdays many miles from Yountville because they cannot afford to live nearby. That separation did not arrive like a wildfire or an earthquake. CalVet has documented it. Yountville has documented it. The Town adopted housing policies intended to address it, voters dedicated hotel-tax revenue to housing, Town officials spent years working with CalVet on future employee housing at the Home, and Yountville spent roughly two years turning the former elementary school property into a concrete plan that included permanently protected housing for middle-class workers. Then a small group of residents, led prominently by Jabara, gathered the signatures that stopped those approvals. The staffing problem did not stop with them.

That is the juxtaposition this essay asks the reader to hold in mind. It is entirely possible for Jabara’s affection for veterans to be sincere and for his political actions to have made one part of the practical work of caring for them harder. The contradiction is not evidence that anyone secretly dislikes veterans. It is evidence of something much more common in civic life: people can care deeply about an outcome while resisting the land use, money, density and compromise required to produce it. Dinner and Sinatra occupy the easy side of that equation. Housing some of the people who will care for those veterans the following morning occupies the difficult side.

The Problem Was Known Before the Party

A Yountville resident does not have to accept that connection on faith, and certainly does not have to take the word of a Commons supporter or the Yountville Moon. CalVet’s own planning documents describe the problem in unusually direct terms. The Veterans Homes of California Master Plan 2025 portrays the Yountville Veterans Home as an extraordinarily complex operation: roughly 615 acres, more than one million square feet of facilities, multiple levels of care, aging infrastructure and a location that creates serious workforce challenges. Its staffing data show vacancy rates approaching 29 percent for registered nurses, 25 percent for licensed vocational nurses and nearly 47 percent for certified nursing assistants. Reliance on overtime and registry staffing has become part of normal operations. Those are not abstract personnel statistics. In skilled nursing, the number of qualified people available to work determines how many beds can actually be staffed and therefore how many veterans can be admitted and cared for.

CalVet then connects that staffing problem directly to geography and housing. Its planning work identifies the Yountville location as a critical challenge because the Vets Home is far from where many employees live and the surrounding housing market makes living nearby extraordinarily difficult. Recruitment and retention emerged as keystone issues in stakeholder discussions. Employee housing is therefore treated not as a pleasant perk but as part of the institution’s operational strategy. The Master Plan discusses affordable family housing on campus, notes the very small number of habitable employee cottages that remain, and recalls the practical value of having employees nearby during the 2014 Napa earthquake and the 2017 wildfires, when long-distance access to the campus became difficult. The lesson is almost embarrassingly straightforward: a residential healthcare institution that operates every hour of every day is more resilient when at least some of the people who operate it can live within reasonable reach.

CalVet is not claiming that housing alone will cure every vacancy or that every nurse wants to live in Yountville. Wages, state hiring rules, licensing, working conditions and the broader shortage of healthcare workers all matter. The importance of the housing evidence is more modest and more useful. The agency responsible for running the Home has identified distance and housing as material obstacles to recruiting and retaining the people it needs. That should end the peculiar local habit of treating the relationship between housing and Veterans Home staffing as a theory awaiting one more study. The relationship has been studied by the people responsible for the institution, and they have been planning around it for years.

Yountville Knew This Too

The second set of documents belongs to Yountville itself. The Town’s 2023-2031 Housing Element does not treat the Veterans Home as an island whose staffing problems begin and end at the state property line. It identifies additional employee housing at the Home as a priority, describes years of discussions with CalVet and the Department of General Services, and estimates that roughly 150 to 200 additional units could eventually be accommodated on the campus. The Town commits staff to continued coordination and identifies water and wastewater capacity that could support substantial residential development there. In other words, Yountville was not ignoring the obvious question of whether California should build housing on those famous 615 acres. Its adopted housing policy was actively trying to help make exactly that happen.

The same Housing Element looks beyond the Veterans Home gate because the Home’s employees participate in the same housing market as everyone else who works in Yountville. The Town’s analysis describes a community whose economy depends overwhelmingly on people who live somewhere else, while local preference policies and dedicated housing revenue attempt to give people employed in Yountville some realistic access to housing created with public support. The Veterans Home needs nurses and caregivers; hotels need employees; restaurants need cooks and managers; the Town needs staff; public institutions need people who can afford to remain in the region. The occupations differ, but the housing problem is shared. When a community requires labor it has made it increasingly difficult to house, housing policy becomes labor policy, transportation policy and, at the Veterans Home, healthcare policy.

This history matters because it changes the chronology of the present controversy. Yountville did not build a skilled-nursing facility and then suddenly discover that workers might need somewhere to live. Nor did the Commons invent a new social obligation to house people who work in town. The connection had been recognized in state planning, municipal planning, local preference policies and public spending decisions before the petition fight. By the time the Commons reached approval, Yountville was not beginning a conversation about whether middle-class housing mattered. It was attempting to convert years of policy into something physical.

The 615 Acres Are Part of the Solution, Not the Excuse to Wait

It is easy to understand why a resident encountering this issue for the first time looks at the Veterans Home and asks the obvious question: if California owns 615 acres, why doesn’t it simply build employee housing there? That is a good question, and the public documents provide a surprisingly satisfying answer. CalVet does want employee housing on the campus. Yountville wants to help it happen. The Housing Element contemplates perhaps 150 to 200 additional units there, and the Master Plan identifies future development opportunities. The people who raised the 615-acre argument were therefore right about an important part of the solution. Where the argument went wrong was in turning a long-term solution into a reason to stop a near-term one.

The Veterans Home is not a reserve subdivision waiting for someone to notice all the empty land. It is a 142-year-old state institution with active healthcare operations, historic resources, roads, utilities, aging buildings and enormous capital needs. CalVet’s planning work places significant employee housing within a long sequence of redevelopment that must coexist with the Home’s medical mission and infrastructure work. Major projects on state land move on a state timetable measured in years. The need for caregivers does not wait on that timetable. The recruitment difficulty exists now, the new skilled-nursing capacity exists now, and the employees driving in from distant communities are doing so now.

The rational conclusion was never to choose between housing at the Veterans Home and housing at the Commons. Yountville’s own documents contemplated both. Future employee housing on CalVet land could directly serve the Home and should be pursued aggressively. Permanently protected middle-class housing on Town-owned land could serve a broader workforce, including Veterans Home employees who qualify, without tying a person’s home forever to a single employer. A nurse who changes jobs still needs a home. So does a Town employee, a hospitality manager or a family trying to establish a life in the community rather than merely supplying labor to it. A housing shortage built over decades was never going to yield to one project under one government on one parcel.

The Commons Was the Part Yountville Could Actually Do

That is where the Commons enters this story, and where the photograph from The Estate begins to acquire its uncomfortable second meaning. The former elementary school property was not conceived simply as an apartment project. Roughly 65 percent of the Yountville Commons was devoted to open space, walking trails, gardens, recreation and similar public uses, about 17 percent to roads and parking, another 6 percent to dedicated civic uses, and approximately 12 percent to housing. Housing was integrated into a much larger public landscape because two years of community planning had reached a fundamentally civic conclusion: making some room for the middle-class people who work in Yountville could itself be a public amenity. The Town owned the land, could protect the housing over time and could shape the project around local needs rather than wait for a private development proposal to create a few restricted units as a condition of something else.

The Commons was also important because it was part of the larger housing response Yountville could actually control. The Town could advocate for employee housing on state land, and it did. It could lobby Sacramento, coordinate infrastructure and encourage CalVet to move faster, and it did. What Yountville could not do was command the State to produce 150 apartments on the Veterans Home campus next year. On the former school site, by contrast, the Town controlled the property, the planning process and the approvals. That distinction between what Yountville could encourage and what it could actually deliver became strangely obscured as opposition to the Commons intensified.

There were legitimate arguments about the plan. Some residents thought it was too expensive, too dense, insufficiently parked, architecturally unresolved or simply too ambitious. Those objections deserved to be heard and, where persuasive, incorporated. But by the time the project was stopped, the Town had spent roughly two years in public meetings, design work, environmental review and revision. The practical effect of the petition was not to produce a smaller Commons, accelerate housing at the Veterans Home or replace the project with a less expensive alternative. It stopped the approvals. Two hundred thirty-five valid signatures were sufficient under California law to force the Council to repeal the ordinances or send them to the voters, and the Council repealed them. The problem that had produced the housing effort remained exactly where it was.

Agency matters here. The Commons did not simply become delayed, as though a schedule slipped or a contractor failed to show up. A small, organized group of residents opposed the approvals and successfully stopped them, with Gary Jabara playing a prominent leadership role in that effort. Their reasons were not all the same and their motives should not be invented. They exercised a legal right. But exercising a right does not make the consequences disappear. A significant piece of Yountville’s response to a documented housing problem was deliberately interrupted, and no replacement of comparable scale or readiness appeared when it was stopped.

A Town Is Not the Same Thing as a Petition

The intensity of that campaign has also created a misleading impression that Yountville is split neatly in half over whether middle-class workers should have some chance to live in the community. Recent history says something different. In 2018, voters approved Measure S by roughly 74 percent, agreeing to tax hotel guests in order to fund affordable and workforce housing. Subsequent elections produced a Council that continued making housing a priority. The Town purchased the school property, conducted years of public planning and advanced the Commons through repeated public decisions. None of that proves that a majority supported every unit, parking space or dollar in the final Commons plan. It does establish that addressing housing for people who work in Yountville was not a fringe idea imposed on an unwilling town.

The petition deserves the same precision. Two hundred thirty-five signatures were legally powerful, but they were not a townwide vote. They established that enough registered voters wanted the approvals suspended to trigger California’s referendum process. The larger electorate was never asked to accept or reject the Commons because the Council chose repeal. That distinction matters in a small town, where a concentrated political effort can quickly acquire the rhetorical status of ‘the community.’ The petitioners were part of the community and entitled to use the law available to them. They were not the whole community, and their success should not be rewritten as proof that Yountville abandoned the larger goal of housing middle-class workers.

In historical terms, the divisiveness itself is the newer development. The Veterans Home once housed far more employees on its campus, while the civilian town grew beside an institution that supplied jobs, families and everyday economic life. Nobody needed a slogan to explain why the people who cared for veterans might live nearby. Yountville’s modern luxury economy and the extraordinary value of its housing have gradually severed that ordinary relationship between work and residence. The political novelty is not the proposition that workers need homes. It is the idea that creating those homes has become sufficiently controversial that nearly every physical proposal can be treated as a threat to the character of the place the workers are needed to sustain.

The People Missing From the Photograph

That is why Jabara’s comment at the party is more interesting than it first appears. He said he enjoys talking with Veterans Home residents because he learns from them. There is every reason to take him at his word, and an obvious way to extend the conversation. The next time The Estate hosts the veterans, save a table for several of the people who care for them: a registered nurse, an LVN, a CNA, a recruiter trying to fill vacancies and perhaps an administrator responsible for staffing the skilled-nursing operation. Ask where employees live, what applicants say when they consider a job in Yountville, what makes experienced staff leave and whether realistic housing options closer to the Home would change recruitment or retention. Invite a CalVet planner to explain what can be built on the 615 acres and on what timetable. Invite the Town to explain what it can build on land it controls.

The point would not be to stage a dinner-table ambush in which one side is forced to confess that the other was right. The useful thing would be to put the worker who has been strangely absent from the public picture into the same field of vision as the veteran everyone agrees deserves excellent care. A CNA commuting from Fairfield is not an abstraction called workforce housing. She is a person upon whom the promise made to the veteran depends. The distance between her home and her job is not proof of anyone’s moral failure, but CalVet says that distance is part of a recruitment and retention problem. Once that connection is understood, a debate about housing cannot honestly return to treating the worker as somebody else’s concern.

There is an irony here worth preserving because it is gentler, and more revealing, than outrage. Yountville is exceptionally good at the visible rituals of appreciation. It knows how to welcome veterans, raise a glass, hire a band and produce a beautiful summer evening. The difficult obligations are less photogenic. They involve zoning maps, budgets, density, public land, long meetings and the possibility that preserving a community sometimes requires allowing it to change. The veterans are easy to honor because everyone can agree on the sentiment. The caregivers force the town to confront what that sentiment costs when translated into daily life.

The Story the Front Page Did Not Ask

The Yountville Sun could have used Jabara’s party as the beginning of that larger story. There is nothing wrong with putting the event on the front page. Community gatherings are local news, and a photograph of veterans enjoying Sinatra with their neighbors is a perfectly legitimate record of town life. What is remarkable is the lack of comparable curiosity about the policy story sitting immediately behind the picture. CalVet has published detailed information about staffing vacancies, recruitment, commuting and employee housing at Yountville’s largest employer. The Town has adopted a Housing Element that treats Veterans Home housing and broader middle-class housing as related responsibilities. A major local housing project was stopped after a petition campaign in which the host of the front-page party played a leading role. A curious newspaper does not have to take sides to notice the collision of those facts.

The reporting questions practically write themselves. How much of the new skilled-nursing capacity can be staffed today? Which classifications are hardest to recruit? Where do those workers live? How much does distance matter compared with wages and other factors? What is CalVet’s actual schedule for meaningful employee housing on the campus? What has Yountville committed to do under its Housing Element? What housing could still be delivered at the Commons, and when? None of those questions requires the Sun to endorse the old plan, oppose Jabara or campaign for the Council. They require the ordinary journalistic curiosity to follow a cheerful photograph into the less cheerful facts surrounding it.

That absence matters because many residents reasonably rely on a local newspaper to do exactly this work. Most people will never read a state master plan or hundreds of pages of a Housing Element unless someone shows them why a particular section matters. When the newspaper devotes its most visible space to the party and almost none to the documented relationship between housing, staffing and the future of the institution being celebrated, the public argument becomes easier to manipulate. People hear that the State owns 615 acres but not that CalVet describes major housing there as a long-term undertaking. They hear that the Commons was stopped by ‘the community’ but not that the petition contained 235 signatures and no townwide vote rejected the project. The fog is not created by one false statement. It accumulates when the connective tissue between true facts is never reported.

The Resident Who Did Not Know Can Be the Hero

The most important person in the next chapter may therefore be the resident who knew almost none of this before the Commons fight. Perhaps she heard the number of proposed homes and thought it sounded enormous. Perhaps he saw 615 acres at the Veterans Home and reasonably assumed California should solve the problem there. Perhaps she supported the Commons because she generally believed Yountville needed housing but could not have explained what CalVet had actually said about recruitment and retention. None of these people should be scolded for failing to spend their evenings with government planning documents. A healthy town does not require every citizen to become a land-use specialist. It does require enough citizens to become curious when the consequences of a decision become clearer.

For that resident, the documents are useful precisely because they do not demand allegiance to either camp. CalVet’s Master Plan explains the staffing and geographic problem from inside the institution. The Yountville-specific planning work explains the enormous complexity of the campus and the long horizon for major new development. The Town’s 2023-2031 Housing Element explains how Yountville has understood its own role, including years of coordination with CalVet and the possibility of substantial future employee housing on state land. Read together, they allow a resident to hold several ideas at once: CalVet should build employee housing; Yountville should help; that housing will take time; the workforce problem exists now; and housing on Town-owned land can address part of the same problem without competing with the State’s future plans.

A resident can absorb all of that and still dislike the previous Commons plan. She can argue for fewer homes, different architecture, different parking or a different financing strategy. He can insist that CalVet move faster and that Sacramento contribute more. What changes is the quality of the disagreement. The question is no longer whether housing and staffing are connected or whether 615 acres magically remove Yountville from the problem. It becomes a practical discussion about how much housing each public entity can deliver, for whom, on what land and on what schedule. The resident who arrives without a fixed factional identity may be particularly valuable because changing an opinion in response to evidence does not require surrendering a reputation built around the old one.

After You Stop the Plan, the Question Changes

The same freedom does not apply quite as comfortably to the people who successfully stopped the approvals. They remain entitled to every criticism they made, and nobody needs to declare them anti-housing or indifferent to veterans. But the success of the petition changes the civic burden. Before stopping a plan, an opponent can reasonably devote most of his energy to explaining what is wrong with it. After stopping it, particularly when the underlying problem remains documented and urgent, opposition is no longer a complete position. The relevant question becomes what the opponent is prepared to support instead.

If the previous Commons was too large, what scale of middle-class housing belongs on the property? If the unit mix was wrong, what should replace it? If the cost was unacceptable, what public investment is acceptable for housing that remains protected rather than returning to the luxury market? If CalVet’s land is still the preferred answer, what should Yountville do during the years required for the State to deliver substantial housing there? If nurses, CNAs, Town employees, hospitality workers and other middle-class people should have some realistic opportunity to live closer to their jobs, where will those homes go? These are not gotcha questions. They are what responsibility looks like after successfully interrupting a public response to a problem that did not disappear when the ordinance did.

The delay itself deserves no romantic gloss. It has not made a single CalVet hire easier. It has not produced one employee apartment on the Veterans Home campus. It has not created a smaller Commons, lowered the cost of a replacement or shortened a nurse’s commute. Perhaps a future plan will ultimately be better, but that future benefit cannot be credited to the delay before it exists. For now, the measurable result is simpler: a significant local housing response was stopped and the problem is no closer to resolution.

The Question for Gary Jabara

That brings the story back to the host of last week’s party. Jabara’s affection for the veterans may be entirely sincere, and the essay becomes weaker if it pretends otherwise. The point is not to catch him performing hypocrisy in the cheap sense of saying one thing and secretly believing another. The contradiction is more consequential. He can genuinely enjoy honoring veterans and still have helped lead a political effort that delayed a substantial housing response intended for the class of middle-income workers upon whom the Veterans Home and the rest of Yountville depend. Sincerity does not erase consequence, and generosity on one evening does not answer the policy problem waiting up the hill.

