In this Election Day essay, I reflect on two years of planning, the Town’s genuine failures to communicate, the curious reluctance of some prominent critics to do their homework, and the patient, decidedly unglamorous work of local government. The Commons was never a perfect proposal, but it was never the thoughtless improvisation its opponents described, either.

Tomorrow, the campaign signs will come down, the accusations will fade, and Yountville will still own seven and a half acres of land with an unfinished future. Whoever wins, the next Council will inherit the same difficult questions, along with the responsibility to answer them.

A final salute to the people who showed up, read the material, asked thoughtful questions, and did the boring work that makes democracy possible. And a gentle reminder that the old elementary school expected its students to do their homework. Perhaps Town Hall should expect as much from the grown-ups.

Election Day in Yountville. After months of accusations, arguments, and campaign literature, the voters finally have their turn. Tomorrow, the signs will come down, the speeches will end, and the seven and a half acres will still be there. Democracy gets its day in the sun. Wednesday morning, the less glamorous work of governing begins again.

First, An Election Day Dedication

This essay is dedicated to all the loyal readers of the Moon, who now number between 800 and 1,000 with each post. It is dedicated as well to the one reader who would very much like the Moon to go away. That reader has not missed an issue, which is its own kind of loyalty, and I am not ungrateful for it.

Free speech is one of the quiet wonders of a free country. It lets an ordinary person say plainly what they have seen and heard, and it never asks first whether the people being described hold an office, a fortune, or a famous name. This week’s reporting in the Register showed how far that simple idea can carry. A reporter read the emails and the survey responses, listened to the meeting recording, and set them beside what people had said in public. The work required no special access and no secret sources. It required eyesight, a set of ears, and the patience to use them, which turned out to be a scarce resource this election season.

Many of you have written to me these past few weeks with corrections, documents, questions I had not thought to ask, and encouragement on days when it was welcome. You understood early that this election was never only about a housing plan. It was about who decides the future of this town, and whether those decisions are made in public by people who have gone to the meetings, paid attention and are able to reach consensus with their neighbors. That remains true whatever the count shows tomorrow morning. The record stays public, and the Moon will go on reading it.

Thank you for reading, all of you, including the one reader still making peace with the idea of free speech, even in Yountville.

In Praise of the Boring Work

On Election Day, a salute to the people who listened, read, designed and decided, and to the town that will need them back at work again tomorrow.

Gary Jabara has spent this year telling Yountville that the Commons is a mistake. In a September interview he called continuing down the Town’s path “insanity.” Asked whether he had read the Town’s two studies of the project, he told the Napa Valley Register, “I didn’t read either one.”

That admission appears in the second installment of Lauren Spates’ series on the Yountville Commons, published the day before the election. Her article is titled “Commons’ Confusion?” and identifies a breakdown in communication as the central problem. That is a fair conclusion. The more useful thing she did was ask the people demanding answers whether they had read the answers the Town provided. Several had not.

It is fitting that this argument concerns an elementary school. Children once arrived at that property expecting someone to ask whether they had done their homework. The school closed in 2020, and the Town bought the seven-and-a-half-acre property to put it to work for another generation. Nobody expected its next educational purpose to be a remedial reading assignment for critics.

The Dog Ate My Housing Element

Jabara calls the Commons “not well thought out, far too expensive” and larger than the need. Those are legitimate subjects for debate. Public construction is expensive, municipal finance is complicated, and nobody should build anything because the drawings are attractive and the consultants have nice shoes. The Town commissioned studies on exactly those questions: a workforce housing analysis from BAE Urban Economics and financial scenarios from KNN Public Finance.

Jabara read neither. It is a little like a restaurant critic panning a kitchen he has never eaten in. One can criticize a financial proposal without studying every spreadsheet, and wealthy people have long hired others to read spreadsheets for them. The criticism carries less weight when its author has not opened the analyses that address it.

He also praised Councilmember Hillery Trippe because “she does her homework,” which suggests homework is something he admires mainly in others. Mayoral candidate Joe Tagliaboschi told Spates he was “not familiar” with the studies, while worrying that the narrative had been shaped to fit a predetermined outcome. Consultants do make mistakes. The way to find them is to read the documents the consultants prepared and place in the public record.

Jabara’s remedy is to hire his own expert. He has retained land-use attorney Jeff Dodd to study the Town’s housing obligations and propose alternatives, and he describes Dodd as an “unrelated third party.” Dodd confirms Jabara is his client. That is not a scandal. Lawyers generally work for the people who hire them, a custom that predates municipal housing studies. Dodd may produce good work. A study paid for by a private party is still not a public study, and calling it independent does not make it one.

The Missing Invitation

Thomas Keller has made Yountville famous in places where people can pronounce quenelle. At the March 3 Council meeting he said nobody in Town leadership had ever asked his views on the Commons. Coming from one of the town’s most influential employers, the complaint landed and the story was reported nationwide.

Emails provided to the Register show Keller’s executive assistant arranged a February 11 meeting with Mayor Margie Mohler, Councilmember Robin McKee, Keller and his representatives. Multiple attendees confirmed it took place. His general manager, Michael Minnillo, had answered the 2024 employer survey (“Hopefully the school site works out!!”) and later joined the consultant’s employer focus group. Keller himself attended the February 17 study session. None of this shows he got the answers he wanted. It does show he was in the room.

Boardwalk Investments, Jabara’s real estate company, answered six of the nine survey questions with “n/a - company policy” and left the other three blank. Employers have legitimate reasons to protect employee information and need not answer every municipal survey. Declining to provide information and then complaining that nobody collected it are two different positions, and they do not sit comfortably together.

Jabara did later send the Town a survey of 172 employees showing strong interest in two-bedroom units at $1,700 to $2,200 a month and little interest in studios. That is useful, and it is what participation looks like. It is also one employer’s preference, which has to be reconciled with construction cost, rent, site planning and the workers of every other business in town. Keller promised a similar survey. The Register could not find one.

The Communication Problem

Spates is right that communication failed, and Town leaders say so. Mayor Mohler says the Town never explained how residents’ comments were sorted into a plan. McKee says the process outpaced public understanding. Those admissions deserve to be taken seriously, not treated as proof of collapse.

I spent much of the past two years on the Commons design and the outreach around it: open houses, workshops, advisory board discussions, Council presentations, individual conversations, and enough coffee to make my nervous system a minor medical curiosity. People had ideas about parks, parking, building sizes and the character of the public spaces. Some were incorporated. Others were modified or ran into engineering, budgets, accessibility and gravity. Architecture is the art of fitting competing demands into finite space, and the most popular request is always to make everything larger for less money. We could have explained those decisions better, and I include myself.

Poor communication is not the same as no communication. The public planning process began in 2024. The Council unanimously approved a conceptual site plan in March 2025. The February 17, 2026 study session ran nearly four hours, with consultants, staff and Council members answering questions on housing need, phasing and financing. By the Register’s account of the recording, residents asked thoughtful questions, the answers reflected where the project stood, and everyone agreed more information would follow. It was a working session on how to build in stages, not the unveiling of a finished project.

Weeks later came the petition to repeal the zoning. It qualified, and on June 2 the Council repealed the ordinance rather than send it to the ballot. The repeal did not sell the land or end the Town’s housing obligations. It restored the old zoning and reopened the question. Somewhere between February and June, a preliminary financial scenario began to be discussed as though every building had been approved and every dollar spent.

A Town or a Developer

The question that matters most has received less attention than bedroom counts. Yountville can keep the property and build housing as a municipal asset, or it can spend public money to help someone else build and own it. The Commons proposed the first. Rent could eventually support Town finances while keeping the housing for local workers. That approach carries real risk: construction cost, debt, maintenance and the need for competent long-term management. Handing over valuable public land, subsidizing housing the Town will never own, or waiting on the private market for rents workers can pay all carry risk too. Those are questions for side-by-side financial comparison. Pointing out that most cities do it the other way does not answer them.

Yountville has resources most California towns do not: a visitor economy that pays for well-kept public facilities, and a centrally located property that may never again be available for a broad civic purpose. The financial assumptions should be tested and the alternatives compared, in language residents can follow without a semester of municipal bond finance. Abandoning a strategy because it is unconventional would be an odd choice for a town whose most famous businesses became famous by refusing to be conventional.

The Commons is not perfect, and no serious plan is. What remains open is whether the town will use what it has learned to improve the proposal or reset to the beginning with each new objection. In architecture, that is the difference between design development and an endless first meeting. It gets expensive, and the people waiting for housing are not the ones at the meetings. More than 80 percent of Yountville’s workers commute in, according to figures cited by the Register. They keep the town running and have little voice in its decisions.

The Boring Work

Today Yountville votes. The campaign literature has arrived and the accusations have circulated, and through all of it the seven and a half acres have not moved an inch. The Town still owns them, the housing need is unchanged, and a practical decision is still waiting.

I am grateful for Spates’ reporting. She did not write a defense of the Commons or excuse its proponents’ mistakes. She compared public claims with the record. She found employer consultation where exclusion had been described, professional studies where inadequate analysis had been alleged, and unfamiliarity with the very reports being challenged. She also found real communication failures, fair disagreement over unit types, and open questions about the Town’s financial risk. That is a more useful story than two camps shouting across Washington Street.

Most of what made the Commons possible was dull. Staff assembled packets that ran to hundreds of pages. Council members read them, sat through study sessions that crept toward four hours, and answered the same questions at the tenth meeting that they had answered at the first. Residents came to workshops, wrote comments, and watched some of their ideas survive and others not. Consultants ran the numbers twice. None of it makes a good campaign mailer. It is how a town decides anything, and the people who did it deserve more credit than the people who arrived late to announce that it had not been done.

Nobody needs a degree to take part in local government, and no resident should be dismissed for not reading a 248-page housing assessment. Experience and skepticism count. When the argument turns on whether an analysis was adequate or a consultation took place, though, it is fair to ask whether anyone read the analysis or checked the calendar. Otherwise the debate becomes competing recollections, and one side has the meeting minutes. If you doubt me, you have not read the recent articles in the Napa Register.

Tomorrow the next Council inherits the property along with the research, testimony, design work and open choices that come with it. It can revise the Commons, change the financing, or pursue a different strategy. The quality of whatever it decides will depend less on how loudly people hold their convictions than on how carefully they have read the evidence.

Whoever wins tonight, the work will be waiting Wednesday morning, and most of it will be boring. The new council will have to read the packets, sit through the meetings, and sign their name to a decision. Three of the loudest voices in this campaign have already shown how they feel about that kind of work. Gary Jabara read neither study. Thomas Keller let four requests from the Register go unanswered, along with a reporter who stopped by The French Laundry in person. Joe Tagliaboschi, who would like to be mayor, told the Register he was “not familiar” with the reports. The old school asked more of its third graders, and most of them delivered. They brought their books, raised their hands, and learned that the reading was due Monday whether or not they felt like doing it. The building has been closed for six years. The lesson is still available to anyone willing to see it, and the town will be fine as long as the people running it are ready for the difficult work of governing. Meanwhile, the speeches, the yard signs and the divisiveness will find their way to the recycling bin. Amen.

Based on Lauren A. Spates’ November 2, 2026 Napa Valley Register report, “‘Commons’ Confusion? The Communication Breakdown at the Heart of Yountville’s Housing Debate,” and the Town of Yountville’s published Commons planning record.

Disclosure: Brendan Kelly is principal of Kelly + Morgan Architecture, which served as the Town of Yountville’s Owner’s Design Consultant on the Yountville Commons. That scope is complete.

Then the Town proposed adding something apparently more controversial than a dog park: homes for a few dozen working households.

Despite years of public meetings, environmental studies, and approvals, a small minority used California’s century-old petition process to interrupt the effort. The result illustrates what legal scholar Michael Heller called the tragedy of the anticommons, a peculiar failure in which the power of a few to prevent something outweighs the collective ability to accomplish it.

This essay explores the history, humor, and extraordinary irony of a town that has become remarkably good at protecting what it has, while struggling to make room for those who might someday belong. It is also a reminder that Yountville’s history offers reasons for hope. The Commons is already here. The question is whether it can find room for a few more neighbors.

The Commons vs. the Anticommons. For the last few years, Yountville has transformed its former school property into a place for everyone, with gardens, recreation, civic facilities, and gathering spaces. But when the Town proposed adding homes for a few dozen working households, a small minority used its power to stop what years of public planning and approvals had set in motion. The tragedy of the anticommons is that a community can have the land, the resources, and the will to accomplish something worthwhile, yet still be stopped by those who would rather keep the gate locked.

The Robber Barons of the Rhine

In medieval Germany, the surest way to get rich was to build a castle above the Rhine and refuse to let anyone pass. The local nobility had discovered that commerce was a splendid thing, especially when someone else did the work and paid for the privilege. They built towers, stretched chains across the river, and charged tolls to the merchants moving goods between towns. The neighboring barons knew a good idea when they saw one and put up chains of their own. Before long, floating a barrel of wine downstream took the resources of a minor kingdom and the patience of a modern California planning applicant.