Jabara also possesses something more useful than a public position. He has influence, business experience, property, resources and an evident ability to organize people. He helped demonstrate how effectively those assets could be used to stop the Commons. The fair question now is how they will be used to help solve the problem that remains. If the old Commons was wrong, help shape a replacement that can actually be built. If employee housing at the Veterans Home is central to his preferred solution, use his influence to press CalVet and the State for a realistic program and timetable while acknowledging that Yountville still needs to act in the meantime. Bring caregivers into the conversation, not merely as sympathetic figures but as workers whose actual salaries, commutes and housing choices should inform what gets built.

The same question belongs, in proportion, to the 235 people whose signatures made the delay possible. They need not apologize for signing a petition, and they need not endorse the old plan. But they should recognize that they helped alter the course of a public response to a documented problem. Having seen the connection between housing and the Veterans Home more clearly, what are they prepared to support now? The answer cannot remain indefinitely that the next parcel, the next financing plan, the next density and the next timetable are also unacceptable. At some point support for middle-class housing has to acquire an address.

Look at the Photograph Again

Now return to the photograph from The Estate. Nothing in it has changed. The veterans are still enjoying a summer evening. The singer is still doing Sinatra. The host is still smiling, and his welcome can still be genuine. What has changed is the reader’s field of vision. Just outside the photograph are the nurses and CNAs commuting toward Yountville because the housing market has placed them elsewhere. Behind them are CalVet’s vacancy tables and its recommendation for employee housing. Beside those are Yountville’s Housing Element, its years of coordination with the State and its commitment to housing middle-class workers. And sitting in the recent past is a Town-owned property where a substantial part of that response had moved from policy into an approved plan before a small group led by Jabara stopped it.

Seen with that context, the party is not offensive. It is poignant. It shows a community performing the part of its obligation that is easy to see and easy to love while the difficult part remains unresolved. Honoring veterans requires almost no disagreement about what veterans deserve. Caring for them forces a community to ask where the people who provide that care will live, what the public is willing to spend, what land will change, how much density is acceptable and whether people who already possess housing are willing to make room for people who do not. Those are harder questions precisely because they convert affection into policy.

Yountville has not run out of information about the problem. CalVet has explained its workforce challenge. The Town has explained its housing strategy. The State’s future employee housing and Yountville’s local middle-class housing are not rival ideas. The missing ingredient is not another study proving that people need to live within reasonable reach of the institutions that employ them. It is the willingness to choose and support actual places where that housing can be built.

The veterans have been honored. The complimentary meal has been served, the music has played and the summer evening has ended. For Jabara and the small group who helped delay a significant part of Yountville’s housing response, the question that remains is more demanding and far more useful: having seen how directly housing affects the people who care for the veterans, what are they prepared to do now to help solve it?

Because the difficult part was never loving the veterans. It was making room for the people who care for them.

Summary: The wealthiest business owner in Yountville has been throwing parties. Wine, a mariachi band, a Frank Sinatra evening, and next month, a harvest celebration. Last week he emailed his guest list to say what the parties have been for: the town needs new leadership, and it is time to turn the page. He cannot vote here. He owns the biggest resort in town, and now the newspaper too. This essay is not about him, though. It is about you, the person whose vote he is courting. It walks through what his email actually says, what really happened in the fight over the old school property, and what California law requires of anyone spending serious money to sway an election. Then it makes a prediction you can check for yourself. And it asks you to do one thing before November: turn the page he keeps offering, and look. So much promised. Nothing written there yet. Ask him why.

The Important Word Was Keep

There is an old and inconvenient idea about self-government that predates campaign consultants, mailing lists, and complimentary yoga. Benjamin Franklin gave it its shortest form when, leaving the Constitutional Convention, he was asked what kind of government the delegates had made. A republic, he said, if you can keep it. The important word was keep. A republic is not delivered to your door, and it is not maintained on your behalf by the mayor, the town manager, the newspaper, the architect, the retired lawyer, or the man who attends every council meeting because he has more time than you do. It survives because ordinary people accept the mildly irritating obligation of knowing what is being done in their name.

Franklin distrusted grandeur. Thomas Paine insisted that even good government requires scrutiny. Adam Smith, so often reduced to a patron saint of markets, spent real intellectual energy on what happens when concentrated private interests acquire outsized influence over public affairs, because the parties to that bargain hold very different amounts of money, access, and information. None of the three would have accepted the argument that everything is probably fine because the free wine is good.

Which brings us to Yountville, and to the resident this essay is actually about. Not the famous chef, not the telecom entrepreneur, not the council, not the author. You. The person who lives here, votes here, and has been invited, warmly and repeatedly, to let somebody else do the keeping.

The Email That Explains Itself

On August 17, Gary Jabara, owner of The Estate Yountville and of the town’s largest commercial holding, sent an email titled “Building a Better Yountville.” It deserves a careful reading, because Mr. Jabara has done the town a genuine service. He has explained the operation himself, in his own sentences, in the correct order.

“It really began,” he writes, “with the 200+ residents who came together around the referendum to stop the Commons development.” Then comes the sentence worth committing to memory: “That list became our first invitation list.” No inference is required and no source needs protecting. A political effort produced a list. The list became an invitation list. The invitations produced gatherings, which he inventories himself: “We started with a small information session in the Barrel Room, added some wine, then a mariachi band, and most recently Frank Sinatra.” Somewhere between the Barrel Room and Sinatra, by his account, the operation grew into something larger: “we became less a mailing list and more a community.”

The community then receives its instruction. The email speaks of questionable decisions, millions spent, severance agreements and open-ended contracts, calls for “new people, new energy and new ideas,” and arrives at its destination: “It is time to turn the page.” The September gathering will be themed to the harvest, which he explains as “saying goodbye to what has run its course and making room for what comes next,” 78 days before an election for mayor and two council seats. Then the closing thought: “Maybe it’s time for Yountville to do a little harvesting of its own.” He deserves credit for the clarity. Few political operations narrate their own assembly this completely, in writing, over the founder’s signature.

A Word About the Word Referendum

One term in the email requires correction because it is doing quiet work. Mr. Jabara describes the “200+ residents who came together around the referendum to stop the Commons development.” Yountville has held no referendum election on the Commons. No townwide vote occurred, and no majority of Yountville voters walked into a booth and rejected the project. What occurred was a petition signed by 235 registered voters. It was consequential, it was lawful, and its signers owe nobody an apology. The council then repealed the challenged approvals rather than putting the matter before the electorate, which is one of the two responses state law allows.

But 235 signatures and the judgment of Yountville’s voters are not interchangeable things. Calling one the other converts “some residents organized successfully against a project” into “the people rejected the project.” Those are different sentences, and the difference matters more now that Mr. Jabara has identified that same group as the seed of his present political community. A town serious about governing itself should insist on accurate history, particularly when the history is being offered as a mandate for what comes next.

The Genre of the Turned Page

Turn the page is an appealing phrase, and Americans have always been susceptible to the genre it belongs to. Throw the bums out. Drain the swamp. Morning in America. Hope and Change. Make America Great Again. The genre works by offering a trade: your complicated ledger of facts for one clean feeling. A slogan, essentially, is a promise not to explain. Make Yountville Great Again, in whatever local phrasing it eventually adopts, will be the same promise, aimed at the same customer, the citizen who would rather feel represented than stay informed.

Sometimes pages should be turned. The question is what is written on the next one, and here the August email achieves a verifiable emptiness. It contains no candidate’s name, no housing proposal, no plan for the 7.5 acres of public land at the center of town, no stated use for the workforce housing fund the voters created, no budget, and no number. The page Mr. Jabara asks you to turn contains a public record that can be examined, criticized, and judged. The page he asks you to turn to is blank. He has not written what comes next. Nobody turns to a blank page in a contract, and nobody should do it in a town. Before you turn anything, ask him to fill it in: the land, the fund, and the people who work here. Are the Veteran Home Residents that gullible? I say keep the faith.

Politics Comes With Paperwork

Now for the part of this essay written in advance, so that readers may check it against events.

California does not regulate parties, bands, or generosity. It regulates political spending, and it defines that spending by its purpose. Under the Political Reform Act, money spent to influence the qualification of a ballot measure or the outcome of an election is a contribution or an expenditure, whoever spends it and however good the music is. The obligation follows the money, not the name. It attaches whether or not anyone gets around to forming a committee, and it has been attaching, dollar by dollar, to every event in the chronology Mr. Jabara himself published on August 17: an operation born from a petition drive, built on that petition’s list, and now aimed, in his own words, at replacing the town’s leadership in November.

The law offers a man in that position exactly two doors. Behind the first is a committee: a statement of organization filed within ten days of the first $2,000, campaign statements with the Town Clerk, the venues and the wine and the Sinatra evening reported at fair market value, a treasurer’s name on the line. Behind the second door is silence, the end of the events, the end of the advocacy, the list retired. There is no third door in which a wealthy business owner continues organizing and spending at scale while the public file stays empty. That arrangement has a name in the statute books, and it comes with daily late fees.

So here is the prediction, filed before the harvest party rather than after. A committee will be announced. It will arrive wrapped in civic language, a name with Yountville in it, a mission about better government, and it will be presented as a beginning. It will not be a beginning. It will be the paperwork catching up with an operation whose origin, growth, and purpose its founder has already described in prose, and whose spending this publication has already placed before the Fair Political Practices Commission by formal inquiry. When the announcement comes, no outrage is required and no surprise is available. The correct response is three words: there it is. Disclosure is the respectable part of politics, and Mr. Jabara is welcome to it. He should simply understand that he will not be introducing the operation to Yountville. Yountville read about it in August, here in the Yountville Moon.

What Institutions Are For

Meanwhile, something less entertaining has been happening across town. Government kept functioning. The Town received law firm letters, public records demands, warnings about its finances, and months of pressure from the largest commercial interest within its borders. The Town Attorney answered the correspondence. The council acted. The petition process ran its lawful course. Budgets were adopted. Revenue continued to arrive and set a record in June. The land remained publicly owned and Measure S remained intact. None of this proves the Town was right about the Commons. It proves something more modest and more durable: institutions are supposed to withstand pressure.

That is why we have them. Public decisions are not supposed to change because the person demanding change is rich, furious, charming, litigious, generous, or capable of filling a ballroom. Institutions create friction between private desire and public action, and that friction is maddening to anyone convinced he is right. It is also among the principal protections of self-government. The test of Yountville’s institutions is not whether they defend this council, because councils come and go. The test is whether the same rules keep applying when the pressure becomes expensive.

In Praise of Boring

Yountville is vulnerable to all of this precisely because it is comfortable. Many residents worked their whole lives to arrive somewhere Tuesday evenings no longer feel like a civics examination, and they would rather have pickleball, dinner, the dog, the garden, a glass of wine, grandchildren, and the luxury of living where most things work. Fair enough. Enjoy every bit of it. But comfort breeds one dangerous assumption: that somebody else is doing the keeping. Somebody read the budget. Somebody attended the meeting. Somebody knows what the petition actually did. Somebody will notice if an argument about 7.5 acres of public land quietly becomes an organization devoted to changing who governs the town. Eventually everybody assumes somebody else is the citizen, and that is the moment citizenship becomes easiest to acquire wholesale. Not with an envelope of cash, which would be crude, but with access, belonging, grievance, friendship, and invitations, the pleasant sensation of admission to the room where the people who really understand things gather. Wine helps. So does Sinatra.

Against this stands the unfashionable truth that good government is mostly boring, and that its boringness is a virtue. It is water systems and street maintenance, audits and actuarial tables, zoning maps and housing elements, agendas posted on Thursdays, staff reports nobody reads, and votes taken after two hours of testimony. It is numbers entered into columns by people whose names will never appear on a campaign sign. The town you enjoy is the compound interest on generations of that tedium.

If you want to know who deserves your vote, go to a council meeting. Not the recording. The room. Sit in the chairs, listen to the whole thing from start to finish, and read the agenda before you come. You will see two kinds of people. Some come with numbers: what the water system costs, what the budget can carry, what a repair will run. Others come to put on a show, and the show gets louder every month. The people with the numbers are minding your money, your streets, and your town. The performers are minding an audience. And when you have listened long enough to have a real question, stand up at the podium and ask it, a genuine one, one you actually want answered. You will learn more from how it gets answered than from any party invitation you will ever receive. When the show ends, the bills still have to be paid, and you will want to know who was doing the arithmetic.

The Hero of This Story

Nobody should fear political change, and nothing here is an argument for incumbency. Council seats are not hereditary titles. Contracts should be examined, severance agreements scrutinized, public money accounted for, and bad decisions punished at the ballot box. If Mr. Jabara has identified waste, misconduct, or incompetence, he should document it. If the candidates he supports can govern Yountville better, they should explain how, in numbers, in public, on the record. That is democracy. But democracy carries a matching obligation that receives less attention: the voter has to do some work too.

You do not get to outsource citizenship to the person with the nicest party. You do not get to confuse hospitality with public policy or mistake repetition for evidence. And you are entitled to raise an eyebrow when a man who cannot cast a ballot in this town becomes intensely interested in how you cast yours. That does not make his arguments wrong. It makes your responsibility greater.

So turn the page if you conclude it should be turned, but read it first. Ask who wrote it, who paid for the printing, and who benefits from the plot. Ask what happens to the 7.5 acres of public land you already own and to the middle class housing money the voters deliberately created. Ask where the people who cook here, clean here, teach here, and care for hundreds of aging veterans are supposed to live. Ask every candidate what they will build, what they will spend, what they will protect, and what they are prepared to lose. Ask what the new direction is after the music stops.

Then check the answers. Check Gary Jabara’s. Check the council’s. Check the candidates’. Check mine. The documents are public, the meetings are recorded, the votes are on paper, and political money leaves a trail that the law requires to be visible. Get informed. Stay informed. Take some responsibility for the place where you live. An informed resident is unpurchasable at any price, and an uninformed one is simply waiting for a bidder.

Yountville Is Not For Sale

This series is called Yountville Is Not For Sale, and until now the phrase has been read as an argument about land. This fall it is about the other asset, because the first thing placed on the market in any election season is your judgment, and then your vote. Every party, every mailer, every song, every grievance, and every warm email is bidding on the same two items. They cannot be taken from you. They can only be surrendered by you, sometimes for something as inexpensive as a feeling.

That is why the choice before Yountville is larger than Gary Jabara and larger than the Commons. Yountville can be rolled or Yountville can stand up, and standing up does not mean voting the way this publication wants, supporting the Commons, defending the council, or opposing Mr. Jabara. It means refusing to let anybody else do your thinking for you. The proposition behind this series has never been that rich people are unwelcome, that developers are villains, that Town Hall is infallible, or that change should be feared. The proposition is that a town belongs to its citizens for exactly as long as its citizens behave like owners rather than guests. Owners ask questions. They look at the books. They know where the property lines run. They notice when somebody is selling them something, especially when the salesman insists it is a gift. And they read the paperwork before they sign.

Gary is asking Yountville to turn the page. You are welcome to it. Just don’t complain later that nobody warned you to read what was on the other side.

Disclosure: The author served as Owner’s Design Consultant on the Yountville Commons project for approximately two years. That scope of work is complete. He writes here as a private citizen. Where facts are disputed, the Moon shows its evidence.

On August 4, Gary Jabara sent an email to every member of the Yountville Town Council and every declared candidate for it. The email announced that his August 13 Sinatra gathering at The Estate Yountville would exclude all of them, and it explained why: an “anonymous and highly political whistleblower complaint” filed after a previous gathering, a complaint he said involved “one of our guests and me.” Jabara told the town’s elected leadership that his attorney had already filed a request to preserve “any and all email meta-data,” and that if the sender proved to live outside town, “we’re filing a Jane Doe lawsuit with the public email providers to identify the exact residential address from which the email originated.”

Jabara chose to describe the complaint to a dozen public officials during an election season. He chose to characterize its politics, announce litigation over it, and promise a hunt for its author’s home address. What he did not do is show anyone the document. The Moon has it, and the Moon’s position is simple: a document a man describes to the entire government of this town should not remain a rumor he alone gets to characterize. It is printed below, in full, so that readers can weigh the complaint and the response to it side by side.

How the Moon Holds This Document

A copy of the complaint was forwarded to the Moon, unsolicited, in July. The sending address has been withheld. The Moon does not know who wrote the complaint, will not speculate about who wrote it, and will not discuss its sourcing further. The document is reproduced exactly as received, including its punctuation, its links, and its errors. Nothing has been added, and nothing has been removed. except the address.

The Complaint, Verbatim

From: Yountville Whistleblower <address withheld by the Moon>

Date: July 17, 2026 at 12:42:51 PM PDT

Subject: Whistleblower Complaint - Public Misconduct

I’m submitting my whistleblower complaint anonymously because I have no interest in losing my job.

The actions described below on the part of Council Member Hillery Trippe taint the entire Yountville Town Council, further damage public confidence in our local government and jeopardize our public employees.

I’m filing my complaint with local, county and state authorities in order to safeguard the integrity of Yountville’s public decision-making process and curb the misconduct of a Council Member that undermines transparency and fundamental principles of good governance.

The first major red flag went up during public comment at our July 7, 2026 Town Council Regular Meeting, when a public speaker got up to speak about the “former Town Manager’s agreement,” referencing confidential provisions of internal personnel discussions with this particular public employee. At the end of his remarks, the speaker announced his candidacy for Yountville Mayor. You can view these comments starting at 14:26 of the meeting video (

It’s the worst kept secret in town government that it was Council Member Trippe that shared this confidential information with the individual who spoke at the July 7 meeting, and I trust that a Town Attorney investigation will quickly confirm that.