Every one of them thought he was being perfectly reasonable. Each baron controlled only his own stretch of river. Each toll had some local justification, and each castle was a substantial investment its owner was understandably anxious to protect. Added together, all that reasonable self-interest made the river steadily less useful for the job rivers have done since roughly the invention of water. Merchants lost money, and so did the towns. Eventually the barons lost money too, because there was less commerce left to tax. The Rhine had become a very efficient system for protecting individual interests at the expense of everyone who depended on it.

In 1998 the legal scholar Michael Heller gave this a name: the tragedy of the anticommons. Most of us learned about its better-known opposite in school. In the tragedy of the commons, a shared resource is ruined because everyone uses too much of it. The anticommons is what happens when too many people hold the power to stop a resource from being used at all. One of Heller’s many examples was the empty storefronts of post-communist Eastern Europe, where would-be merchants couldn’t open shops because the rights to occupy and operate the buildings were split among competing authorities. The stores sat empty, the customers stood outside, and everyone holding a veto could congratulate himself on having used it.

I’ve been thinking about those barons lately, mostly when I drive past the Yountville Commons. There are no castles overlooking the property, though a few nearby buildings might qualify on their assessed values alone. Nobody has stretched a chain across Yount Street yet, although I wouldn’t rule out a committee to study the appropriate chain material. What we have instead is a small town that spent nearly a century turning an old school property into a remarkable collection of shared public amenities, and then discovered that letting a few middle-class workers live there was the one act of generosity that needed practically everyone’s permission.

The School That Became a Town

The story starts in the late 1800’s, when Yountville built a grammar school on the property. It was a modest building for a modest community, built when the main worry about children was finding enough classrooms to hold them. In 1928, they built a more modern one but it was still the Grammar School. By the 1950s the school had outgrown that building, so the town did what towns once did when they had more children than room. It built an even bigger school. That 1928 building became Town Hall, which put municipal government on the same ground where generations of local children had started their education.

There was something quietly optimistic in that decision. The town didn’t abandon a sound building just because its first purpose had ended. It gave the building a new one and brought civic life closer to the center of town. The children moved into larger quarters, the Town moved into the old schoolhouse, and the property began turning from a school campus into something more interesting. As far as I know, nobody called it a commons at the time. They were too busy making one.

For many years the arrangement worked. Children went to school, residents did their business at Town Hall, and the grounds held the ordinary activities of a small American town: baseball games, school gardens, playgrounds, and the countless unremarkable events that make up community life. Nobody had to explain why these uses belonged next to each other. Being close together was part of what made them useful, and the buildings took on meaning from the lives lived in and around them. It was an entirely sensible arrangement, which may be why it would be so hard to propose from scratch today.

Over the following generations, the town changed. It got wealthier, its houses got more valuable, and its population got older. Families with children became a smaller share of the community, and the school that once needed a bigger building eventually didn’t have enough students to stay open. In one of those reversals that would seem heavy-handed in a novel, a town that once ran short of classrooms because it had too many children ended up with a school property to reuse because it had too few. The children hadn’t vanished from California, of course. They were growing up in places their parents could afford.

A Rather Successful Experiment in Sharing

In 2024 the Town bought the 7.5-acre property from the school district for about $11 million. It was a rare chance to keep a large, centrally located piece of land in public hands instead of letting it pass into the private real estate market. There were open questions about the long-term future of the site, but the Town didn’t wait for a perfect master plan before putting it to use. It started with the buildings and grounds already there, an approach the people who turned the grammar school into Town Hall years earlier would have recognized.

The old school library became Yountville Fit, a local health club. That neatly reverses the usual educational arrangement, in which children are encouraged to exercise their minds and told repeatedly not to run in the library. The multipurpose building became Don and Sally Schmitt Hall, home to children’s camps, classes, meetings, and community events. A building that once served the daily needs of schoolchildren still serves the recreation and social life of the whole town. These were not glamorous transformations. They are the kind of practical adaptation that makes public property more valuable over time.

The abandoned school garden had an even more remarkable revival. Under the direction of the celebrated local farmer Peter Jacobsen and a dedicated group of volunteers, the neglected beds went back into cultivation. The volunteers grow vegetables and herbs for the community and donate the harvest rather than sell it. Their produce supplies the Farmstand Café at The Coop, which occupies the former Little League snack shack. There is something entirely Yountville about a baseball concession stand turning into a café stocked from a garden tended by one of the Napa Valley’s most respected farmers. In another town, the snack shack might have reopened with a new freezer and slightly better nachos. Here it acquired a farm-to-table philosophy.

Part of the baseball field became Yountville’s first dog park, an amenity so well suited to the town’s current demographics that it’s a wonder it took this long. Yountville now has a good many more dogs than children, and the dogs appear to have the stronger constituency. They have their own fenced facility, clearly posted rules, and an appetite for neighborhood socializing that would put most public outreach meetings to shame. The dog park is called Canine Commons, so at least one segment of the population has accepted the idea of shared public space without demanding an environmental impact report on the meaning of the word.

Taken together, these changes make an impressive small experiment in civic imagination. A library turned into a health club and a multipurpose room into a community hall. A neglected garden now feeds people, the snack shack has become a café, and a ballfield is where the town’s dogs conduct their complicated social affairs. None of it required destroying the neighborhood or discarding its history. The Town simply recognized that public property can serve different public purposes as a community changes.

The Town gave the whole property a name, Yountville Commons. One might have thought that would be the least controversial part.

The Dangerous Business of Naming Things

It turns out the word Commons has become a political provocation. Throughout this election season, several candidates and opponents of the housing plan have pointedly called the property the former school site. That is technically accurate, in the same way Town Hall is the former grammar school and The Coop is the former Little League snack shack. Each description is historically correct and curiously selective. It names what the building used to be and declines to acknowledge what it has become.

Someone has even filed a public records request asking how the property came to be called Yountville Commons, as though the Town had quietly conferred a hereditary title on 7.5 acres of municipal real estate. I would dearly love to know what the requester expects to find. An unauthorized naming ceremony, maybe, held after midnight by planning staff in ceremonial robes. A secret memo showing that the word Commons was smuggled into the municipal vocabulary by outside agitators. Or, most alarming of all, evidence that someone at Town Hall looked at a collection of shared public facilities and called them what they were.

The Town’s own explanation was much less mysterious. In August 2024, public works staff described the property as land that belongs to the community, whose future would affect the entire town, and said that made Yountville Commons an appropriate name. The announcement came with improvements to the site, including the opening of Canine Commons and the conversion of former school facilities to new uses. It was a practical description of a civic place taking shape, nothing more.

Names matter, though, especially when a town is arguing about its future. Calling the property the former school keeps it safely in the past, defined by something that has ended. Calling it the Commons implies a continuing public purpose, something that belongs to the town and can change with its needs. The first name leans toward nostalgia and the second toward what might come next. Neither changes the legal status of the property, but which one a person prefers says a good deal about how that person understands what is at stake. It is hard to imagine a more literal expression of the anticommons than a political fight over whether the public may call its own public property a commons.

The Moment the Commons Became Controversial

For all the argument about the property’s future, the Town had already accomplished a good deal. Residents worked out at Yountville Fit and children went to camp at Schmitt Hall. Volunteers worked the garden, customers gathered at The Coop, and the dogs had their own small republic behind the fence. The old school had become a lively collection of public uses, tied to the Town Hall that had occupied the original grammar school for generations. It was exactly the kind of incremental, imaginative reuse preservationists usually applaud, and the Town had good reason to be pleased. Then came the proposal to add housing.

It was not an apartment tower, a gated enclave for visiting billionaires, or a speculative resort. The long-term plan called for modest workforce housing woven in among the existing civic uses, gardens, paths, and public spaces. The first phase contemplated 30 to 40 homes. The range was deliberate. The plan used form-based design, which fixes the size, shape, and placement of the buildings and leaves the number of homes inside them to depend on the mix of smaller and larger units. The same buildings could hold more households or fewer, which let the first phase begin housing some of the middle-income workers who serve Yountville and increasingly can’t afford to live there. The buildings were designed at neighborhood scale, with simple forms and shared outdoor space instead of the usual apartment blocks marooned in asphalt. The idea was to extend the logic of the Commons.

The library could become a gym and the multipurpose room a community hall. The snack shack could become a café, the ballfield a dog park, and the abandoned garden a productive agricultural enterprise. Everyone understood those changes as improvements to the public realm and as proof the Town was making good use of its investment. The prospect of a few dozen households introduced a new and far more alarming kind of public benefit: people who might actually live there. And about 2 weeks after a 4-1 vote authorizing the updated zoning that would allow homes to be built on the former school site, a few residents who had avoided the years of public hearings started to notice what was happening.

The distinction is revealing. They are comfortable sharing amenities with people who already belong to the community, and less comfortable when sharing means making room for people who don’t belong yet. A dog park serves the existing population, and so do a gym and a café. Workforce housing would serve future residents, people whose names aren’t on the voter rolls and whose opinions haven’t been folded into the familiar social arrangements of the town. They are hypothetical neighbors, which makes them far easier to oppose than real ones. Nobody has to explain to a hypothetical neighbor why there is no room for her.

Opponents raised the familiar questions about cost, parking, density, and scale. Those are legitimate subjects for public discussion, and no proposal should escape scrutiny because its intentions are good. But the Town had spent years studying the property, holding public outreach, reviewing environmental effects, and refining the plan. The housing proposal did not appear one morning under a tarp. It was discussed in public, examined by consultants, and approved through the ordinary machinery of municipal government. Discovering afterward that the machinery produced a result you dislike doesn’t mean the machinery failed. It means you dislike the result. California, with its customary generosity toward procedure, had provided a way to start over.

The Ghost of 1911

In 1911, California voters adopted the Progressive Era reforms that still shape the state’s politics: the initiative, the recall, and the power of voters to challenge a law their representatives had passed by gathering 10% of voters signatures against it. The reforms were meant to give ordinary citizens a way to confront powerful institutions and interests that had stopped answering to the public. That last power was a real democratic innovation, since voters no longer had to accept whatever their representatives enacted. It came out of an era when the railroads exercised extraordinary influence over California politics, and reformers believed direct democracy could act as a counterweight.

More than a century later, that machinery arrived in Yountville. After a contentious council study session in early February, a small group of residents began collecting signatures on a petition to repeal the Commons zoning ordinance. By March 5 they had the 174 signatures required to qualify it, 10 percent of the town’s registered voters. One voter in ten, without a single ballot being cast, could set in motion a legal process capable of suspending a major land-use decision.

There is a fine historical irony in using a Progressive Era reform, designed partly to check concentrated power, to stop a public effort to house working households. The reformers of 1911 would recognize the democratic principle at work. They might be surprised to find it applied to the question of whether a former elementary school should house nurses, chefs, municipal employees, and other members of the middle class. The robber barons of the Rhine had chains, and California’s reformers gave us petitions. Both are perfectly legal, and neither guarantees the river keeps moving.

The petition did not prohibit housing on the property, and it did not force the Town to give up the Commons. Once it qualified, the ordinance was suspended and the Town Council had two choices under the law: repeal its own ordinance or put it on the ballot. The council repealed it, which returned the property to its previous zoning. No vote was ever held but the one on Nov 3 will effectively decide its fate. The Town still owns the land, the existing amenities kept operating, and the need for workforce housing stayed exactly where it was before anyone circulated a petition. What disappeared was the immediate legal path to carrying out the adopted plan.

This is the anticommons at work. Nobody has to seize public land, knock down a building, or announce that working people are unwelcome. All it takes is enough people with enough procedural power to interrupt the process by which a shared resource might serve a wider public. Everyone can say they support housing in principle, as long as it is the correct housing, in a suitable location, at an acceptable cost, with adequate parking, agreeable architecture, and something close to unanimous support. No proposal can meet all those conditions at once, so the principle stays intact and the housing stays unbuilt. Under those circumstances a person can support workforce housing forever. It is a remarkably durable political position.

The People Who Are Not in the Room

Local housing debates have a structural problem that gets surprisingly little attention. The people who already live in a town have the political rights and social connections to shape its future. They go to meetings, sign petitions, run campaigns, and vote. The people who might live there if more housing existed have none of those advantages. They aren’t neighbors or constituents yet, and often the community deciding whether they can ever join it doesn’t know they exist. Except in Yountville where it is obvious that the hundreds of people who arrive here everyday to keep the town’s businesses running are literally parking on the streets in front of their homes.

The result is an odd democratic imbalance. Current residents decide whether prospective residents may become current residents, and the prospective residents are mostly absent from the proceedings. Others have to represent their interests, usually through arguments about housing policy, labor shortages, or economic necessity. Those arguments are valid, but they are a poor substitute for a person at the microphone explaining what a modest home near work would mean for her family. The people most affected by exclusion are often the least able to take part in the decisions that keep it in place.