The sharing of confidential Town information protected under attorney-client privilege and made available only to current Yountville elected officials violates not only Yountville Town Council Handbook pages 30 and 34, which prohibit redistribution of confidential information, but also violates state laws with significant penalties, including California Government Code section 54963 and, depending on the degree to which such violation includes benefit to “themselves or business interests,” Political Reform Act and Government Code section 1090.

On that topic: business interests…

I wasn’t invited to the July 9 Fiesta with Friends but was forwarded the email from the party’s host Gary Jabara that smeared multiple Town Council members. The event felt overtly political, coming just two days from the outrageous breach of the Town Council’s attorney-client privilege, so I decided to go and see who came in and out of the party.

Thank goodness no one was checking the guest list so I was able to walk right into the party.

I personally witnessed Council Member Trippe speak to the 200 guests gathered as if she were the sole representative of the Town Council, railing against the Town Manager and further disclosing confidential details about our internal process of hiring a new Town Manager. She then joined party host Gary Jabara in publicly naming the individual he and Hillery intend to hire as Town Manager in order to advance Gary’s business interests in evicting tenants at Estate Yountville in order to redevelop the property.

I grew up here knowing there’s a lot of wealth that comes in and out of our town but I never thought I would see one of our Council Members try to put Yountville up for sale.

We know that Council Member Trippe’s conduct crossed the line during the back and forth around Yountville Commons. Multiple of my colleagues have direct knowledge of the political advice she sought from our Town Attorney in order to support the referendum campaign. In multiple meetings, Council Member Trippe also held herself out as an attorney in order to unduly influence Town staff.

There are plenty of documentary records, including emails, that can be obtained through the Clerk’s Office. Believe me.

I’m also copying all of the relevant authorities since Yountville does not have its own Whistleblower Hotline. If you too have information about wrongdoing by the Town Council Member in question, email your information to the following:

Complaint@fppc.ca.gov

complaints@napacivilgrandjury.org

da@countyofnapa.org

www.calbar.ca.gov/sites/default/files/portals/0/documents/forms/Attorney_Misconduct_Complaint.pdf

Please also consider emailing Town Attorney Gary Bell at gbell@chwlaw.us

Yountville Is Not For Sale!

What the Public Record Supports

The complaint mixes claims that can be checked today against claims that only an investigation can resolve. The Moon has sorted them, and readers should hold the two categories apart as firmly as this essay does.

The July 7 meeting happened as described. The video is a public record, and at the timestamp the complaint cites, a public commenter discusses the former Town Manager’s agreement and closes his remarks by announcing his candidacy for mayor. That commenter was Joe Tagliaboschi, now a declared candidate and also since publicly endorsed by Gary Jabara. The video establishes what was said in public and by whom. It does not establish where the speaker’s information came from, which is the question the complaint puts to investigators.

The statutes the complaint cites are real and their subjects are what the complaint says they are. Government Code section 54963 prohibits disclosing confidential information acquired in a closed session of a local agency. Section 1090 concerns financial interests in government contracts. Whether either was violated by anyone is precisely the question the complaint asks the authorities to answer, and nothing in this essay tries to answer that.

One correction of vocabulary, applied to this document as the Moon applies it to everyone. There has been no referendum in Yountville. A petition signed by 235 registered voters, roughly a tenth of the town’s electorate, suspended the Commons zoning ordinance, and the town-wide election that word implies has never been held. The complaint’s phrase “the referendum campaign” refers to that petition effort.

The public record also documents a pattern the Moon reported on August 7. At the August 4 council meeting, Councilmember Hillery Trippe demanded on camera that Town Attorney Gary Bell explain a severance payment she had participated in approving in closed session, a question the Brown Act forbade Bell from answering in public and one that Trippe, of everyone in the chamber, was best positioned to know he could not answer. She cast the lone council vote against the Commons and organized against the project outside the public process. None of that proves the complaint’s central allegation, and this essay does not offer it as proof. It is context, on tape and in print, for why this complaint did not arrive in Yountville as a surprise.

What Remains Allegation

Everything else in the document is, as of this writing, an allegation and nothing more. That Trippe was the source of the information heard on July 7 is the complainant’s inference, which the complaint itself concedes by asking the Town Attorney to confirm it. That Trippe addressed roughly 200 guests on July 9 as though speaking for the council, that she and Jabara publicly named a preferred candidate for Town Manager, and that the purpose was to advance business interests in evicting tenants at The Estate Yountville to redevelop the property are the eyewitness claims of one unnamed person. The Moon has not verified any of them and does not assert any of them. The complainant states that colleagues have direct knowledge and that documentary records exist in the Clerk’s Office. Records held by the Clerk are obtainable by anyone.

The Endorsement

One week after Tagliaboschi announced his candidacy while discussing a confidential personnel agreement, Jabara endorsed him publicly. The sequence is now a matter of documented fact: confidential information surfaced through a mayoral candidate on July 7, and the man now pursuing litigation to unmask the person who complained about it endorsed that candidate within days.

A Note to Other Newsrooms

The documents underlying this essay, Jabara’s August 4 email and the complaint as received, are available on request to any news organization, including the Yountville Sun. As of publication, the Sun has reported neither the complaint nor the email its owner sent to the town’s entire elected leadership describing his plans to litigate over it.

Where the Series Title Came From

One disclosure specific to this essay. The complaint closes with the sentence “Yountville Is Not For Sale!” Readers will recognize it. The Moon’s current series took its title from that line. The author of this publication read the complaint in July, and its closing sentence named what the Moon had been documenting for two months, so the Moon adopted it, the way writers have always taken a good line. The complaint came first. The series title followed. That is the entire relationship between this publication and the complaint’s unknown author, and it is disclosed here so that nobody else gets to disclose it first.

What Happens Now

The complaint may be vindicated by investigators or dismantled by them. Either outcome will be news, and the Moon will report it with the same rules applied here. What can be said today is narrower. An anonymous town employee put allegations before four public authorities, and the response of the town’s wealthiest business owner was not to rebut a single one of them. It was to preserve metadata, threaten a Jane Doe lawsuit, and promise the town’s elected officials that he would find the author’s home address. The complaint asks the authorities a question about the conduct of Yountville’s government. The response asks the town a question about power. The authorities will answer the first in their own time. The second is on the ballot November 3.

☾

Disclosure: Brendan Kelly served as the Owner’s Design Consultant to the Town of Yountville on the Yountville Commons project. That engagement is complete. He writes and publishes The Yountville Moon as a private citizen.

COMING SOON: THE HISTORICAL FABRIC OF YOUNTVILLE

Exhibit One: Groezinger Wine Cellars

Yountville takes historic preservation seriously.

We take it so seriously that changing a window, moving a sign, altering a roofline, or selecting the wrong shade of beige can become a civic pilgrimage through planning staff, design review, findings, conditions of approval and several opportunities to become intimately acquainted with the municipal code.

Which is why I became curious about the rumor that the upper floor of the old Groezinger Wine Cellars — the landmark generations of residents remember as Vintage 1870 — may be headed toward a considerably grander future.

Say, for example, a ballroom.

I should disclose a professional bias here. I am a licensed architect. I have spent more than three decades working with building codes, historic buildings, structural engineers, fire officials and planning departments. I know enough about the process to understand that an old antique marketplace does not become a ballroom simply because somebody removes the antiques.

Assembly occupancy is a different animal. Suddenly there are questions about how many people can occupy the room, whether the old floors can carry them, seismic capacity, exiting, stairs, elevators, accessibility, restrooms, sprinklers, alarms, emergency lighting and mechanical systems. And when the building happens to be one of Napa Valley’s most important surviving nineteenth-century industrial landmarks, there are additional questions about the California Historical Building Code, design review, historic-resource impacts and CEQA.

Perhaps all of those questions have already been asked and answered.

We intend to find out.

The Yountville Moon has submitted public-records requests seeking the permits, approved occupancies, structural calculations, seismic analyses, fire reviews, inspection records, design approvals, historic-resource determinations, CEQA documents and the complete record behind a previously submitted $2.25 million seismic and life-safety upgrade application for the old winery.

But this series is about something larger than one rumored ballroom.

Owning an important historic building is not quite the same thing as owning an ordinary piece of real estate. Ownership comes with stewardship. These buildings survive because one generation accepts some responsibility for handing them intact to the next.

And that gives the Town of Yountville an equally important responsibility.

A town cannot judge a historic project by the size of the owner’s ambition, influence or pocketbook. It has to judge the proposal on its merits. Is it safe? Is it legal? Does it respect the historic resource? Has the required public process occurred? And, most important, would Yountville apply exactly the same rules if the applicant were somebody else?

That is the test.

Because historic preservation means very little if the rules become flexible when the owner becomes powerful.

And if America really is entering its ballroom era — from Donald Trump’s White House to Washington Street in Yountville — perhaps this is a particularly good moment to remember why we have preservation laws in the first place.

History belongs to the future, too.

Gary Jabara is having a Frank Sinatra party at The Estate Yountville on August 13, and the first order of business was to notify the entire political leadership of Yountville that none of them may attend. In an August 4 email addressed to “Council Members and Candidates,” Jabara explained that the gathering is a private affair for “my friends, neighbors, and our veterans,” which is certainly his prerogative. He owns the place. He can invite the entire cast of Ocean’s Eleven if he can find them. He adds, in writing, that “anyone not invited will be respectfully turned away.” That is a door policy for a Sinatra evening, sent under signature to the town’s elected officials. He closes by wishing the people he has just banned “much success in your respective campaigns.” It is a gracious note, roughly the way a bouncer is gracious when he hands you your coat. And because the email went to sitting council members and declared candidates about town business, it is a public record. Anyone may request a copy. By last week, few in Yountville needed to.

What turns this otherwise forgettable bit of social sorting into a document worth reading closely is Jabara’s explanation for the banishment, because somebody filed what he calls “an anonymous and highly political whistleblower complaint” after one of his previous gatherings, a complaint he says involved “one of our guests and me.” Gary, it appears, has been criticized anonymously, and Yountville’s entire political class needed to be informed that this aggression will not stand.

CSI: Yountville

Jabara told the Council and candidates that his attorney has already filed a request to preserve “any and all email meta-data” and determine whether the whistleblower email “truly came from an internal city source, as the sender wanted us to believe.” The request was filed, according to the email, with “the City,” which will come as news to Yountville, a town, though a man cannot be expected to keep track of every municipality he is investigating. If the sender turns out not to live within the city limits of this town, Jabara continues, “we’re filing a Jane Doe lawsuit with the public email providers to identify the exact residential address from which the email originated.” That is a remarkable amount of litigation strategy to include in an email about a party, and he sent it to a half-dozen politicians during an election season. Most attorneys charge extra to keep a client from doing exactly that. But Jabara apparently worried that his audience might not fully appreciate the technological resources now being brought to bear on the Case of the Anonymous Email. So he added the line that makes the whole thing sing: “My deep telecommunications background comes in very handy here.”

Well, thank God for that. Somewhere in America an email provider may soon receive legal papers and discover it has wandered into the crosshairs of a telecom entrepreneur determined to learn from which breakfast nook an unflattering email was dispatched. One imagines a situation room upstairs at The Estate, banks of monitors flickering to life, technicians removing their headsets, and Gary studying a wall-sized map of Yountville, all six blocks of it, while somebody whispers, “Sir, we have an IP address.” Perhaps there is a perfectly legitimate legal issue underneath all this, and Jabara is entitled to pursue whatever remedies the law actually provides. The comic achievement is deciding that every elected official and candidate in town needed a briefing on the manhunt, including the detail about the sender’s “exact residential address.” If anyone wondered why the whistleblower chose to remain anonymous, Gary has now circulated Exhibit A, copied the government on it, and wished it luck in November.

Strangers in the Night, Politicians at Home

Having finished with metadata, lawsuits and residential addresses, Jabara pivots rather abruptly back to hospitality. His gatherings, he explains, “are simply an opportunity for me to spend time with people I enjoy, celebrate our community, talk about the direction of Yountville, and thank the veterans who have given so much in service to our country.” This is a lot for one evening: Sinatra, friendship, community, veterans, the future of Yountville and, hovering somewhere over the crudités, the knowledge that the host’s deep telecommunications background may come in handy if anybody sends an anonymous email afterward. Guests should assume the metadata is being preserved along with the leftovers.

The politicians, meanwhile, can safely stay home. The Brown Act does not prohibit council members from attending ordinary social events, but a council majority privately “talking about the direction of Yountville” is precisely the sort of sentence that makes a town attorney reach for the aspirin. Jabara describes excluding them as “a very difficult personal decision” forced on him by “the past actions of one individual,” which is a little like banning the fire department from your barbecue and announcing it was one of the hardest calls of your life. Nobody needs to grieve. The Council has a perfectly good place to discuss the direction of Yountville. It has chairs, microphones, agendas and the peculiar disadvantage that the public gets to listen.

The Veterans Get Sinatra. Their Caregivers Get Highway 29.

The veterans are specifically welcome, which Jabara says is his way of thanking people “who have given so much in service to our country.” That is a lovely sentiment, and the veterans should enjoy every minute of the evening. But there is an awkward piece of scenery just up the road from The Estate: California is building a $324 million, 240-bed skilled-nursing facility at the Veterans Home while CalVet confronts the considerably less glamorous problem of finding and retaining enough caregivers. CalVet’s own master plan for the campus says the high cost of living forces staff into long commutes and leaves critical jobs unfilled. The same plan grades the site against five criteria and gives the Home a failing mark on “hiring compatibility.” The state put that in print, with a red X next to it. Apparently even $324 million cannot persuade a nursing assistant’s paycheck to become a Yountville rent check.

This would merely be an unfortunate coincidence except for what happened to the most advanced workforce-housing project Yountville had actually managed to produce. The Town owns seven and a half acres within walking distance of the Veterans Home. Voters created Measure S in 2018, with 72 percent approval, specifically to generate money for affordable and workforce housing, and hotel guests supply that revenue. After more than two years and more than 20 public meetings, the Commons could have begun with roughly 30 to 40 deed-restricted homes. Then a petition signed by 235 registered voters, roughly a tenth of the town’s electorate, suspended the zoning ordinance, and the project stopped without any election taking place. Jabara’s contributions to the campaign against the project sit in the public record, from the cost figures he circulated to the letters his attorneys sent the Town. Nobody ever suggested the Commons would solve CalVet’s staffing problems or belong exclusively to Veterans Home employees. It would simply have allowed some of the ordinary people who sustain Yountville, caregivers among them, to live closer to the community they serve. There is something wonderfully Yountville about hosting veterans for a lovely private evening honoring their service while helping stall housing in which some of the people caring for those veterans might actually have lived. The veterans get Sinatra; their caregivers get another hour on Highway 29.

Please Identify One Idea

The episode presents another mystery, and this one may exceed even Jabara’s telecommunications capabilities. For a man eager to “talk about the direction of Yountville,” it is remarkably difficult to locate a consequential public idea he actually wants Yountville to pursue. We know what he opposed at the Commons. We know what his lawyers objected to. We know who is not invited to the party. We now know that anonymous criticism is headed for forensic examination. But where is the affirmative idea? Forty workforce homes instead of 126? A different plan for the seven and a half acres? A proposal for Measure S? An actual idea for helping Yountville house the people who work here? Surely somewhere amid the lawyers, hotels, restaurants, newspaper, property holdings and deep telecommunications background there must be one good idea for Yountville that Gary Jabara wants to make happen. Finding it may prove considerably harder than finding the whistleblower.

My Way

The funniest part of Jabara’s email is that the anonymous complaint itself is almost beside the point. Maybe it was justified. Maybe it was ridiculous. Maybe its author had good reason to stay unnamed, or maybe the author simply lacked the courage to sign. We do not have to decide any of that to appreciate the spectacle. A person criticized Gary Jabara anonymously, and rather than shrugging, responding publicly or letting his lawyer quietly handle whatever legitimate question exists, he notified Yountville’s entire political class that he is coming for the metadata, the email provider and ultimately the “exact residential address,” with his deep telecommunications background riding shotgun and the City of Yountville, wherever that is, preserving the evidence. Thin skin is common in politics. Turning it into a press release is rarer.

Which brings us back to Sinatra. Jabara could have chosen Come Fly with Me, but everyone has to get to the airport first, and some of the caregivers at the Veterans Home are still commuting from Fairfield. Strangers in the Night has possibilities, although presumably Gary would want their IP addresses before morning. That’s Life counsels a philosophical acceptance of criticism, riding high in April, shot down in May, that the email does not immediately suggest. So there really is only one Sinatra song for a man who owns a large piece of the downtown commercial district, recently bought the local newspaper, worked to stall the Town’s workforce housing plan, decides who may attend the private conversation about Yountville’s future and now wants to know precisely where an anonymous critic lives.

“My Way.”

It is a magnificent song. It is just a lousy form of municipal government.

Disclosure: Brendan Kelly served as the Owner’s Design Consultant to the Town of Yountville on the Yountville Commons project. That engagement is complete. He writes and publishes The Yountville Moon as a private citizen.☾

A closing note for the invited: The Moon was not asked to the Sinatra evening either, which is fair, since nobody here can carry a tune. But the direction of Yountville is a public subject wherever it gets discussed, and any guest who hears an idea worth the town’s attention is welcome to pass it along. The Moon does not discuss its sources and, unlike some hosts, has no interest in anyone’s residential address. Juicy tidbits only so email me at yountvillemoon@gmail.com

Heads up!: Jabara’s email refers throughout to an anonymous whistleblower complaint. The Moon has obtained a copy. On Friday the Moon publishes it in full, and readers can decide for themselves which one is the story: the complaint or the response to it.☾

The larger point is that the burden of explanation now shifts. For two years, Town staff and Commons supporters had to answer questions about density, cost, parking, ownership, phasing and design. The people who delayed the project now need to say what they actually support. If 126 homes were too many, how many should be built? If the former school is the wrong site, where is the right one? If Measure S money, paid substantially by hotel visitors, should not help build workforce housing on Town-owned land, what should it do instead? The essay rejects another round of vague support for “workforce housing” without an address, a number of homes and a timeline.