Yountville’s prosperity makes the imbalance especially sharp. The town has some of the most celebrated restaurants and hotels in the region, staffed by a workforce that mostly lives somewhere else. It has extraordinary public amenities, a substantial tax base, and an enviable reputation for keeping up its physical surroundings. Meanwhile the ordinary middle-class household that once might have bought a modest house in town is increasingly priced out. A three-bedroom ranch house that served one family for decades can now fetch a price that appeals to someone shopping for a second home, and the seller has every reason to accept. The market is doing exactly what markets do when desirable property is scarce.

There is nothing immoral about buying a second home, and nobody who works in Yountville expects the purchasing power of the wealthiest people who visit it. The question isn’t whether a dishwasher should be able to dine at The French Laundry or a hotel employee should be able to buy an estate. It is whether a town with Yountville’s resources can make room for some of the people who want to live where they work. That is a much more modest ambition, though it has somehow gotten tangled up in arguments about socialism, property rights, and the impending collapse of civilization.

The original grammar school served a community that expected its children to live nearby. When more children arrived, the town built a larger school, and when the town needed municipal space, Town Hall moved into the original building. Each generation adapted the property to the community it had become, and the present generation has inherited the same responsibility under different circumstances. The problem today isn’t finding classrooms for children who are arriving. It is finding homes for families who may otherwise never arrive at all.

The Price of Keeping Everything Perfect

One of the most attractive features of the anticommons is that its costs are almost invisible. A proposed building has a price tag, a construction schedule, and a set of drawings that can be criticized in great detail. An unbuilt building has none of those inconveniences. Nobody gets an invoice for the housing that was never built, the workers who keep commuting, or the young families who settle somewhere else. The costs are spread over years and miles, piling up quietly in the lives of people unlikely to attend the next Town Council meeting.

That gives the status quo a remarkable political advantage. Its consequences are familiar enough to pass for natural conditions, while the consequences of change get presented as risks requiring exhaustive analysis. We can price out the first 30 to 40 homes, but we rarely calculate the cost of not building them. We debate how many parking spaces future residents will need and seldom consider how many miles those same residents will drive if they keep living outside town. A proposed building’s shadow gets studied with great care, while the longer shadow of a town losing its capacity to house ordinary households goes unmeasured.

None of this is an argument for careless development. Yountville should keep demanding good architecture, thoughtful landscaping, sound financing, and careful stewardship of public money. Those standards helped make the town what it is, and there’s no reason to drop them. Standards are supposed to improve what we build, though. They aren’t supposed to grow into an endless catalogue of reasons to build nothing. Past a certain point, the pursuit of perfection works against the very qualities we say we are protecting.

The Commons plan tried to work within those standards, with a neighborhood of modest buildings and shared spaces that could sit alongside the civic amenities already in place. Its design could be refined, its financing examined, and its phasing adjusted. Because the Town kept ownership of the property, it retains a great deal of control over how the site develops. Most communities trying to create workforce housing would envy that position, especially those working on land already held by private developers.

Yountville owns the land and has the need, the resources, and the institutional capacity to act. What it has struggled to put together is the political agreement to use those advantages. Michael Heller would recognize the predicament immediately.

The Commons Is Already Here

The most hopeful fact about Yountville Commons is that it already exists. It isn’t a set of drawings waiting for construction or a slogan invented to sell a housing plan. It is a real place: Town Hall in the original schoolhouse, a health club in the old library, a community hall in the former multipurpose building, a working garden, a café, and a dog park. Residents use these places every day, mostly without a thought for the complicated history that made them possible. The buildings changed and their purposes evolved, and the property became more useful because the town let it change.

The housing plan was meant to continue that tradition by adding one more use to a place already defined by several public purposes sitting side by side. A few dozen households would diminish the meaning of the Commons no more than turning the library into a gym diminished the meaning of the old school. The addition would simply acknowledge that a town’s public life includes the people who live there along with the facilities they visit. Homes belong in a commons as much as gardens, gathering places, and paths do, because the people in those homes are part of what gives the shared spaces their purpose.

That is the distinction the political fight has obscured. The Commons was never only a housing project, though housing was always central to its long-term purpose. It was an attempt to work out how a valuable piece of public land could keep serving a changing town. That effort started long before the Town bought the property in 2024, and it will go on long after this election. What remains to be seen is whether the next chapter gets written with the same practical generosity as the earlier ones.

The people who turned the original grammar school into Town Hall didn’t preserve the building by insisting it stay an empty school. They preserved it by giving it a new public purpose. The garden volunteers honored that ground’s history by pulling the weeds, working the soil, and planting vegetables, and they invited others to help make it productive again. The same principle applies to the rest of the property. Preservation at its best is the art of letting something valuable stay useful as the world around it changes.

There’s a lesson in this for the candidates asking voters to trust them with Yountville’s future. A council member can protect the town without treating every new resident as a threat to its character. Listening to the public is part of the job, and so is making decisions. Respecting the past doesn’t require pretending the property still belongs to an institution that left it years ago. The old school is part of Yountville’s history. The Commons is part of its present, and its future is still an open question.

The River Still Runs

I keep coming back to those barons on the Rhine, each guarding his stretch of river against the intolerable possibility that someone might float past without permission. They weren’t fools. They understood their immediate interests perfectly well, and many probably thought of themselves as conscientious guardians of their communities. What they missed was that the prosperity of the whole valley depended on something larger than the sum of their tolls. The chains eventually came down, and the reason wasn’t that the river belonged to nobody. Its value depended on connecting people, and the chains kept them apart.

Yountville faces a much gentler version of that dilemma. Nobody proposes to erase its history, tear up its neighborhoods, or give away what makes it beautiful. The question before the town is whether those qualities can extend to a few more people, including some who already contribute to its prosperity every day. The Commons offers a way to answer with modest homes, gardens, paths, and shared civic space instead of one more declaration of good intentions. It won’t solve the Napa Valley’s housing problem, but it could show something that has become rare: a successful community willing to share a little more of its success.

I believe Yountville can do it, partly because it has been doing it for nearly a century. The original school became Town Hall, the larger school became a set of public amenities, and the abandoned garden became a place where volunteers grow food for their neighbors. The town made each of those changes out of confidence that it could change without losing itself. The next one needn’t be any different.

The 7.5 acres in the middle of town remain in public hands. The community cares deeply about its future, and the chance to welcome some of the people who want to join it hasn’t gone anywhere. The schoolchildren of 1928 could hardly have imagined the town that grew up around their little grammar school, and we can’t know what Yountville will look like a century from now. But the Town’s voters can make choices that leave the next generation room to belong here, rather than forcing it to admire the town from somewhere else.