The Veterans Home matters because it strips away the abstraction. Behind every delayed unit is an actual worker who still has to live somewhere: a nurse, nursing assistant, cook, hotel employee or other person whose work sustains Yountville but whose income increasingly excludes them from living there. The essay’s central challenge is therefore simple: Congratulations, you delayed it. Now tell Yountville what the delay was for, and what you are prepared to build instead.

For most of the last two years, the people planning the Yountville Commons have been on the witness stand. Why 126 homes? Why studios? Why three stories? Why should the Town remain the landowner? Why not hire a private developer? Where would everyone park? What would the whole thing eventually cost? Why couldn’t the Veterans Home simply house its own employees on those 615 acres up the hill? Town staff, consultants and elected officials spent more than twenty public meetings answering those questions, changing the plan along the way, completing environmental review, approving the zoning and tentative map, and preparing to find out through competitive procurement what the first phase would actually cost to build. Then 235 people signed a petition, the zoning ordinance was suspended, and the Council repealed it rather than spend more public money fighting through a referendum. So congratulations. You delayed it. Now it is your turn to answer some questions.

Let’s begin with the Veterans Home, because it offers a particularly useful test of whether the people who delayed workforce housing understood the community in which they were doing it. California has spent more than $325 million building a new 285,000-square-foot, 240-bed skilled-nursing facility at the Yountville Veterans Home. The State found the money to build it. It even budgeted for more than a hundred additional employees to operate it. The problem now is finding and keeping enough people to staff those beds. The State knows how to finance buildings, and after years of planning and construction it is about to have some very good ones. What it does not have are enough people to operate them. CalVet’s own planning documents describe serious vacancies among the registered nurses, licensed vocational nurses, certified nursing assistants and other direct-care employees on whom the Home depends, and they identify the extraordinary cost of living around Yountville and the long commutes forced upon employees as obstacles to recruitment and retention. More than two hundred veterans have reportedly been waiting for skilled-nursing admission while staffing, rather than the physical number of beds, constrains how many people the Home can actually serve.

Nobody who signed the Commons petition created that staffing problem. It predates the petition, it has multiple causes, and California, not the Town of Yountville, is responsible for operating the Veterans Home. Wages matter, management matters, state hiring practices matter, working conditions matter and CalVet’s own employee-housing policies matter. But housing matters too, and this is where the petitioners now have something to explain. If you deliberately interrupt the most advanced effort to build deed-restricted workforce housing in a town where one of the largest employers is already telling you that the local cost of living makes it difficult to recruit workers, you have not caused the underlying problem, but you have certainly made one part of it much harder to solve. The question is whether the people who circulated and signed that petition understood this consequence before they decided Yountville needed to wait.

Consider the worker at the center of this story. An entry-level certified nursing assistant at the Veterans Home may earn somewhere in the low-to-mid $20s per hour, depending on classification, experience and differentials. That is an ordinary working wage in much of California and an impossible housing wage in Yountville. The person helping an elderly veteran out of bed in the morning may therefore have started her day in Fairfield, Vallejo, American Canyon, Vacaville, Santa Rosa or farther away, driven into Napa Valley, worked an exhausting shift and then driven home again. When the Home asks her to cover another shift because somebody else is missing, the calculation includes not only eight more hours of work but the commute waiting at the other end. When another young nursing assistant considers whether to take the job in the first place, the inability to live anywhere nearby is not an ideological question about California housing policy. It is a practical reason to work somewhere else.

The absurdity is that Yountville is unusually well equipped to do something modest about this. The Town owns seven acres at the former elementary school, roughly a fifteen-minute walk from the Veterans Home. Yountville voters approved Measure S in 2018 with 72 percent support, creating a dedicated source of revenue for affordable and workforce housing that is paid substantially by hotel visitors rather than Yountville homeowners. The Town then spent years planning the Commons on land it already controlled, with the intention of keeping the property in public ownership and the housing permanently deed restricted. The plan was phased, which meant Yountville did not have to build 126 homes at once or commit itself irrevocably to every building shown on a conceptual plan. It could begin with roughly 30 to 40 homes, see what they actually cost, learn from what it built and decide what should follow.

Those first homes would not have belonged to the Veterans Home, and that is important. The Commons was never a CalVet employee-housing project. It was intended for the larger workforce that makes Yountville function: restaurant workers, hotel employees, Town staff, teachers, caregivers, young professionals and other people whose incomes increasingly exclude them from the community where they work. A nurse or nursing assistant at the Veterans Home would simply have been among the people for whom such housing might make sense. Thirty or forty homes would not solve the Veterans Home staffing shortage, just as they would not solve the labor problems of every hotel and restaurant in town. They would do something much less grandiose and much more useful: allow several dozen working households to live in Yountville who otherwise probably could not.

This is where the politics surrounding the Commons have become remarkably slippery. Almost nobody in Yountville says they oppose workforce housing. Instead, we hear that people support workforce housing but not this much, not this design, not at this cost, not under this management structure, perhaps not on this site, and certainly not until some additional alternative has been explored. Any one of those objections can be reasonable. Collect enough of them, however, without ever specifying what would be acceptable, and “I support workforce housing” becomes a position requiring no housing at all. That is why the petition changed more than the timetable for one zoning ordinance. It shifted responsibility to the people who demanded the delay to tell the rest of Yountville what they thought the delay was supposed to accomplish.

The Veterans Home gives us an excellent place to begin asking. If 126 homes were too many, would the petitioners support the first 30 or 40? If the architecture was wrong, what should change about it? If the eventual cost projections for the entire Commons were too high, why not competitively price the first phase and find out what it actually costs? If public ownership was the problem, should Yountville sell land purchased with public money to a private developer instead? And if the answer is that caregivers at the Veterans Home should not be part of Yountville’s housing concern because CalVet has 615 acres of its own, then that proposition deserves to be stated clearly and examined on its merits rather than offered as a convenient way to stop talking about the seven acres Yountville already owns.

We will examine those 615 acres in the next essay, because they have become one of the strangest abstractions in the Commons debate. From Washington Street they can sound like an enormous reservoir of vacant state land upon which California could simply build hundreds of apartments if Sacramento would get around to it. The reality described in CalVet’s own master planning is considerably more complicated: a 142-year-old medical and residential campus containing more than one hundred buildings, historic resources, aging utilities, steep terrain, major health-care operations and enormous deferred infrastructure and capital needs. CalVet does contemplate additional employee housing, and it should build it. The State should renovate usable cottages, create new workforce housing where appropriate and recognize that an institution employing hundreds of people in one of California’s most expensive communities has a responsibility to participate in solving its own housing problem. None of that explains why Yountville should postpone doing the same thing on its own land.

In fact, the insistence that the Veterans Home solve this by itself represents a curious reversal in the relationship between two communities that have occupied the same small piece of Napa Valley for nearly a century and a half. The Veterans Home predates modern Yountville and for generations has been part of its civic and economic life, providing employment, public investment and a population that is not incidental to the town but physically and politically part of it. Civilian Yountville, meanwhile, has become one of America’s great luxury destinations, a place where hotel rooms can cost more for a night than many caregivers earn in several days and where the economic success generated by visitors has made ordinary residency increasingly difficult for ordinary workers. It is an odd moment to discover that the two communities have nothing to do with one another, and that the people who care for veterans on one side of town should simply solve their housing problems somewhere else.

Perhaps that really is the position. Perhaps CalVet should house every employee it can, hotels should solve housing for hotel workers, restaurants should solve it for restaurant workers, and Yountville should accept that most of the people required to operate the community will live in Fairfield, Vallejo, Napa, American Canyon, Vacaville and beyond. There is a coherent, if bleak, version of that argument: Yountville is simply too valuable for much workforce housing, scarcity is an inevitable consequence of what the town has become, and commuting is the price workers pay for serving it. What is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain is that position simultaneously with the assertion that one strongly supports workforce housing. At some point support has to produce an address, a number of homes and a date when somebody gets a key.

That is why no further study is required to establish the basic facts before Yountville. We already know the Veterans Home has staffing vacancies. We know CalVet considers local housing costs and commuting relevant to recruitment. We know a worker earning roughly $20-something an hour cannot compete in Yountville’s private rental market. We know the Town owns seven acres. We know Yountville voters created a dedicated housing revenue stream, largely paid by visitors. We know the Commons went through more than two years of public planning and more than twenty public meetings. We know it was designed to be phased rather than constructed all at once, and we know the petition did not produce a competing housing plan. Another consultant can produce another report, another committee can hold another workshop and another election can generate another round of promises about how deeply everyone cares about workforce housing, but none of those exercises will alter those facts.

Nor does acknowledging them require Yountville to resurrect every element of the Commons exactly as it stood on the day the petition was filed. The buildings can change. The unit mix can change. Financing can change. Costs can be tested. The first phase can remain modest while the Town learns what works. There is nothing sacred about a particular drawing produced during a two-year planning process, but there should be something valuable about the two years of knowledge contained in it. Delay becomes particularly hard to defend when it is used not to make identifiable changes but to restart questions that have already been asked and answered until the political conditions for building anything disappear.

The Veterans Home is therefore not being dragged into this argument because Yountville owes California a solution to its staffing shortage. It is here because the Home makes visible what the phrase “workforce housing” can otherwise conceal. Somewhere behind every unit Yountville delays is a person who still needs to live somewhere: a nursing assistant beginning a dawn shift, a cook closing a restaurant at midnight, a hotel employee changing rooms for visitors who can afford Yountville for a weekend but whose housekeeper cannot afford it for a month. Housing policy decides how far away those people live, how much of their lives they spend commuting and, eventually, whether they continue working here at all. Yountville cannot house everyone, but on seven acres it already owns, using money visitors are already providing, it can certainly house some of them.

For two years, the people behind the Commons had to explain what they wanted to build. After 235 signatures delayed that work, the people who stopped its progress inherit some of that burden. The first question is not whether they caused the Veterans Home’s staffing problems; they did not. It is whether, knowing those problems exist, knowing housing is part of them, knowing Yountville possesses both land and dedicated housing revenue, and knowing a first phase of deed-restricted homes was moving toward implementation, they believe delaying those homes made anything better. If they do, the rest of Yountville deserves to hear how. If they don’t, then perhaps the next conversation should finally move beyond what they oppose and toward the much harder question that will follow this series all the way to November: what, exactly, are they prepared to build instead?

.

The filing period is over. Six people want three of the five seats that will govern Yountville. The election is not really about the Commons. It is about whether Yountville remains a town, or finishes its conversion into a luxury resort whose workers, caregivers and next generation are expected to live somewhere else.

The filing period closed Friday, and Yountville finally has its cast. Mayor Marjorie Mohler is running for reelection against Joe Tagliaboschi. For two Town Council seats, Robin McKee and Hillery Bolt Trippe are running to keep theirs, while Jessi Bugden and Matthew Chrzanowski are asking voters to put them there for the first time. That means three of five votes on the governing body are in play at once. In most places, that would be the beginning of a municipal campaign. In Yountville, it is the first chance the entire town has had to answer the question that has been hiding underneath a year of arguments about housing, budgets, petitions, public records, resignations and civility: who is actually going to control the future of this place?

The temptation will be to describe this as an election about the Commons, because the Commons supplied the drawings, the dollar figures and the public meetings around which the political factions formed. That would be too easy. The Commons was the occasion. The deeper argument was already waiting for it. Yountville is an extraordinarily valuable little piece of California in which agricultural preservation has successfully prevented suburban expansion, tourism has successfully generated enormous wealth, housing has consequently become extraordinarily scarce, and the people needed to operate the place overwhelmingly live somewhere else. The Town acquired seven acres in its center and proposed using a portion of them to create permanently deed-restricted workforce housing under public control. For the first time in the town’s history, Yountville was not merely regulating what private owners wanted to build. It was deciding what the public itself needed to own.

That is when the fight became ferocious.

Follow the Power, Not the $91 Million

The political genius of the opposition was to turn a long-range buildout estimate into a bill arriving tomorrow morning. Councilmembers were being asked to understand both the ultimate opportunity presented by seven acres of public land and the first practical phase that could actually be financed and built. Those distinctions disappeared almost immediately. The number $91 million became “the project,” the project became an imminent financial catastrophe, and every question about the future of Yountville became a referendum on whether Town Hall could be trusted with money.

There were legitimate cost questions. There always are when government proposes something ambitious. But the fiscal outrage has always contained a strange omission: Yountville voters had already decided where a substantial portion of the money was supposed to come from. In 2018, nearly three-quarters of them approved Measure S, a one-percent tax on hotel guests dedicated to affordable and workforce housing. The people paying that tax are principally the visitors consuming Yountville’s luxury economy, not the local homeowners whose property values have soared along with it. The basic public bargain was unusually elegant. Tourism helped create the housing pressure; visitors would contribute to easing it. The Town would use that money not to subsidize another luxury development but to preserve land and housing for the people who actually work here.

Once you understand that, the argument over the Commons looks less like an argument about the municipal purse and more like an argument about municipal power. Yountville already owned the land. Voters had already created a dedicated revenue stream for affordable and workforce housing. The Town was not simply proposing to spend that money and watch it disappear. It was trying to convert public revenue into a permanent public asset: land, housing and long-term affordability that would still belong to Yountville after the first financing package was forgotten. In Napa Valley, where land and real estate have been extraordinary engines of wealth for generations, that should have been the obvious aha moment. The Town Council was trying to do what every successful property owner in the valley understands instinctively: use capital to acquire and improve an asset that becomes more valuable over time.

That changes the entire frame. Workforce housing was not merely a social expense. It could be public infrastructure and public wealth at the same time; a place for workers to live, a hedge against future housing costs, and an intergenerational asset created with money voters had specifically entrusted to the Town for that purpose. For once, Yountville was not waiting for a hotel owner, restaurant operator or private developer to decide what use produced the best return. It was in a position to decide for itself what kind of return mattered which is the definition of good governance.

And that is an important change in who gets to decide.

Gary Jabara Is on the Ballot. His Name Just Isn’t Printed There.

Gary Jabara’s name does not appear among the six candidates, which should not prevent anyone from noticing how much of this election now revolves around his influence. He has become by far the most consequential private commercial landowner in commercial Yountville, controlling hundreds of hotel rooms, restaurants and major properties, including two historic landmarks that define the physical identity of the town. He became one of the loudest private critics of the Commons. He participated in the political campaign against the Town’s approach. Then, just before an election determining three of the five seats on the Council, he bought the Yountville Sun, the town’s local online newspaper.

None of that proves that Jabara controls a slate of candidates, and the Moon should not pretend proof exists where it does not. But neither should Yountville behave like a village in a fairy tale where everyone politely agrees not to notice that the man buying much of the commercial center has also bought the newspaper while becoming deeply involved in the politics determining what his property and the public land beside his holdings will become. If this were happening in Chicago, Boston or San Francisco, nobody would regard the ownership structure as impolite conversation. They would call it power.

Gary Jabara made his fortune in wireless infrastructure and then spent hundreds of millions buying commercial real estate. Good for him. But Yountville is entitled to ask a different question now: what beautiful civic thing has he ever built here that did not also belong on his balance sheet? His model is private ownership, private return and increasingly private influence over public decisions. That is not stewardship simply because somebody pours free wine while explaining it.

Which brings us back to Brad Raulston. What exactly did Raulston do to so enrage Jabara that, months after his departure, the newspaper Jabara now owns is still excavating a six-month severance agreement as though Woodward and Bernstein had finally reached Yountville? Raulston’s real offense may have been considerably less cinematic: he helped lead a Town government that was acquiring public land, using voter-approved hotel taxes to create permanent public assets, and asserting that Yountville’s future did not have to be dictated by whoever could extract the highest private return from it.

Maybe that has nothing to do with Jabara’s interest in the story. But somebody ought to ask.

A newspaper does not have to lie to protect its owner. Sometimes it only has to be incurious.

That is what elections are for.

The Two With a Record of Building

Mayor Marjorie Mohler and Councilmember Robin McKee enter the campaign with something none of the rhetoric can erase: a public record of trying to use government to create mandated workforce housing. They did not merely agree that housing was important. They voted through the hard parts: land acquisition, planning, zoning, financing assumptions, design and public conversations. Because eventually public policy has to leave the council chambers and become a physical thing.

Mohler’s great political weakness may also be one of her strongest governing qualities. She is not a natural salesman. She is an analyst, a retired scientist who spent a professional career at places including Genentech, and she tends to believe that if the public is given enough facts it will eventually arrive at the same conclusions she has reached after studying them. Politics does not always reward that faith. But Yountville does not need a mayor who can merely identify the mood of the room. It needs one capable of understanding municipal finance, housing law, state mandates, public infrastructure, regional government and the implications of decisions that will outlive everyone currently sitting at the dais.

McKee’s record is less technocratic and more rooted in the peculiar economy Yountville actually has. She knows hospitality, has served the town through appointed and elected roles, and supported the effort to create workforce housing even while questioning costs and details. That distinction matters. The test of a councilmember is not whether he or she can identify flaws in a proposal; nearly anyone can do that. The test is whether flaws become reasons to improve something or excuses to make sure nothing happens.

Mohler and McKee do not need immunity from the Commons “mistakes” because the central mistake was not theirs. The Council insisted that the full cost picture be presented in public before it had even begun the harder work of testing assumptions, separating the ultimate buildout from a viable first phase, trimming scope and deciding what was actually worth building. That is what responsible public process is supposed to look like. Instead, the largest number was seized on as though it were a construction contract, the petition arrived before the Council had a chance to interrogate the proposal, and the zoning was ultimately repealed before that process could mature. Ambitious public projects get slowed, challenged, redesigned and phased all the time. Welcome to the California housing crisis. The lucky part for Yountville residents is that the story is not over. The land is still public, the funding through Measure S still exists, the state mandate still needs to be satisfied, and this election gives voters the chance to decide how the story ends.

Hillery Trippe: The Outlier

Hillery Trippe is the easiest candidate to understand because she has spent the last year making herself the outlier. She opposed the Commons when the Council voted 4–1 to move it forward, then effectively refused to accept the loss. Since then she has carried the arguments of commercial and hospitality interests into the chamber wrapped in the respectable language of “process,” “more information” and “fiscal responsibility.”

Her alternative has remained wonderfully weightless. The Commons should cost less. A private developer should somehow build it. There should be more study. Somebody else should have a better idea. That is not a housing plan; it is a wish list with no land, no developer, no financing, no affordability covenant and no date when anybody actually gets a key.

The more important issue for Yountville residents is that Trippe lost the policy argument inside the public debate of the Council and then helped fight it outside the Chamber until the policy was stopped. Fine. Politics permits that. But own it. Do not spend the campaign pretending you were merely the lone adult asking prudent questions while other people mysteriously organized themselves around exactly the outcome you wanted. If you helped stop the Town’s housing strategy, tell voters what you intend to replace it with.

Trippe has become the Council’s clearest carrier of a larger idea that deserves to be dragged into daylight this election: prosperity is not sovereignty. Yountville’s hotel owners, restaurateurs and major commercial landlords create enormous value and deserve a strong voice in the town. They do not get extra votes because their tax bills have more zeros. Yet Trippe repeatedly behaves as though the concerns of those interests deserve another round of litigation after the elected Council has already made its decision.

She seems to approach the dais less like one of five people hired to govern than like the lawyer for a disappointed minority shareholder. Every vote can be appealed. Every answer invites another interrogatory. Every defeat apparently comes with a motion for reconsideration.

Eventually a councilmember has to do something considerably harder than object. She has to govern.

Joe Tagliaboschi: The Old Grievance Candidate?

Joe Tagliaboschi deserves more respect than caricature. He served in the Navy. He spent years working for Yountville, eventually as Public Works Director. He knows the town’s pipes, streets and physical systems in a way few candidates ever will. He was appointed to the Council once and has repeatedly tried to win a seat again in his own right. That is a substantial public biography.

But a long history with Town Hall can produce something besides expertise. Tagliaboschi increasingly sounds like a former employee who has an argument with the institution he once served. His recent public comments have concentrated on the failures of present leadership and on delaying important decisions, including the selection of a new town manager, until after an election in which he himself hopes to replace the mayor. There has long been talk in town that he resented not becoming town manager himself. Unless evidence establishes that, it should remain a question rather than an accusation. What voters can see without rumor is a candidate whose political identity appears increasingly defined by dissatisfaction with the people now running the organization where he once worked. Did I mention that he was endorsed publicly by Gary Jabara?

For a Navy veteran running for mayor of the town that contains the largest state Veterans Home in the country, the revealing question is not whether Joe Tagliaboschi knows how to maintain public infrastructure. He does. The harder question is whether he knows how to create anything new. Keeping streets, pipes and public works functioning is important; governing through a housing crisis requires imagination, coalition-building and the ability to turn competing interests into something real. Tagliaboschi’s instinct too often seems to be the opposite: preserve what exists, object to what is proposed, and then hand the difficult part to some hypothetical private developer, some future state program, some other agency, some cheaper project that has no site, no financing, no timetable and, conveniently, no one actually responsible for producing it. That is not a plan. It is civic outsourcing by wishful thinking. Yountville does not need a mayor whose answer to every hard problem is that somebody who has not yet appeared will eventually solve it. It needs one who can assemble the people already here and make something happen.

Jessi Bugden: From Nowhere to the Ballot

Jessi Bugden is perhaps the clearest example of how abruptly the political terrain has changed in Yountville. Until the Commons fight, she had little visible public footprint in Yountville government mostly because she has lived here for just a few months. Suddenly she became the organizer associated with the 235-signature petition that suspended the Commons zoning. Her husband, Eric Appel, appeared publicly in the same opposition movement, criticizing the Town’s financial approach alongside Gary Jabara. A few months later Bugden is running for Council. What a coincidence!

Bugden and Appel also held their wedding at The Estate Yountville, Jabara’s hotel property. That fact alone proves nothing about politics. People get married at hotels. But this is a town of fewer than three thousand people, not Manhattan, and the instinct to pretend relationships do not exist because acknowledging them might appear impolite is one of the ways small-town power escapes examination. Bugden was part of the political movement Jabara strongly supported. Her husband spoke publicly in the same cause. Now she wants one of five governing votes. What has she created in her past life that somehow will convince the voters of Yountville to put their trust into this new arrival? Voters are allowed to ask who encouraged her candidacy, whose advice she seeks, where she differs from Jabara and what she intends to build now that she has demonstrated she can help stop something.

That last question is the important one. The petition did not prove that Yountville rejected the Commons. It proved that 235 voters, roughly ten percent of the electorate, wanted the ordinance stopped unless the broader electorate approved it. The broader electorate never got that opportunity because the Council repealed the ordinance. Bugden’s campaign therefore begins with a genuine political accomplishment but an incomplete governing record. She helped produce “no.” A council seat in Yountville requires an answer to what comes after it.

Matthew Chrzanowski: Who?

Then there is Matthew Chrzanowski. Perhaps he will turn out to be thoughtful, independent and exactly the sort of younger candidate Yountville needs. At the moment, however, he is the political equivalent of an unopened envelope. No Council record. No commission record that has surfaced. No notable letters. No sustained public participation in the disputes that have consumed the town. No visible political history from which voters can infer why he has suddenly concluded that he should become twenty percent of Yountville’s governing body.

That vacuum naturally produces suspicion in a town where political alliances form quickly. Is Chrzanowski another independent citizen who simply decided this was his moment? Was he encouraged to run by people hoping to change the Council majority? Does he have relationships with Jabara or the Commons opposition that have not yet become public? Those are questions, not conclusions. The cleanest way to answer them is for Chrzanowski to introduce himself with some specificity. Who asked him to run? What does he think should happen at the school site? What is his position on Measure S, workforce housing, the Veterans Home staffing problem, the mobile-home parks, public ownership and the role of the Sun’s owner in town politics? If he is nobody’s candidate but his own, saying so should be easy.

The Election Is Not About the Commons

This is the fact everyone should keep in mind for the next ninety days. The Commons is not on the ballot. Its old zoning is gone. Its particular design can change. Its cost can change. Its phasing can change. The next Council can build something smaller, smarter and less expensive.

What cannot change is the underlying choice: what kind of town will Yountville be?

Yountville can continue becoming a place whose principal economic purpose is to receive wealthy visitors and protect expensive residential assets while nearly everyone who works here drives in from somewhere else. There is no law against that. It may even be the most profitable future available. The school is already gone. Fewer young families can afford to replace the ones who once sent children there. Restaurant workers can commute. Hotel workers can commute. Town employees can commute. Nurses can commute. Who really cares? The Veterans Home can be told to solve its staffing problem on its own state property. Mobile-home residents can be told that rising costs are simply the price of remaining in a luxury town. More luxury residences can produce more wealthy part-time residents who will enjoy Yountville intensely during the weeks they are here.

And if that is the future people want, they should at least have the courage to say so out loud. Some already have.

And naturally, all those commuters and visitors will require more parking.

Taken far enough, Yountville becomes a cruise ship permanently moored among the vineyards: beautiful decks, superb restaurants, expensive cabins, immaculate landscaping, and an enormous crew that arrives every morning to make the experience possible before going home somewhere else at night. The passengers may love the ship deeply. They may spend generously while aboard. But nobody mistakes a cruise ship for a town.

The alternative is not to pave the vineyards, destroy Yountville’s character or resurrect every detail of the Commons. It is to recognize that preservation must include people as well as buildings and landscapes. The Veterans Home needs enough nearby caregivers to make full use of the extraordinary facilities California is building for veterans. Read the studies for yourself. Yountville has become very good at commissioning studies, requesting more studies, and then behaving as though the existence of another unanswered question is proof that nothing can yet be done. There is at least one regular at public meetings who seems to believe the cure for every housing decision is another study. If she spent as much time reading the Town’s Housing Element as asking the Council to commission the next one, she might have to invent a new reason for delay. Mobile-home residents need a reasonable chance to remain part of the community they already inhabit. Hospitality workers and public employees need at least some path from commuter to resident. Younger people need a foothold from which they might eventually become the older people arguing about Yountville thirty years from now. A town that successfully preserves every historic structure and every agricultural view while losing the capacity to replenish its citizenry has preserved a stage set.

The Seventh Candidate

This is why Gary Jabara may be the most important person in the election who is not running.

The question is not whether he has the legal right to buy hotels, restaurants, historic properties or a newspaper. He does. The question is what happens when those economic interests begin translating themselves into political influence over the five people who control public policy. If Jabara wants a different future for Yountville than the one Mohler and McKee have been pursuing, he should say what it is. More privately developed housing? Fine. Where, how much, and how long is it affordable? More luxury residential development? Say so. More parking? Explain why. Employee housing controlled by employers? Explain what happens when the worker changes jobs. Veterans Home housing? Explain why the State’s solution to one employer’s staffing needs should excuse the civilian town from housing the rest of its workforce.

The same questions belong to Trippe, Tagliaboschi, Bugden and Chrzanowski. If their positions happen to coincide with Jabara’s, that does not make them puppets. But independence cannot consist merely of denying influence. It becomes visible when a candidate tells a powerful ally no.

Maybe Gary Jabara has a vision for Yountville. So far, we mostly know what he didn’t want. He did not want the Town building publicly controlled workforce housing on public land. He did not want Yountville using its own housing money to create an asset that would outlive the next development cycle. Which raises an awkward question for the people who make his hotels, restaurants and resorts work: do his employees understand how little room there seems to be for them in the Yountville he is helping shape once their shift ends? And do his guests understand that the luxury experience they are buying depends on a workforce that is increasingly expected to arrive from somewhere else, serve the town beautifully, and then disappear again at night? Maybe that is the plan. Maybe it isn’t. But if you own a large piece of Yountville’s economic engine and now own the newspaper that covers its politics, “I didn’t like the Commons” is no longer much of a civic vision. It is time to tell the town what you do want.

The answer will tell voters more than ten glossy mailers.

Everyone Gets the Same Questions

This is the beginning of the election season, not the end of the argument. In October, the Yountville Moon will invite all six candidates to sit down individually for recorded, on-the-record interviews. They will not be asked for campaign slogans or three-minute biographies. They will be asked what they intend to do with the former school, how many workforce homes Yountville should actually create, what Measure S should pay for, what protections mobile-home residents deserve, how the town’s housing decisions affect staffing at the Veterans Home, and where they believe the line belongs between commercial influence and public authority.

The same basic questions will go to everyone. There will be follow-ups. The interviews will be published so readers can judge the answers rather than rely on somebody else’s characterization of them. Candidates who have records will have to explain those records. Candidates who helped stop things will have to explain what they would build instead. Candidates who have arrived with almost no public record will have an opportunity to create one. And every candidate will get a very simple test of independence: tell Yountville something important on which you disagree with Gary Jabara.

By October, nobody should be able to say they were surprised by the questions. Between now and then, the Moon intends to spend the election season establishing the facts those questions are built on. Then the candidates can answer them in their own words, on the record, with the voters listening.

Wake Up, Yountville

By the time those interviews begin, Yountville should understand what is actually being decided. For the last year, its political factions have been encouraged to stare at separate pieces of the same problem. Veterans Home residents worry about care. Mobile-home residents worry about fees. Homeowners worry about property values and neighborhood change. Hospitality businesses worry about employees and costs. Workers worry about commuting. Older residents worry about losing the Yountville they remember. Younger people mostly disappear from the conversation because few can afford to get into it.

The easiest way to control a town like this is to keep those groups convinced that their interests are separate.

They are not.

A town with enough permanently affordable housing to help retain a Veterans Home nurse is also a town with a better chance of retaining a restaurant manager, public employee or young family. A government willing to protect mobile-home residents from displacement is expressing the same basic belief as a government willing to preserve deed-restricted workforce housing: that not every square foot of Yountville has to migrate eventually toward the person capable of paying the highest price for it. A town willing to keep public land public is saying that some assets should be measured by what they make possible rather than what they would fetch.

Those are choices about values, but they are also choices about power.

And now there are six people asking to exercise that power.

Mohler and McKee have records voters can inspect. Trippe has a record that deserves much closer examination. Tagliaboschi has decades of history with Town Hall and an increasingly adversarial posture toward its present leadership. Bugden went from political obscurity to organizing the petition that helped halt the Town’s housing strategy and then directly onto the ballot. Chrzanowski has arrived almost entirely undefined. Over all of it hangs the influence of a man who owns more of Yountville’s commercial center than anyone else, opposed the Town’s direction, and now owns the newspaper through which many residents will learn about the election.

That is not a conspiracy theory. It is the field.

“Yountville Is Not for Sale” is not a declaration the Moon gets to make for the town, and it cannot mean that private enterprise is unwelcome or that nothing should ever change. The phrase asks something much more fundamental: who gets to decide what Yountville is for? Is this principally a luxury destination whose highest civic duty is protecting the environment in which visitors and increasingly wealthy property owners enjoy themselves, while the workforce lives elsewhere? Or is it still a town, a place with enough room for veterans and caregivers, owners and renters, retirees and workers, people who arrived forty years ago and people who might arrive next year?

For months, a small number of people have behaved as though that question had already been answered. It has not. Three of Yountville’s five governing seats are now on the ballot. For the first time since this fight began, the whole town gets to decide.

Disclosure: The author served approximately two years as Owner’s Design Consultant on the Yountville Commons project, a scope now complete.

Here is how a magic trick works. The magician gets you to watch his right hand, waving, snapping, pointing, while his left hand does the trick. The waving hand has a name: misdirection. The waving hand exists for one reason, so you never look at the hand that matters.

Yountville is watching a magic trick right now. The trick runs every week, and the town’s only newspaper is performing it.

Start with who owns that newspaper, because ownership explains everything that follows. The Yountville Sun was purchased this spring by Gary Jabara. Jabara owns a hotel here. Jabara has been the loudest opponent of the Commons, the project seventy-two percent of Yountville voters agreed to fund back in 2018. Jabara is not registered to vote in this town. And Jabara bought the paper three months before an election that will decide who is mayor and who holds two of the five council seats.

An election is coming, and the man with the most to gain from that election now owns the only printing press in town. Hold onto that fact. Jabara’s ownership is the left hand. Everything else you are about to read is the right hand, waving.

The waving hand, week by week

One week, the villain is Brad Raulston, the town manager who resigned this spring to care for his wife after a car accident. The Sun printed Raulston’s severance payment down to the penny, $150,380.96, and presented that number like evidence of a crime. The Sun never told you the ordinary truth about the payment, so here is that truth, explained slowly, because the truth matters.

The document Raulston signed is called, in the Sun’s own reporting, a “resignation agreement and release of claims.” Those last three words, release of claims, are the whole answer. A release of claims means the departing employee promises, in writing, forever, never to sue the town for anything. Towns pay money for that promise. Every city in California pays for that promise, because a signed promise is cheap and a lawsuit is not. This year alone, St. Helena paid its departing city manager about $457,000. Calistoga’s former city manager collected over half a million dollars. Yountville paid the smallest amount in the whole valley, to the only manager who left voluntarily.

That is the “scandal.” Any lawyer in California would confirm every word of the last paragraph in a thirty-second phone call. The Sun has now run two stories and a published letter about this severance, and in all that ink, the Sun never once called a lawyer to ask. Ask yourself why a newspaper wouldn’t want its own question answered.

The next week, the villain is the council itself. Residents appeared at the August 4 council meeting demanding answers about that same severance payment. Where did those residents get their alarm? From the Sun’s July 30 story. Who reported their alarm as fresh news two days later? The Sun, on August 6, citing itself as the source: “as reported in the Sun on July 30.” Read that cycle again, slowly. The newspaper strikes the match. The newspaper reports the fire. The newspaper sells you coverage of the smoke. Every week a new villain on the front page. Every week, the same owner behind the front page.

The councilmember who played along

Now to that August 4 meeting, and to Councilmember Hillery Trippe, because what Trippe did there deserves to be understood step by step.

Trippe is an attorney, as Trippe frequently reminds this town. Keep her legal training in mind through what follows, because it means she cannot claim she didn’t know what she was doing.

Separation agreements like Raulston’s are discussed by the council in closed session, the private meetings the law allows for personnel and legal matters. Trippe sits in those closed sessions. Trippe is a member of the council that made this agreement. And the state’s open meeting law, the Brown Act, forbids everyone in those sessions, Trippe included, from revealing what was discussed there.

Now watch what Trippe did with all that knowledge. She turned to Town Attorney Gary Bell, on camera, and demanded Bell explain why the severance was paid.

Trippe already knew why the severance was paid. She was in the room where the agreement was made.

Trippe also knew, as an attorney, that the Brown Act forbids Bell from answering her question in public.