The tragedy of the anticommons is that a community can get so good at protecting what it has that it forgets what those things were for. The hope of the Commons is that Yountville already knows another way. Its history is full of buildings that found new purposes, public spaces that took on new activities, and people who saw a chance to make something useful together. The garden is growing, and the dogs are having a wonderful time. Nobody has circulated a petition against the dogs. Yet.

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.

The wine flows freely, the speeches are plentiful, and the reporter discovers that questions are considerably less welcome. Meanwhile, the Town Council chamber remains open to anyone willing to have the conversation in public.

The Napa Valley Register takes a closer look at Yountville’s unusually expensive political season.

Five days before an election, the Napa Valley Register reminds Yountville what good journalism looks like.

On March 3, Thomas Keller stood before the Yountville Town Council in his chef’s whites and complained that nobody had bothered to ask his opinion about the Yountville Commons. He had reached out to councilmembers, he said, and welcomed a conversation. “Each one of you has my phone number; you know where I am every day.” It was a generous invitation from a man whose restaurant is famous for being extraordinarily difficult to get into. Unfortunately, when the Napa Valley Register took him at his word and requested an interview, Keller declined four times. On October 26, a reporter went to The French Laundry in person. Still no answer.

That small encounter captures something about Yountville’s political season that has been difficult to describe without sounding like another participant in the quarrel. Everyone wants a conversation, provided the audience is sympathetic, the questions are predictable, and nobody is obligated to answer them. We have enjoyed a summer of conversation at some of the finest hospitality venues in the Napa Valley, complete with live entertainment, excellent wine, and carefully assembled guest lists. What has been harder to arrange is a conversation in which the people making accusations are expected to explain them. Lauren Spates has apparently discovered the problem too, although she approached it with the additional inconvenience of being a journalist.

Her October 29 article, “‘Commons’ Ground?”, opens a three-part Register series called “A Town Divided.” The first installment examines political influence and money; the next two will explore communications and the housing proposal itself. I am quoted several times, and my architectural firm served as the Town’s Owner’s Design Consultant on the Commons, so nobody should mistake me for a disinterested spectator. But I can appreciate the reporting without agreeing with every conclusion. In a controversy overflowing with opinions, Spates has done something refreshingly old-fashioned. She has investigated what people actually did.

The Season of the Party

Gary Jabara spent the summer entertaining Yountville residents at Estate Yountville, where the surroundings were splendid and the admission was free. There were mariachi musicians in July, country music in September, Oktoberfest in October, and a birthday cake for the host. Jabara explained that these gatherings concerned issues rather than politics, a distinction that became increasingly difficult to maintain as favored candidates were introduced and opponents of the Commons gathered around the microphones. According to the Register, officials and candidates supporting the project received no invitations. One can hardly blame a host for preferring agreeable dinner companions, although it is an unusual approach to a community-wide discussion.

Spates did not simply report that Jabara held parties and others objected to them. She reviewed recordings, correspondence, campaign filings, and public records, then interviewed people who had attended. She documented an independent expenditure committee that had already spent at least $28,000 supporting four candidates, the involvement of attorneys, expensive records requests, and Jabara’s purchase of the Yountville Sun. She also noticed that Jabara had announced he was voting for Joe Tagliaboschi and Hillery Trippe, despite being registered to vote in Orange County. When asked, he explained that he was speaking figuratively. California election officials have yet to introduce a category for figurative ballots, but the explanation presumably satisfied its author.

One of the more affecting interviews came from Jennifer Brusstar of the Tug McGraw Foundation, who initially brought veterans to the gatherings believing they were occasions to honor them. She told Spates that the political speeches made her uncomfortable, and eventually she stopped bringing the veterans because she did not want them used as political pawns. There is something genuinely sad about that account. Veterans living in the Home deserve companionship, recognition, and invitations to community events, without finding themselves unexpectedly seated in the audience for a municipal campaign. Brusstar’s explanation needed no embellishment, and Spates wisely gave it none.

An Artificial Intelligence Arrives in Yountville

Then comes Eric Appel, whose contribution to the controversy might deserve a separate chapter in the history of modern municipal finance. Appel, the partner of council candidate Jessi Bugden and an organizer of the petition against the Commons zoning ordinance, apparently impressed Jabara with his examination of the project’s finances. Jabara told Spates that Appel had taken the Town’s financial information and fed it into “AI or something that sorted it all out.” He praised Appel for doing a fine job of synthesizing the information. This is an extraordinary origin story for a campaign accusing an entire town government of financial incompetence.

The Yountville Sun reported in March that Appel claimed the project was reportedly $70 million over budget. A remarkable discovery, considering that no complete construction budget for the long-term plan had been adopted against which such a deficit could sensibly be measured. I would be delighted to examine the calculations that produced this revelation, but I have never seen them made public. Nor did Appel, Bugden, or Jabara telephone or email me to ask about the architectural work, the construction estimates, or the assumptions underlying the planning studies. The accusations reached the public microphone without first reaching the people who could answer questions about the numbers.

I use artificial intelligence myself, and I find it enormously useful. It can sort complicated information, test hypotheses, and uncover patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed. It can also confuse an estimate with a budget, misunderstand a question, and invent answers with the cheerful certainty of a man explaining golf handicaps after his third martini. The important thing is to examine its work, particularly when the conclusions are used to accuse other people of mishandling millions of dollars. If Appel has uncovered a serious financial error, publishing the calculations would be a public service. Until then, we have an accusation, a billionaire’s endorsement of its author, and a mysterious computer that apparently cannot be called to the witness stand.

The Man Who Knew Nothing

Which returns us to Keller, who has twice told audiences I attended that he knew nothing about the Commons. His general manager at The French Laundry, Michael Minnillo, served on Yountville’s Affordable and Workforce Housing Oversight Committee, established following the 2018 passage of Measure S. The committee has a narrow, important purpose: ensuring that hotel-tax revenues collected for affordable and workforce housing are spent for their intended purposes. It does not approve the Commons, select its architect, or authorize construction. Its responsibility is oversight of the public money, precisely the financial accountability the project’s critics say has been missing.

I presented the Commons to that committee on September 25, 2025, with then-Town Manager Brad Raulston. Minnillo was present as we discussed expenditures, rents, accessibility, the prospective operator, and lease arrangements. The meeting was public, the materials were available, and the committee’s function was to examine whether the spending aligned with Measure S. Several months later, on February 17, Keller himself attended part of a public study session devoted entirely to the Commons. Minnillo spoke at that meeting on behalf of the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group, discussing the difficulty of housing employees who commute from distant communities. The Yountville Sun reported both men’s presence and published a photograph of Minnillo at the microphone.