So Trippe’s question was never a question. It was a trap, set for the cameras. Bell did his job, the same job Bell has done well for this town before, including being the first town official to push back on Gary Jabara’s threats in plain legal terms. Bell protected the town, protected a former employee’s privacy, and declined to answer, exactly as the law requires him to. And the video shows exactly what Trippe’s trap was built to produce: the town’s own lawyer, refusing to explain, looking to the untrained eye like a man hiding something. Bell was not hiding anything. Bell was following the law. Trippe knew that better than anyone else in the chamber, because Trippe is the one with the law degree.

One more detail completes the picture of that afternoon. Minutes before setting her trap, Trippe lectured her council colleagues from the official handbook, reminding them that members must not question one another’s motives. “We need to walk the talk,” Trippe said. Then Trippe stood up the town’s attorney in front of the cameras to suggest her own council was concealing wrongdoing, wrongdoing that Trippe personally knows does not exist, because Trippe was in the room.

Remember one last fact about Trippe. She cast the lone council vote against her colleagues on the Commons, and she organized against the project outside the public process. There is a word for reading the handbook aloud and then doing the opposite ten minutes later. Readers can supply that word themselves.

The rest of the cast

The letter the Sun published on August 6 came from resident Jill Turner. Turner’s letter asks whether Raulston “really quit,” and one sentence later, Turner’s letter refers to “this untruth.” Stop and notice what happened between those two sentences. No untruth has been demonstrated by anyone, anywhere. A question went in. An accusation came out. The Sun printed Turner’s letter directly beneath the Sun’s own article, and asked Turner no follow-up questions.

At the same August 4 podium stood Joe Tagliaboschi, echoing Turner’s letter and asking the council to pause its search for a new town manager. Remember Tagliaboschi’s request, because Tagliaboschi has since declared he is running for mayor. Follow the logic of what Tagliaboschi asked for. He asked the council to leave the town’s top administrative job empty until after the election. Tagliaboschi is a candidate in that election. Tagliaboschi was asking the council to hold the chair open for whoever wins, and Tagliaboschi intends to be whoever wins.

And Eric Appel, who led the petition that stopped the Commons, told the council that his petition was “democracy in its most direct form.” Here is the civics lesson the Sun will not print. A petition is not a vote. Under California law, Appel’s 235 signatures, about ten percent of the town’s voters, did exactly one thing: paused the project and forced the council to choose, either repeal the zoning or hold a town-wide election and let all the voters decide. That town-wide election has never happened. In the five months since the petition, Appel’s side has never once asked for that election. Think about what that silence means. If Appel’s side truly believed most of Yountville stood with them, a town-wide vote would be their first demand, not their last. The pause was the prize.

Even Appel admitted, on the record at the August 4 meeting, that the Commons had “good aspects” worth reviving. Which aspects? Appel has never said.

Your town, your move

Now step back and look at what this cast has actually built. Count the pauses. They paused the Commons, the project seventy-two percent of you voted to fund. Now they want to pause the search for a town manager, so the town sits leaderless through the election one of them is running in. Pause the housing. Pause the hiring. Pause the town. And through every pause, the same soundtrack plays: civility, healing, getting back to basics, poured generously at the wine receptions while the newspaper that manufactures the division reports on the division with a straight face.

So ask the question that ends the trick. In all these months of pausing and preaching, what has any of them contributed? Not one idea for the land. Not one plan for the housing. Not one proposal for the seniors, the workers, the parks, the budget, or a single street in this town. Not one day’s honest work toward the well-being of Yountville. Stopping things is not service. Complaining is not a plan. And civility from the people who profit from the chaos is not civility. It is anesthesia.

H.L. Mencken wrote that democracy is the theory that the people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. Dear Yountville voter: in ninety days you will get democracy, good and hard. The filing deadline is this week. The names will be printed in a newspaper owned by Gary Jabara. Read every name and ask one question: what has this person ever proposed for Yountville? If the answer is nothing, you know what the candidacy is. It is one more pause, dressed up as a plan.

The seventy-two percent were the town’s voice once. Be it again. Show up, ask for the work, and vote for the people who have done some. Because if you sleep through this one, you will get exactly the government this cast has planned for you.

And you will deserve it.

Disclosure: The author served approximately two years as Owner’s Design Consultant on the Yountville Commons project, a scope now complete.

The Puff Piece

On July 23 the Yountville Sun broke the biggest local story of the year, which was who owns the Yountville Sun. It handled the scoop the way any hard-nosed newsroom would. It assigned the story to an employee of the new owner, who interviewed the new owner about his feelings.

We learned that he has been visiting the valley for 40 years. We learned that he considers himself a steward. We learned that when The Estate Yountville landed on his desk he had no idea it was, in his words, essentially half the town, which is the real estate equivalent of accidentally adopting a horse. We learned that he had always admired the Sun as a voice of reason, and we learned precisely when the voice had been most reasonable, which was during the debate over the Commons, the workforce housing he spent last winter working to stop.

We did not learn the price. We did not learn the seller. We did not learn who can fire the editor. Under a heading assuring readers that editorial independence remains, the paper reported the owner’s assurance that it does. This is like a heading that says “The Fox Comments on Henhouse Security.”

When Bezos bought the Post, the Post’s own reporters covered the sale as news and spent the next decade publicly wrestling with what it meant. When Ellison took CBS, half the country’s media writers stood watch. That is the custom when a rich man buys an instrument that tells a community what is true. Yountville got a feature about stewardship, and the town’s reaction so far has been somewhere between a shrug and a thank-you note.

Washington can watch Bezos because Washington has other newspapers. The Sun is the only newspaper Yountville has.

The Inventory

Step back and count what one man now holds in a nine-block town of 2,900 people.

The largest commercial property, 22 acres in the center, bought for a figure reported near $300 million. The second property down the street. And as of July, the newspaper, the thing that decides which of the town’s arguments the town gets to hear.

Now count what is in play in the next 14 weeks. A mayor’s seat and two council seats, three of five, on the November 3 ballot. The town manager’s office, vacant since spring, the job that runs the planning department and controls what the council sees before it votes. And already, on the very day the Sun announced its owner, its letters page carried an argument that the manager hire should wait for the next council. A delay like that has value only to someone expecting the next council to be different from this one.

None of this is a crime. All of it is a pattern, and the pattern has a name. It is what acquiring a town looks like when the town is small enough to acquire.

The Empty Chair Where the Ideas Go

Here is the part that should bother you more than the money.

Be precise about what happened, because the precision is the story. He is not against housing. Nobody with 22 acres of hotels objects to construction as a concept. What was overturned was zoning, adopted by the elected council, that would have allowed more than 100 workforce housing units, deed-restricted, on public land, paid for by a tax his guests remit. It was suspended by a petition carrying the signatures of barely 10 percent of the town’s registered voters, and no election was ever held. Understand what that project would have cost him. Nothing. Not a dollar, not a foot of his property, not a room off his inventory. The town had the land, the money, and the votes, and the project could have been built without asking him for anything at all. That is the zoning he spent three months helping to overturn.

And in all those months, through the records requests, the outside counsel, the council appearances, and the letters calling the elected government hubristic and amateur, neither he nor anyone speaking for him has offered one single idea for housing the workforce. Not a site. Not a unit count. Not a dollar. Not a plan. Months of lawyers and public record requests, and the sum total of the counteroffer is nothing.

Almost nothing. His firm did submit one document. A drive time analysis, presented with two of the town’s other large operators, arguing that workforce housing was unnecessary because the workers can drive. Its own table counts 757 employees, of whom 39 live in Yountville. The other 718 commute from Napa, Vallejo, American Canyon, Fairfield, and points beyond, and the study presents this, with a yellow highlight, as the good news. So there is the one idea, the only one on file so far. Let the poor folk commute.

The Suck-Up

Which brings us to his plans for the newspaper, announced in the same profile. He would like a Veterans Spotlight, honoring the residents of the Veterans Home. He would like a Chef’s Corner, with recipes from the town’s kitchens.

Consider the nerve involved. The State of California reported, before this fight ever began, that the Veterans Home cannot fill nursing shifts because caregivers cannot afford to live within reach of it. The kitchens run the same way, on the 718 commuters counted in his own firm’s spreadsheet. The town was fixing it, with its own land, its own money, and a 72 percent voter mandate. He showed up and stopped it. It would have cost him nothing, no journalist has ever asked him why, and he has never offered a plan of his own. Now his first act as a publisher is to ask those same nurses and cooks for their stories and recipes. He would not give them a home in this town. But he might write a cute story about them in his newspaper.

It is a ham-fisted play and an old one. You do not have to house people you can feature. A spotlight is free. The recipes are free. The apartments were the expensive part, and the expensive part was postponed until after the election, and now comes the content.

The veterans, for the record, are roughly 540 residents of this town, a population more than twice the size of the petition that repealed zoning ordinance to create more workforce housing. Perhaps the Spotlight is pure generosity. Perhaps it is aimed at the one population in Yountville big enough to swing an election, launching 103 days before one. Readers can decide, once they know both facts, which is the reason this publication prints both facts.

LOL

The people of Washington did not simply trust Bezos. The people watching CBS do not simply trust Ellison. Those owners are at least media operators with reputations staked partly on the product. Yountville is being asked to extend more trust than that, on less evidence, to a hotel owner from Orange County who told his own paper that its value to him was its performance during his political fight.

The residents of this town are not being asked to hate anyone. They are being asked to stay awake for 14 weeks. Read the Sun, enjoy the recipes, and every time a story frames the election, ask the only two questions that matter. Who owns this? What does he want?

He has told you the second answer himself, by what he helped overturn and what he bought and what he has never once proposed. The land is still public. The money is still in the account. Three of five seats are on the ballot. Nomination papers close August 7. The 718 people in the spreadsheet cannot vote here. You can.

Next in this series: the Veterans Home itself. It is the oldest institution in Yountville, the largest, and the least understood by the people who live a few blocks from its gate, and the questions that matter, how many veterans live there, why its beds are going unfilled, and what this town owes the institution that built it, deserve more than a spotlight. Facts and Fantasy Around the Veterans Home, reported from the Home and the public record, arrives next week. ☾

• Brendan Kelly
  

Sources: Yountville Sun, July 23, 2026; Yountville Hospitality and Restaurant Workforce Drive Time Analysis, Boardwalk Investments Group; Veterans Home of California-Yountville Master Plan of 2022, CalVet.

Disclosure: The author served for approximately two years as Owner’s Design Consultant on the Yountville Commons project, a role that concluded before this publication began. He writes as a private citizen

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The Most For-Sale Town in Napa

A word about this series’ title, because the ironists in the audience have surely noticed. Yountville is for sale. It is the most for-sale town in Napa County. It is nine blocks of things for sale, and expensive ones. You can buy a tasting flight that costs what a tank of gas costs, a hotel night that costs what a mortgage payment costs, and a tasting menu that costs what the hotel night costs, and people fly across oceans to do all three in a weekend. And may God bless them! The town’s entire economy is the cheerful, unembarrassed conversion of beauty, food and wine into revenue. Nobody here is against commerce. Commerce built the sidewalks. Commerce, through Measure S, is supposed to build the workforce housing.

So the title is not a complaint that money has arrived in Yountville. That train left in the sixties and came back as the wine train. The title marks a different line, one every resort town knows about and hopes never to cross. A town can sell you dinner, a room, a bottle, an afternoon. What it cannot sell, or the moment it does it stops being a town, is the government. The wine list is for sale. The council is not. The hotel room is for sale. The zoning map is not. The distinction sounds obvious until you watch it blur in real time, which is what this series is documenting.

The Sun Also Rises

Speaking of things for sale, a happy announcement. The Yountville Sun is back.

This deserves a moment of appreciation, because small-town newspapers do not come back. They die, and everyone says something kind at the funeral about the fabric of community, and the racks stand empty outside the market forever after. The economics are famously terminal. Print advertising is gone, subscriptions cannot carry a staff, and a paper serving 2,900 residents is, as a business, a machine for losing money. Yet here is the Sun, risen, publishing, covering council meetings with a full-time government reporter, in a town of nine blocks. It is a miracle of the modern media economy, and the paper has so far shown a curious modesty about it. The most interesting business story in Yountville this year is the Sun’s own resurrection, who paid for it, and what a buyer expects from an asset that cannot pay for itself. Maybe someday they will report that story. Until they do, readers are left to apply the one rule of resort-town economics the Sun itself would endorse: nothing in Yountville is free, and somebody always picks up the check expecting something.

The Civics Lesson

Hold that thought. The town is going to need this next part by November.

Politics is the argument a community has with itself about what to do next. Not about who is nice, not about who was rude at a meeting, not about hurt feelings on a dais. About what to do. Should the town build housing on the land it owns, or should it not. Should the hotel tax voters approved go where voters sent it, or somewhere else. Those are policy questions, and the argument over them is what political speech is. The founders did not protect speech because they thought everyone would agree. They protected it because they knew everyone would not, and they wanted the fight to happen in the open, in front of the whole room, where every citizen could hear both sides and judge. That is why towns have council chambers. The chamber is the room where the argument is supposed to happen, on the record, in the minutes, on the video archive, in front of every voter at once. A council member arguing policy from the dais is not corrupting democracy. She is performing its central act.

July 21

Now replay the meeting with that in mind.

Vice Mayor Pam Reeves opened the meeting with a list. The barbecue. The shade structures. The water tank. The $250,000 federal microgrid grant. The Entertainment Zone. The Coop, the community garden, the Locals Lounge, the dog park, Yountville Fit, much of it running right now on the Commons site the town keeps being told is a failure. It was a long list, and if it sounded unfamiliar, there is a reason. The Sun, in either of its lives, never covered it. Three years of a small-town government quietly delivering, and the paper of record found little of it fit to print. A town that knows its government is working is a hard town to divide. Remember that. It matters shortly.

Then Reeves said the hard part. A majority of this council, she said, is committed to a democratic process that centers on public meetings, where all are welcome. She was saddened that one council member decided to go outside that process. The chaos of 235 who signed a petition, she said, now looks like an end run to manufacture division at election time.

Councilmember Hillery Trippe identified herself as the subject, objected that the dais is no place for political speeches, and then delivered one, about the right to assemble in private, to gather in a house with only the people you invite, to criticize government at any volume. All of it is true. None of it is responsive. Nobody in that room questioned her right to assemble. Reeves questioned what the assembly was for. And to that question Trippe offered the Constitution’s confetti and not one word of policy. Not a site. Not a number. Not a plan. The council member who spent two years demanding more information had, on the one question that matters, none to give.

The Operation

Watch how the operation actually ran, because the record lays it out like a diagram.

Step one, the doubt. Through the design and procurement process, Trippe positioned herself as the diligent skeptic. More information about the consultants. More questions about the numbers. More process, always more process. It sounded innocent, and that was the point. Just asking questions is the oldest device in the outlier’s kit. It costs nothing, concedes nothing, and deposits a residue of suspicion on everything it touches. The questions were asked. The answers were given, in staff reports, in the financial analysis, in bond counsel’s work, in public meeting after public meeting. The residue remained, because residue was the product.

Step two, the vote. The council voted. Trippe lost, fair and square, in the open, in the chamber, by the process she now says she reveres. In a functioning democracy that is where the story ends. The minority makes its case, the majority decides, everyone stands for election on the result.

Step three, the end run. Instead, a petition. Two hundred thirty-five signatures, roughly a tenth of the electorate, gathered and filed on a clock timed so the ordinance would be suspended with no practical window for the council to respond before the appeal period ended. Understand what that timing buys. It converts a policy defeat into a procedural ambush. It moves the argument out of the chamber, where the whole town can watch, into doorways and living rooms, where only the invited are present and only one side speaks dramatically and unopposed in the “public comment” period. Trippe stood at the dais on July 21 and celebrated exactly that venue. You can assemble, she said, where no one else was invited. Yes. You can. And when a sitting council member who lost a public vote helps move the decision into rooms where no one else was invited, she has not discovered the First Amendment. She has abandoned her post.

Step four, the laundering. An operation like this needs one more thing. It needs to look like it came from nowhere and everywhere, a spontaneous uprising of concerned neighbors. That is a job for a newspaper, and what luck, the town suddenly has one again. For months the campaign against the Commons zoning was covered as organic civic concern, never as what the record shows, an organized, funded, lawyered effort with legal letters aimed at town consultants and talking points that moved in lockstep across public comment. Signature gatherers were neighbors. Legal threats were questions. The council’s accomplishments went unreported, and the division deepened on schedule. Then, on July 21, the vice mayor finally described the operation out loud, and the Sun located the first aggression of the entire affair. The headline was not about a suspended zoning district, a $1.7 million median home, or a state deadline bearing down. It was about one council member criticizing another. Years of campaign, and the attack begins, per the Sun, at the moment someone answers back. In its coverage of a fight over the town’s future, the paper has yet to mention that its own resurrection is a purchase, and that its buyer’s opposition to the project in question is a matter of public record. This publication discloses its author’s history with the Commons at the bottom of every essay, including this one. A newspaper owes its readers no less, and the absence of the disclosure is itself information.

Influence and Control

This is what the series title means, stated plainly. Influence is when monied interests show up at the public meeting, hire the consultants, write the op-ed, and make their case to a council that will decide either way. Influence is legal, ordinary, and as old as the republic. It is a voice in the argument. Control is when the interests stop arguing and start acquiring the machinery the argument runs on. The newspaper that decides which facts circulate. The petition apparatus that decides which votes stand. The candidate slate that decides who sits on the dais. Control does not petition the government. It replaces the audience, the referee, and eventually the players, and then holds a public comment period on itself. A town under influence still argues about what to do next. A town under control still holds the meetings, prints the paper, and conducts the elections, and none of it decides anything, because the deciding has moved to rooms where no one else was invited. Yountville has crossed from the first condition into the borderlands of the second, and the purchase of its newspaper is the latest marker on the trail.