None of this proves how much Keller understood or remembered, nor should anyone be required to master every detail of a municipal housing proposal. But it makes his public profession of ignorance difficult to leave unexplored, especially when his general manager participated in the very oversight process created to protect the housing funds. Keller may have excellent reasons for opposing the proposed unit sizes, parking arrangements, or financial structure. He has also said he supports workforce housing and already accommodates some employees in properties he controls. Those are useful subjects for a serious interview, which makes his unwillingness to speak with the Register all the more curious. On March 3, he invited a conversation with people who knew where to find him. The reporter found the address.

A Tale of Two Newspapers

The Yountville Sun occupies an interesting position in all this. After its former publisher suspended operations in May, Jabara bought the newspaper and revived it in July, promising that its editorial independence would continue. I have no evidence that he instructs its editor what to publish, and keeping a local newspaper alive deserves acknowledgment. But independence cannot exist solely as a promise from the proprietor, particularly when the proprietor is financing political expenditures, hosting campaign gatherings, and publicly criticizing the government his newspaper covers. The real test is whether the newspaper is prepared to ask its owner the same uncomfortable questions it asks everyone else.

The Sun has covered public meetings, recorded criticism, and published useful information, including the February study session attended by Keller and Minnillo. What it has not consistently done, in my view, is pursue the next question. A candidate claims the project is $70 million over budget. Compared with which budget? A businessman says the council wasted millions. Which expenditure was improper, and which council decision authorized it? A celebrated restaurateur says nobody discussed the Commons with him. What was he doing at the February study session, and what did his general manager learn while overseeing Measure S expenditures? None of those questions requires the newspaper to support the Commons. They require it to take its own reporting seriously.

Spates offers a useful contrast. She checked Jabara’s voter registration, examined his political committee’s spending, sought responses from the people involved, and searched court records when he threatened litigation against an anonymous whistleblower. She also disclosed that the Register had applied for a grant from the Town’s Community Foundation, an acknowledgment of a potential interest that readers had every right to know about. The article is not perfect. It describes the Commons as having “fell apart,” when the council actually repealed the enabling zoning ordinance after the petition, leaving the property and the Town’s housing problem exactly where they were. But a reporter need not arrive at all my conclusions to earn my appreciation for doing the work.

One other item is worth making. The Register reported me as saying that 90 percent of Yountville’s residents live at the Veterans Home or in its mobile-home communities. Obviously that’s not true. What I actually told the reporter was that approximately 90 percent of the people living in Yountville’s restricted housing are residents of the Veterans Home or the town’s mobile-home communities. I was describing the composition of Yountville’s existing affordable housing, not suggesting that nine out of ten people in town live in those two places. They clarified that quote within 24 hours and I’m grateful for their fast response.

The Room We Already Have

Five days from now, Yountville will elect a mayor and two councilmembers. Whatever the result, the former elementary school property will still belong to the Town, the money already invested will remain spent, and the workers who cannot afford to live near their jobs will still have to commute home. The election will not create a financial alternative, resolve the housing question, or make the consequences of public decisions disappear. Those matters will eventually return to the council, where the competing arguments must be considered in the open. The people asking to change the Town’s direction will have an opportunity to explain what that direction should be.

And Yountville already has a perfectly suitable place for that discussion. The Town Council chamber is neither glamorous nor especially comfortable, but it has microphones, published agendas, public records, professional advisers, and seats that do not require an invitation from a hotel owner. Anyone can attend, offer criticism, ask questions, and challenge the assumptions behind a proposal. Keller has used it, Minnillo has used it, Appel has used it, and so have hundreds of residents whose opinions differ. The more demanding task is to arrive with evidence, remain for the answers, and accept that public discussion involves people who may not agree with you.

The Register has two installments remaining, and I will read them with the same interest and skepticism I brought to the first. I am pleased that Spates is asking questions, but I do not need her to become an advocate for the Commons or an opponent of its critics. I would rather have another independent reporter willing to follow an argument wherever the evidence leads, even when that destination is inconvenient for me. With five days remaining before the election, that seems a more useful contribution to Yountville than another banquet, another campaign email, or another accusation whose supporting calculations nobody can find.

Disclosure: Brendan Kelly is principal of Kelly + Morgan Architecture, which served as the Town of Yountville’s Owner’s Design Consultant on the Yountville Commons. That scope is complete.

Meanwhile, the future of the Yountville Commons remains unresolved, residents of the town’s mobile-home parks are seeking greater security, the Housing Element faces serious challenges, and one of Yountville’s most significant historic landmarks, the Groezinger Winery, faces a proposed transformation. Beyond town limits, Napa Valley’s luxury wine industry is undergoing a significant economic realignment.

The Town That Can Afford Almost Everything examines the remarkable success of a community that has become exceptionally good at preserving its appearance, and asks whether it can be equally thoughtful about preserving its future. With so much wealth, public land, and institutional knowledge at its disposal, Yountville has opportunities most towns can only imagine. The question is whether a town that can afford almost everything can also find a way to make room for others.

Yountville has become extraordinarily successful at welcoming visitors, but can it still make room for the working people who might call it home? This illustration captures the contrast at the heart of the essay: a flourishing hospitality economy in the foreground and the quieter possibility of another generation of families finding a place in the village beyond. The question is not whether Yountville must choose between prosperity and community, but whether its remarkable wealth can help sustain both.

The View From Washington Street

There may be no more convincing argument for the success of the American hospitality industry than a pleasant Saturday fall evening in Yountville. The sidewalks are immaculate, the gardens are tended, the restaurants are celebrated around the world, and hotel guests cheerfully pay more for a night’s sleep than many Americans spend on a month’s rent. Wine arrives in beautiful glasses, accompanied by explanations of its geological origins and occasionally the suggestion that a particular hillside possesses a personality. Nobody is explaining the geological origins of the people who wash the glasses. They arrive before the guests and leave after them, often driving considerable distances to participate in an economy that has become extraordinarily successful without making much room for them.

Yountville has good reason to be proud. It is a small town that accomplished something very few California communities managed during the last half-century: it became prosperous without becoming ugly. The surrounding agricultural landscape was preserved, the commercial center remained walkable, and an extraordinary hospitality industry developed without turning Washington Street into a six-lane highway lined with franchise restaurants and drive-through pharmacies. The result is a place admired by people who live here, people who work here, people who visit every year, and people who dream of someday affording the privilege. This achievement was neither an accident nor the product of a single charismatic leader. It came from decades of planning, restraint, investment, public service, private enterprise, and the willingness of earlier generations to make decisions whose benefits would arrive long after the people making them had left the room.