Reeves did not speak for sport. Her constituents have been asking, with increasing volume, why nobody on the dais will stand up to this. The town is divided, and the division did not condense out of the fog. It was built, deliberately, by a small group that needs division to win, because its actual position, that a tenth of the electorate should override the 72 percent who approved Measure S, cannot survive an undivided town looking straight at it. Reeves stood in the chamber, on the record, in front of everyone, and said so. That is what the room is for.

And the problems the operation was built to obscure sat in the very same agenda, in a staff report that drew a fraction of the attention. Planning Director Aaron Hecock told the council the town is not on pace to meet its very low income RHNA obligation. Less than 10 percent of Yountville’s housing is affordable to moderate and lower income households. Roughly 20 percent of the existing affordable stock could lose its protections within a decade, beginning in February 2027. The median home runs $1.35 to $1.7 million and requires an income between $365,000 and $515,000. The median low income for a single person is $98,700, which in Yountville buys neither. The remaining housing sites are a handful of privately owned parcels, each requiring a willing owner, a negotiation, and a price. The Commons is the one site the town controls, with funding voters already dedicated. That is what 235 signatures suspended. The signatures did not suspend the state’s math, the deed restriction calendar, the threat of decertification, or a builder’s remedy filing. Four months on, not one petitioner has stood at the public microphone and named where the housing should go instead. They never had an answer. Delay was the answer. The election is the goal.

So here is the standing question, for Trippe, for every petitioner, and for every candidate who pulls nomination papers before August 7. Name the site. If not the Commons, then where, at what density, funded how. Say it in the chamber, on the record, in front of all the residents. Everything else in this town is for sale, and the town has done handsomely by the arrangement. The question this election answers is whether the price tags stop at the chamber door.

This is the second essay in the series The Town of Yountville Is Not For Sale, which will run through the November 3 election.

Next in the series: Who Rescued the Yountville Sun, and Why?

Disclosure: The author served for approximately two years as Owner’s Design Consultant on the Yountville Commons project, a role that concluded before this publication began. He writes as a private citizen. And in case you didn’t notice, the Yountville Moon is free.

In a town as small as Yountville, power rarely arrives under its own name. It arrives as concern about process, unease about scale, nostalgia for a vanished place, or a worry about unit mix. The people advancing an interest call it common sense. The people gathering influence call themselves neighbors. By the time anyone admits that a political contest is underway, the most important part of the contest may already be over.

That is the setting in which the Yountville Commons was stopped last winter. The Town Council had approved the ordinance and tentative map by a vote of four to one after years of public meetings, planning, environmental review, infrastructure work, design studies, financial analysis and repeated revisions. The property was not privately owned land awaiting an applicant. It was the former elementary school, closed by declining enrollment and purchased by the Town in part with more than $3 million of Measure S revenue, then reopened to the public after years behind fences. The Commons was meant to become the center of civic life again, with housing occupying roughly one-quarter of the site and more than half remaining open space.

The people of Yountville never voted to reject that plan. Two hundred thirty-five registered voters signed a petition during the brief period allowed by state law. That was enough to suspend the ordinance and require the Council either to repeal it or send it to an election. The Council repealed the ordinance rather than hold the entire project in place through another campaign, another construction season and another period of mounting public expense.

The repeal has since been described as though it were a town-wide verdict. It was nothing of the kind. It did not restore the school, preserve the property as permanent open space or establish a different plan for the site. It did not reduce the Town’s housing obligations or replace the approvals that had just been removed. It did not show that the people who opposed the Commons agreed about what should happen next. It stopped one public process at the moment when that process was finally approaching the point where its costs, phases and first construction decisions could be tested in the market.

A Mandate Taken Seriously

The public vote that mattered had already taken place eight years earlier. In 2018, Yountville voters approved Measure S by nearly three to one. The measure directed revenue paid by visitors toward affordable and workforce housing. More than one thousand voters said yes. Roughly one-quarter of those voting said no. The remarkable part of the vote is often forgotten. The Town owned no land to build on when the measure passed. Voters taxed their visitors on the strength of a possibility, trusting that a site would eventually exist. When declining enrollment closed the elementary school, the possibility became a place, and the Town spent the money as instructed.

The site was never imagined as housing alone. The Town removed the fences, made immediate improvements and returned the property to public use. The name Commons was chosen deliberately. It described a place that belonged to the town and would be shaped through public decisions. Housing was one part of a larger civic landscape that included community buildings, gardens, open space, public paths and the repair of a physical center that had gone quiet when the school closed.

An Entitlement Is an Asset

The Council’s task was not to authorize the construction of every building shown in a long-range plan. It was to create the legal and physical framework that would allow the Town to make responsible construction decisions later. The property had to be zoned. A tentative map had to establish the pattern of parcels, utilities and access. Possible unit mixes had to be studied. Phasing alternatives had to be drawn with enough specificity that qualified design-build teams could price the work. Without those steps, the Town could not obtain true competitive pricing for a first phase or determine what Measure S revenue, rental income and public financing could prudently support.

The ordinance was therefore a beginning, not a blank check. The tentative map did not commit the Town to an entire buildout. The drawings did not obligate the public to spend the total cost of every possible phase. They created a platform from which the Town could ask the questions that opponents now say were never answered. The number of units in the first phase, the bedroom mix, the construction cost, the borrowing capacity, the rent structure and the sequence of public improvements could only be resolved after the zoning and map made the project real enough to bid.

The petition stopped that work before the prices arrived.

The people associated with stopping it now speak often about wasted public money. The accusation depends on forgetting what the money was purchasing. Planning, environmental review, infrastructure design, zoning, mapping and procurement documents are not decorative exercises. They convert an uncertain property into an entitled asset. They make financing possible. They allow builders to compete on a defined scope. They give future councils choices that can be exercised without starting again from the beginning.

The petition stripped away the approvals that gave much of that work its value, then used the absence of a completed project as evidence that the work had been wasteful. The sequence is important. The Town did not spend money and fail to act. It spent money in order to act, reached the point where action could be priced, and was stopped by a petition signed by 235 voters. The interruption was later offered as proof that the interrupted process had gone nowhere.

The Model Was the Threat

The Commons was designed to do something California towns are routinely told they cannot do. The Town would build workforce housing itself, in small phases, on its own land, on its own schedule. No master developer would take title. No private partner would control the pace. The Town would price a first phase through competitive design-build procurement, build what the numbers supported, and then decide, with the first buildings occupied and producing rent, whether and when to build the next. Each phase would be small enough to finance conservatively and stop cleanly, and each would teach the Town what the next one should cost. The approach traded speed for control, and control was the point.

The premise underneath the design was that workforce housing has become civic infrastructure. A town maintains streets, water and sewers because the place does not function without them, and no one asks the water system to justify itself against the possibility that a neighbor might someday share a well. Housing for the people who operate the town now belongs in that category, with one difference that separates it from every other public system. Streets and pipes only cost money. Housing, once its debt declines, returns it. A Town-owned portfolio would eventually generate rental income under public control, revenue that could maintain the buildings, extend the housing and reduce the town’s dependence on any private party’s willingness to act.

That is what made the Commons a threat to anyone committed to indefinite delay. The danger was not the density, which was modest, and not the cost, which had not yet been priced. The danger was the demonstration. A town that builds its first phase on its own land, watches the units fill with its own workforce and banks the rent has proven a method. The method is repeatable, and it requires no one’s permission. Every argument that housing must wait for the right private partner, the right neighboring landowner or the right decade collapses on the day the first phase opens.

The consequences of preventing that demonstration do not end at the edge of the former school grounds. Yountville’s current housing allocation is 72 homes through 2031, including 19 for very-low-income households. At this month’s Council housing session, Town staff counted 29 units permitted or approved, projected roughly 44 by the end of the cycle, and concluded that Yountville is not on pace to meet its obligations, particularly for very-low-income homes. The town has 1,372 existing housing units. About 100 carry deed restrictions for moderate-, low- or very-low-income households, and only 13 serve very-low-income residents. Roughly 20 percent of that protected stock could lose its restrictions within the next decade, with the first expirations beginning at the Mount Avenue Cottages in February 2027.

The workers described by these income categories are not abstractions created by state housing law. They are the people who make the town function every day. Hotel housekeepers, caregivers, retail employees, tasting-room workers, farmworkers and laborers fall within the very-low-income range. Hospitality managers and wastewater operators fall within the low-income range. Nurses, firefighters and some Town supervisors fall within the moderate-income range. Yountville’s prosperity depends on these workers, but its housing market largely excludes them. Workers arrive from other towns in the morning, maintain the hotels, serve the meals, care for residents, operate public systems and leave again at night. The cost of Yountville’s housing shortage is exported to highways, neighboring communities and households that surrender hours of each day to commuting.

Housing Delayed is Housing Denied

Delay is especially useful in housing politics because it can be presented as prudence. The opponent does not need to oppose affordable housing openly. Support can always be offered for a better project, a smaller project, a cheaper project, a different site, a later phase or another study. The perfect proposal remains safely in the future while the imperfect proposal in front of the public is stopped.

Delay has a second advantage. It requires nothing. The opponent of a specific project never has to produce a plan that pencils, a site that exists or a partner who has agreed to anything. It is enough to keep possibilities in circulation. At this month’s housing session, a former mayor rose during public comment to encourage the Town to continue discussions with the Veterans Home of California about workforce housing on state-owned land. The suggestion may be sincere. Its record is what matters. The Veterans Home is adjacent, state-owned and perpetually discussable, and years of conversation with it have never produced a single unit of housing the Town controls. In the meantime, the interim Town Manager told the Council that Yountville is running out of sites. The statement was accurate as far as it went. It was delivered in a chamber that stands a short walk from 7.5 acres the public already owns, bought with housing money for housing, zoned for housing once already, and stopped by 235 signatures.

For the worker who still cannot live in Yountville, the distinction between delay and rejection disappears. Construction costs continue rising. Financing assumptions expire. Consultants leave. Political coalitions change. The site becomes harder to discuss and more expensive to reconsider. A future Council begins again with another process, another study and another promise that the next plan will be handled more carefully.

This is how housing is defeated without anyone admitting to opposing housing.

The Town’s official Housing Element makes the fragility of the alternatives unusually clear. It identifies six opportunity sites with a combined realistic capacity of 93 units, but 88 of those units depend on two privately controlled properties, 16 assigned to a private garden parcel and 72 to the Catholic Church site. The remaining four sites together represent five units. A site listed in a Housing Element is not a construction commitment. It remains dependent on the owner, the market, financing and future politics. The Commons was different because the Town owned the land and had already advanced the approvals necessary to proceed.

The 235 petition signers did not create a more affordable plan, a smaller first phase or a better housing site. They stopped the discussions that might have produced those outcomes. They did not preserve the Town’s investment. They tore away the legal framework that made the investment useful. They did not solve the cost question. They prevented the public procurement process from producing the most reliable answer available.

The coalition now presents itself as the custodian of what remains.

Who Governs What Comes Next

The alliance that stopped the Commons contained residents with very different expectations. Many believed they were protecting the former school grounds from development. They feared the loss of open space, remembered the school as part of the town’s identity or distrusted the scale of what they had been told was coming. Their concern was sincere, even when it rested on the false impression that housing covered most of the property or that approval meant the entire long-range plan would be built at once. Other participants had different interests. Some large property owners and business figures may favor more development, provided it occurs on private land, produces private value and is considered by a Council more receptive to negotiated flexibility. They did not need to share the preservationists’ goals. They needed only to share their opposition to the public plan.

The petition allowed those interests to remain concealed within a single act. It asked what people wanted stopped and required no account of what they wanted instead. A resident hoping for less development could stand beside a property owner hoping for more intensive private development without either confronting the contradiction. The disagreement could be postponed until after the ordinance was gone and, perhaps, until after a new Council majority had been elected.

The modern company town is not built by purchase. It is built by control. No one from the petition campaign has proposed selling the school site, and no one needs to. The transfer happens differently. Public land sits idle while the Town holds serious conversations about land it will never govern. Measure S revenue accumulates while proposals circulate to route it through private partnerships that would own what it builds. Deed restrictions expire on schedule while the search for a perfect site continues. Control of the public’s assets passes to private interests not through a transaction but through a calendar. Nothing is ever sold. Everything is merely postponed, until the postponement becomes the policy.

This series is called The Town of Yountville Is Not for Sale because the struggle is no longer confined to the Commons. It concerns whether assets the public bought remain instruments of public purpose, whether elected government keeps the independence to use them, and whether a town whose economy creates extraordinary wealth will keep exporting the people who create it. The title is not an argument against business. Yountville depends on hotels, restaurants, wineries, shops and visitors, and they deserve a voice in public life. But economic importance does not confer greater civic authority. A payroll is not a constituency. Tax revenue is not a vote. The owner of a large property is still one participant in a public process governed by rules that must apply to everyone.

The Commons brought all of this into view. It joined public land, workforce housing, employer influence, private development interests, direct democracy and a Council election on one 7.5-acre site. The petition did not settle those issues. It suspended the one public framework that had begun to organize them.

The essays that follow will examine how 235 signatures acquired the appearance of a public mandate, how the language of preservation can serve private development interests, why the Town’s incremental building model threatened the politics of delay, what Yountville’s housing obligations now require and what every candidate should disclose before asking voters for control of the Council.

In 2018, more than one thousand Yountville voters directed the Town to use visitor revenue for affordable and workforce housing before a buildable site existed. The Council took that vote seriously enough to acquire land when the school closed, preserve most of it as open space, imagine a new civic center and bring a first housing phase close enough to reality that competitive pricing could begin. Two hundred thirty-five petition signers stopped the process before the answers arrived. The people responsible now point to the unanswered questions as evidence of failure and offer themselves as the better stewards of the town. The record has not disappeared. It has simply been obscured by repetition, grievance and the convenient fiction that repeal settled anything.

This series intends to bring that record into the light.

A private developer could certainly have built housing on the site. And it’s possible one still may. But the Commons was never only a housing project. It involved public land, public pathways, open space, community-serving amenities, and a long-term question about who would control the site’s value once the work was done. Before the Town could bring in private building expertise, it had to answer a more basic question: why would it surrender control of a public asset before the public had decided what it was for?

The former elementary school sits near the center of Yountville, where it has stood for more than 125 years, and for most of that time, no one had much reason to think about who controlled it. Children walked to it. The school district owned the ground and ran the buildings and fields, and the rest of the town was slowly built around it. When the school closed, and the Town bought the site in the spring of 2024 for roughly eleven million dollars, that long, quiet arrangement ended. The first thing the Town did was take down the fence, make some long-deferred repairs and renovations, and let people back onto the grounds. The second thing was to ask residents what to do with the most important piece of public land inside its boundaries.

One question came up early, in workshops and in letters, and eventually from the dais. Why didn’t the Town just hire a developer? The question carried an assumption worth taking seriously. Developers raise the money, carry the risk, and coordinate the dozens of trades that turn drawings into a finished building, and a small town has none of that machinery standing ready. To a few residents, it seemed plain that the work of building a civic asset that included housing belonged to companies that build housing, and that the Town was reaching well outside its competence.

The Town never set out to do the building itself. By the time the Commons entitlements were approved, it was already moving toward the arrangement private developers use when a job grows from design intent to actual construction, which is to select a single team to complete the design and construct the first phase. Outside expertise was always going to be involved. The real question was narrower, and it had to do with who would set the goals before that expertise arrived.

Before any of that, the Town did the slow work. It spent two years acquiring the site, opening it to the public, renovating several of the buildings for public use, holding workshops, weighing alternatives, completing environmental review, and arriving at a site plan that moved through 23 public meetings to Town Council approval. What remained was implementation, and the method the Town expected to use has a name most people have never needed to learn.

Public Design-Build is common in California, and most residents have benefited from it without hearing the term. School districts, counties, universities, and the Town of Yountville have all used it. Under the older approach, an agency hires an architect to draw a complete set of plans and then bids those plans out to a builder as a separate step, so design and construction stay in different hands. Design-build folds the two together. The town documents what it wants, and one team of architects, engineers, and builders takes responsibility for finishing the design and delivering the finished work for a fixed price.

What the town defines as success is the part that matters most: a budget ceiling, performance and sustainability standards, a schedule, and whatever else the community cares about. Teams compete to show how they would meet those terms, and the chosen team owns the route while the town keeps the destination.

The clearest local example is Yountville’s own Town Hall. When the building needed a seismic retrofit, the Town did not commission a full set of drawings and hand them to the lowest bidder. It wrote down what the work had to accomplish, a structure brought up to current code, to a set budget and schedule, and it chose one team to both design the retrofit and build it. The Council approved the criteria and approved the team. The building people walk into today is the result, and almost no one gives a thought to how it was delivered, which is the surest sign the method worked.

The Town reached the starting line for relatively little money. Its own accounting, laid out by category in the staff report for the June 16 Council meeting and its four public expenditure attachments, shows exactly where that money went. The land was the overwhelming share, roughly eleven million dollars, about 77 percent of everything spent. Repairing and reopening the buildings and grounds for community use, the gym and the farmstand, Schmitt Hall and the dog park, and the garden, came to about $1.6 million, work a private developer would never have done at all. Carrying the site through design, environmental review, and entitlement, the planning that a private developer would have charged between four and a half and seven million dollars to deliver, cost the Town about $1.8 million. A developer would have paid the same price for the land, spent more than the Town did to reach the same entitled condition, and owned the result. The Town owned it instead, and the rise in the land’s worth that comes from renovating, entitling, and planning it is a real asset the public now holds. The zoning ordinance has been repealed but much of the work remains useful for the housing challenges that still face the Town of Yountville.

Some of the confusion came from a reasonable misreading. Residents who heard that the Town would not hire a developer assumed the only alternative was for the Town to become one, and pictured municipal employees pouring foundations and scheduling drywall. Nothing of the kind was contemplated. The Town meant to hire the people who do that work, the same as any developer would. The one responsibility it declined to hand off was the decision about what belonged at the center of Yountville, and it kept that decision because the land was already public and the public had already paid for it.

This is where the Commons departed from ordinary development. In the usual sequence, a developer buys land, works out what can be built on it at a profit, assembles a team, and brings a largely finished proposal to the public for reaction. The Commons ran that order backward. Residents helped establish what the site should become before any team was asked to deliver it, so the brief came from the town, and the competition to fulfill it would have come afterward. Private participation was not shut out. It was pointed at goals the community had set, rather than goals a balance sheet had set. The brief came from the town. The competition to fulfill it would have come afterward.

Keeping the land and the buildings in public hands was never about control for its own sake. It was about where the value goes. Once a phase has paid off its debt, the rents it produces keep arriving and belong to the Town to spend as the public needs. Inside that sits a subtler point. When a government owns housing and charges its workforce less than the market would bear, that discount is itself a subsidy. The Town collects less rent than the building could command, and it can make that choice freely because no outside party dictates the price. Its one hard obligation is the debt on the building, and that debt is carried by the rents the homes earn and by Measure S, the visitor-paid hotel tax behind the bond, not by anyone’s property taxes.

Because the discount is a choice and not a debt, the Town keeps the lever that matters. The worry most often raised about town-built housing is that the workforce it is meant for will not turn up, and the units will sit empty. Against an asset the Town owns, that risk is small. If demand from local workers ever fell short, the Town could let rents rise toward the market until they cleared, cover its debt, and wait. The building does not fail. It earns a little more for a time, houses someone else who needs a home, and returns to workforce rents whenever the Town decides.

None of this makes the tax-credit model illegitimate. It is often the only way affordable housing gets built at all. But it comes with tradeoffs in control, flexibility, and duration that are very different from direct public ownership. A nonprofit developer working through the low-income housing tax credit has no such lever, and that is the center of the comparison. In exchange for the credits that finance the building, the owner signs an agreement that caps every rent at a fixed share of the area median income and holds it there for at least 30 years under federal law and 55 in California. The rents move only as that income figure moves. The owner cannot lift a unit to the market when conditions change, cannot relax a restriction it no longer needs, or turn the building to another use. Each price is set by a federal formula and locked by contract for a generation. When the term finally ends, the owner is generally free to convert the units to market rate, which is the moment the affordability the public paid for quietly disappears. And that is about to happen to several deed-restricted workforce units in Yountville over the next year or two, so it’s not some strange abstract idea.

The contrast runs opposite to the one usually drawn. The model that sounds flexible, a tax-credit deal carried by a seasoned nonprofit, is the rigid one, its rents fixed and its affordability set to expire from the first day. The model that sounds risky, the Town owning what it builds, is the adaptable one, its affordability lasting as long as the Town wants and bending with circumstances rather than breaking against them. The first phase was to be financed with cash, a voter-approved bond, and a bank loan repaid from rents, precisely so it would carry none of those restrictions. That was the Town keeping its own hand on the wheel and being a careful steward for a public asset.

The phased structure was the second half of the same idea, and it is the part a Council member can explain most plainly. The site was divided into 18 parcels, meant to be built one phase at a time rather than all at once. Approving the plan did not approve the buildout. It approved a framework within which each phase would return to the Council as its own decision, taken in public and on the record when its time arrived.

Only the first phase carried numbers. It was roughly 40 homes at an estimated $25 million, to be funded with about five million dollars in cash, a bond backed by Measure S, the 1 percent visitor-paid hotel tax that brings in about $700,000 a year, and a bank loan the rents would repay. Every phase after it depended on tax credits, grants, and partners that did not yet exist, and each would have required a vote of its own. The Council could approve a phase, resize it, delay it, redirect it, or decline it altogether. None of that discretion was surrendered at the start, and keeping it was the whole reason the work was structured in phases.

This is also why the largest figure ever attached to the project, the roughly $91 million to build everything the site could eventually hold, was a ceiling and not a commitment. It described the maximum the property could absorb across many years and many separate votes. The Town had not agreed to spend it and could not have, because the votes that would authorize each phase had not been taken, and most never would be.

The plainest account of what the Town actually decided runs like this. It approved a set of entitlements that made the seven-acre school site far more valuable than it had been the day it was purchased, then ran the design-build procurement to the point of proposals in hand, meaning to take the leading Phase 1 bid into a fixed-price negotiation as it brought an operator on. What ended that was the ballot, not the bids. The Council’s June 2, 2026, resolution rejected all the proposals and cited changed conditions and cost assumptions, but the condition that changed was the entitlement itself. With the Commons zoning repealed by roughly 10 percent of the registered voters, every proposal had been priced against a project that no longer legally existed, and there was nothing left to negotiate. Every later phase had been left as a separate decision the Town’s elected representatives would make in public when its time came.

The former school held a particular place in the life of the town. It had been bought with public money, in part specifically to build workforce housing; residents had put two years of argument into its future, and the grounds had already begun working as a gathering place before any housing plan reached the table. Many felt the community deserved a real say in what happened next. Others disagreed, and the disagreement was legitimate. Reasonable people can hold different views about how far a local government should reach into what gets built. The choice in front of Yountville, though, was never between expertise and the lack of it.

For a short while, Yountville tried something that has grown uncommon. It kept an important piece of public land in public hands, asked the people who lived there to imagine what it should be, and prepared to bring in private skill to carry that out, one phase and one vote at a time. A referendum later set the housing aside, but a referendum can repeal an ordinance without unmaking the facts that produced it. The Town still owns the ground, and it still wrote the first version of the site’s future. The farmstand sells produce six days a week, the dog park fills most evenings, and the question of who should hold the pencil before the building starts is still worth asking plainly. At the Commons, for once, the answer was the town itself.

Brendan Kelly wrote this essay and served as Owner’s Design Consultant on the Yountville Commons from 2024 to 2026. That work is complete. He writes here as a private citizen with a disclosed interest in the project. Visit more essays like this at the Yountville Moon

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“Form-based design” is an unfortunate phrase for a very old civic idea. It sounds like something from a planning seminar, a zoning code, or a consultant’s report. It sounds technical before it sounds human. But the idea itself is not technical at all. It is the difference between asking, “How many units can fit here?” and asking, “What kind of place are we making?”

The fence came down first. Before the studies, before the meetings, before anyone argued about how many homes the site could hold, the Town pulled the chain-link off the perimeter of the old elementary school and let people walk across the grounds again. By that summer, the cafeteria had become Don and Sally Schmitt Hall, the library had become Yountville Fit, the old Little League snack shack had become a farmstand open six days a week, and a corner of the playfield had become the town’s first dog park. None of that required a master plan. It required only the decision to treat the ground as a shared public space again. That decision came before everything else, and it is the right place to begin, because it explains what the Commons was always trying to be and still can be.

The design method behind the project goes by an unfortunate name. “Form-based design” sounds like something from a planning seminar, technical before it is human. The idea underneath it is neither. It is the difference between asking how many units a piece of land can hold and asking what kind of place the land should become. The first question produces a number. The second produces a part of a working town. At the former school site, in the center of Yountville, the second question was the only one worth asking.

Housing mattered, and still does. A town where most of the people who cook, clean, pour wine, and care for its residents cannot afford to live near their work has a civic problem, not merely a real estate one. Yountville has watched its school close after more than 125 years, its year-round population age, and a large share of its houses go dark for most of the year as second homes. The temptation, facing all of that, is to set subsidized units on a leftover piece of public land and call the matter settled. The school site was too important for that. It was one of the last large pieces of ground in the middle of town that belonged to everyone, and it carried the public memory of generations who had crossed its paths as children.

Form-based design begins with the public experience and works inward. It asks what a building contributes to the space around it before settling what the building looks like, where people will walk, how many units will fit, and where the trees and open ground belong, before determining where the cars will sit. In a conventional development, the order runs the other way. Buildings and parking take their share first, and the public realm is assembled from what remains. Paths become circulation, trees become landscaping, and open space becomes a buffer between things. The Commons reversed that sequence and let the public life of the site set the terms.

During the public process, the Town returned again and again to a single sheet of small site studies, each one another attempt to fit buildings, walks, fields, gardens, parking, and civic rooms together on public land. The point of the sheet was not that every study was good. The point was that the plan was argued into being in public view, one revision at a time.

The public debate tended to reduce the Commons to its housing, but housing was only one part of the framework the Council eventually approved. The larger share of the site was given to the things between the buildings: walking routes, open fields, gardens, recreation, shaded parking, civic rooms, and shared ground meant for residents from across town. That arrangement did not arrive whole. It came out of repeated meetings and revisions, with resident comments shaping the plan rather than reacting to it from outside.

One early choice tells the rest of the story. The plan imagined a series of shared outdoor spaces rather than a collection of private backyards. A backyard makes sense in a subdivision, where each household holds its own ground behind its own fence. On one of the most important public sites in town, that same fence would have carved the common ground into small private claims and turned the buildings inward, away from each other. A shared courtyard, lawn, garden, or shaded walk does the opposite. It lets private and public life sit near one another without collapsing into one another. The aim was never to erase privacy. People who live at the Commons will still need quiet, thresholds, and separation from public activity. The question the design kept asking was whether the land could work harder for the whole town than a row of fences would allow.

The placement of cars followed the same logic. In many projects, parking quietly becomes the real master plan. The buildings arrange themselves around it, the paths bend to accommodate it, and the first thing anyone sees on arrival is asphalt. Once that happens, the character of the place is settled, and no amount of later planting will undo it. The Commons treated cars as necessary but secondary. People still drive, workers still commute, and visitors still arrive at the curb, so the parking had to be real. It was gathered into groves of oaks and broken up so that it would not read as a single field of pavement. The intent was not to pretend the cars away. It was to keep them from owning the room, which is an old principle of town-making and not a new one.

The buildings carried a related discipline. Public argument about a project like this tends to fix on height, density, and whether a given building looks too large standing by itself. Towns, though, are not made of buildings standing by themselves. They are made of the relationships between them. A plain building can be a good one if it shades a walk, frames a courtyard, and gives a clear front to a public space. A dramatic building can be a poor one if it turns its back on the street and leaves dead ground behind it. Most of the buildings at the Commons were meant to be calm enough to support public life rather than compete with it. The few deliberate exceptions, a community hall, a civic porch, a place for children, a corner where people naturally stop, were meant to carry the public weight, and the background buildings give those places their shape. Good civic design works less like a beauty contest among buildings and more like choreography.

This is the part of the tradition that does not require a planning degree to judge. Christopher Alexander wrote about the patterns people recognize without being taught them: a sunny courtyard, a protected edge, a walk that leads somewhere worth reaching. Jane Jacobs wrote about the ordinary overlap of a working street, where different people use the same ground at different hours for different reasons. Leon Krier drew the line between the everyday fabric of a town and its few civic landmarks. Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Stefanos Polyzoides spent their careers writing those lessons into codes other towns could use. The Commons borrowed from all of it, but the purpose was local. The question was what the old school grounds should become now that they belonged to everyone.

Two answers were available, and both fell short. The site could have been kept as mostly open land, lightly improved and heavily remembered. That answer has real emotional pull, because the ground does hold memory, and memory is worth something. But a closed school is not a civic strategy, and a shrinking year-round population is not a preservation plan. The other answer was to treat the site as a housing machine and measure it by output. That answer at least faced the need honestly, but it would have spent one of the town’s last great civic sites on a unit count. The Commons looked for the path between them. It was not housing instead of public space, and it was not public space with housing tucked into the corners. It was housing used as one part of a larger public place.

That distinction matters most for the people the town says it wants to keep. A young cook, a new teacher, a hospitality worker, a caregiver, a town employee, a son or daughter raised in the valley, can work in Yountville every day and still have no plausible way to begin a life here. A first foothold is more than a lease. A small apartment beside a community garden is not the same as a small apartment behind a parking lot, and a studio on a public walk is not the same as one hidden in a private enclave. The rent on paper may be identical. The life the home opens onto is not.

Holding those two things together, private dwelling and public welcome, was the hardest part of the assignment. A private apartment complex can attend mostly to its tenants. A public park can attend mostly to its visitors. The Commons had to do both at once, which is why its thresholds were drawn with such care. The depth of a porch, the placement of a path, the way a window faces a courtyard, the distance between a farmstand and a front door: these are the means by which a place tells people where they are welcome to gather and where they should leave others their privacy. They are not finishing the details. They are the substance of the design.

None of this can be read off a unit count. A density figure will not tell you whether a child can cross the site safely, and a parking ratio will not tell you whether the cars dominate the view.

The physical arrangement is the civic argument.

What the Commons proposed was not a subdivision, not an apartment complex, and not a park with buildings scattered through it. It proposed a piece of town, with the range of uses a piece of town carries: places to move through and places to stay, public faces and private thresholds, a rhythm that changes from morning to evening, and lets different generations occupy the same ground without living the same life.

Yountville’s difficulty was never only a matter of numbers. It was cultural and civic. The population is older than it was, many houses stand empty for most of the year, and the vast majority of the daily workforce is present in the town without belonging to its residential life. The Commons set out to answer that condition in physical form, on public ground, by making a place rather than counting units. Whether it is built in the end, and at what pace, is a separate question the town will decide through its own process. The design itself was an argument about what the old school site should be. It held that the public world is not what remains after the private one is finished, that buildings owe something to the ground around them, that parking should serve a place instead of defining it, and that housing can belong to civic life rather than stand apart from it. Stripped of its jargon, that is all form-based design has ever meant. The fence came down, and the work was deciding what to put in its place.

Brendan Kelly
Yountville · June 14, 2026
Paul Brendan Kelly served as Owner’s Design Consultant on the Yountville Commons for two years. That work is complete. He writes here as a private citizen. Please visit the Yountville Moon for more essays.

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An essay explaining why the Town had to understand the full cost of the Commons before deciding what part it could responsibly build first. The roughly $91 million estimate was not a spending plan, but a full-buildout framework for a seven-acre public site. The real near-term question was whether Yountville could begin with a first phase of about 40 homes. The essay shows how a long-term planning estimate was mistaken for an immediate bill, and how the repeal ended a transparent public process without solving the Town’s housing need, Measure S obligations, or state housing requirements.

Yountville Commons was never merely a housing proposal. It was the old school reopened: the fences removed, the library reused, the cafeteria revived, the garden replanted, the field returned to public life. Housing was part of the vision because the people who sustain Yountville also need a place in Yountville. But the Commons began as something larger: a civic reclamation project at the center of town. This Conceptual Site Plan was approved unanimously by the Town Council in March 2025.

The people who care for their seniors, prepare their meals, maintain the landscapes, and keep the local economy running are not strangers. They are already here every day. Their cars are already parked on the streets. Their labor is already woven into the life of the town.

If a community depends on people it increasingly cannot accommodate, what exactly is it preserving?

That is the question I cannot stop asking.

This piece begins before Yountville was Yountville: with Rancho Caymus, the Veterans Home, the railroad, the highway that spared Washington Street, and the Agricultural Preserve that saved Napa Valley from becoming ordinary California. That preservation was real. Its achievement was real. But so was the bargain hidden inside it.

If the valley floor would be protected from sprawl, then the towns had to become mature enough to hold the people the protected economy required. Yountville never fully made that second move. Over time, the family houses aged in place, the workers commuted from elsewhere, the second homes multiplied, and the elementary school finally said what civic nostalgia could not: a town without enough children nearby is not simply changing. It is failing to replace itself.

This 1940 aerial photo shows the school on the edge of Yountville. It was surrounded by orchards that would eventually be replaced with subdivisions full of working families. The old school did not close because people stopped loving Yountville. It closed because love, memory, and beautiful streets are not housing policy. A town can preserve its surfaces and still lose the succession of lives that made those surfaces meaningful.

This essay is the backstory to the Yountville housing debate: not an accusation, but an autopsy. It’s not complex. The children and their parent

s went where the housing was affordable.

Yountville is a small town, and small towns feel disagreement personally. A public debate can begin as a disagreement about policy and quickly become something more painful: neighbors sorting themselves into sides, motives being assigned, and complicated facts reduced to slogans.

The Yountville Moon was not created to make that fracture worse. Its purpose is the opposite. But the opposite of division is not agreement. The opposite of division is understanding.

Dialogue matters. It does not always require a facilitator, a formal meeting, or a microphone at Town Hall. Sometimes it requires the harder and more ordinary work of asking a neighbor why they believe what they believe, listening carefully to the answer, and then trying to sort the facts from the fears, assumptions, and frustrations that surround them. That takes curiosity. It takes effort. It also requires a shared record.

There is a sentence going around Yountville. You have heard it at council comment, in the letters page, over coffee. “The Town never even studied what the workers needed.”

It is a clean, confident sentence. It is also wrong, and the proof is sitting on a public shelf that almost no one has walked over to read.

This week’s essay is a map to that shelf. The Town’s own certified Housing Element. Census commute data covering nearly every job in town. Two county studies from the last two years. I name each one, say what it measured, and place the size of the Yountville Commons against the size of the need the data describe. The answer to “was the workforce counted” turns out to be yes, repeatedly, and the more interesting question is the one underneath it.

I built in a test. Copy the essay, paste it into Claude or ChatGPT, and ask it to check every citation against the original source. I want you to try it. Then tell me in the comments what you find, and whether the facts change how you feel.

The workforce was counted. The question is whether anyone read the count.

[Rehttps://www.yountvillemoon.com/volume-i-2026-1/ky7bhku6332p6aginwqxmmo19fjgifad the full essay here]