The financial results are impressive. In June, Yountville collected a record $971,724 in hotel occupancy taxes, nearly 25 percent more than the previous June, with average room rates reaching $821. An earlier study of the visitor economy estimated that hotel taxes supplied approximately 65 percent of the Town’s general fund, an astonishing arrangement in which people who do not live here pay for much of the government serving those who do. Restaurant spending contributes additional revenues. It is a remarkably agreeable arrangement, particularly for residents familiar with the financial problems confronting other small California municipalities. Yountville has the enviable privilege of contemplating its future with a healthy bank account, substantial public assets, and the continuing enthusiasm of visitors willing to pay handsomely for the experience.

But prosperity has a peculiar way of concealing its unfinished business. Yountville’s streets are beautiful, its accounts are healthy, its property values are extraordinary, and its elementary school has closed because the district could no longer sustain it. The houses remain, but the families that once occupied them are increasingly sold as second or third homes. The people who care for veterans, maintain the parks, manage the hotels, prepare the meals, and operate the public facilities generally cannot afford to establish their own households here because the town has severely limited new homes.. It is possible, apparently, to become an exceptionally successful town while gradually losing some of the things that made it a town in the first place.

One week from today, on November 3, Yountville will elect a mayor and two members of its five-person Town Council. The campaign has produced the customary promises of responsible leadership, improved communication, greater transparency, fiscal discipline, and a better Yountville, a collection of objectives so universally agreeable that one wonders how the town managed to become divided over them. Everyone wants a better Yountville. Everyone wants to protect its character. Everyone loves the place, or at least the version of the place that introduced itself to them when they first arrived.

The difficulty begins when someone asks what, exactly, those beautiful words will require.

Making Room for Others

There is an expression that has appeared repeatedly in discussions about Yountville’s future: making room for others. It sounds harmless enough, the sort of thing a kindergarten teacher might write on a classroom bulletin board beneath a collection of construction-paper handprints. In Yountville, however, it describes a rather difficult social proposition. It means accepting that a community largely organized around retirement, expensive real estate, and the entertainment of visitors might also benefit from the presence of some younger residents who are neither wealthy nor retired. Not thousands of them. Not enough to turn Yountville into a suburban subdivision or suddenly provide housing for every person employed in town. Just enough to restore some of the generational variety that once came naturally to an ordinary American village.

The circumstances are unusual. Yountville is home to the 615-acre Veterans Home of California, a venerable institution established in 1884 to provide residential care and services for those who served their country. It also has two substantial manufactured-home communities, Bella Vista and Rancho de Napa, containing 299 homes according to the Town’s adopted Housing Element. Eighty percent of those homes are reserved for people aged 55 and older. These are important and legitimate residential uses, and the Veterans Home is an essential part of Yountville’s history and identity. But together they illustrate how much of the town’s residential landscape is already dedicated, by mission or regulation, to seniors.

There is nothing wrong with older people wanting to live in a beautiful place. Many of them built it, protected it, volunteered for its institutions, supported its businesses, and contributed the time and money necessary to preserve the village that everyone now admires. Aging residents are entitled to security, companionship, and the pleasure of remaining in familiar surroundings. The question is not whether they belong. It is whether, in making Yountville such an appealing place to retire, the community has made it extraordinarily difficult for almost anyone else to begin.

Consider the workforce. Yountville’s adopted Housing Element, using federal employment data from 2019, reports that approximately 82 percent of people working in town live somewhere else. At the Veterans Home, approximately 90 percent of employees commute from outside Yountville. Those figures and their implications are hardly obscure. The town functions as a major employment center while serving as a residential community for only a relatively small share of its workers. This arrangement is neither accidental nor particularly mysterious. Workers follow the available wages, housing follows the purchasing power of prospective residents, and Yountville’s existing houses have become attractive to people whose financial resources have little relationship to the jobs available on Washington Street.

Nobody seriously imagines that the Commons, or any other single property in town, could house the thousands of people who work here. That was never a realistic objective. The more modest ambition was to create opportunities for a comparatively small number of them to become neighbors as well as employees, contributing something to the life of the village beyond their working hours. A restaurant manager might walk home after dinner service. A caregiver at the Veterans Home might live close enough to respond to an emergency without beginning another lengthy commute. A young couple might discover that they could remain in Yountville even if their parents had not purchased a house here forty years ago.

Making room for others is not a demand that Yountville become something unrecognizable. It is a question of whether the community has room for anyone whose biography does not begin with a successful career somewhere else.

The School That Might Be Needed Again

The former elementary school offers perhaps the most revealing evidence of Yountville’s predicament. It closed in June 2020, a consequence of declining enrollment across the school district. For generations, children had walked through its doors, played on its grounds, and supplied the village with the small, noisy interruptions that distinguish a living community from a beautifully maintained collection of buildings. Its closure was a demographic milestone, even if it did not initially command the attention that a proposed apartment building or hotel expansion would later receive. A community had reached the point where one of its most ordinary civic institutions was no longer viable.

The Town purchased the former school property in 2024 for approximately $11 million, preserving local ownership of one of the few substantial parcels remaining in the village. The Commons planning process explored housing, recreation, civic activities, gardens, and public gathering spaces, but one of its more important innovations was architectural rather than programmatic. Yountville’s existing deed-restricted housing, produced largely through inclusionary requirements attached to earlier hotel and residential developments, consists overwhelmingly of one- and two-bedroom homes, with a smaller number of three-bedroom units and virtually no studios. This reflects the economics of private development. One-bedroom apartments generally command higher rents than studios, often with less tenant turnover, giving developers little financial incentive to produce smaller accommodations for a young, mobile workforce. Yet studios are precisely what many single hospitality employees, caregivers, and younger workers need and can afford. The Commons initially emphasized studios and one-bedroom apartments to address this neglected segment of the housing market, not because the Town had concluded that families were unwelcome or that larger homes were unnecessary. The distinction matters because a housing program should respond to actual household needs rather than simply reproduce the unit mix that private developers have found most profitable.

The more consequential feature of the Commons was its form-based design, which established the scale, massing, placement, and architectural character of modest village buildings without permanently prescribing the number or size of apartments inside them. A village house containing eight studios and one-bedroom apartments could instead be configured as five two-bedroom homes, or perhaps four three-bedroom homes, within substantially the same building envelope and at a broadly comparable construction cost. Depending on the income levels served and the resulting rents, those arrangements could also produce comparable operating revenue while accommodating very different households. Rather than committing the entire property to one demographic profile, the Commons established a repeatable architectural framework that could respond to changing demand over successive phases. One building might accommodate eight single workers, another five couples or small families, and another four households with children, all within a coherent neighborhood of gabled roofs, gardens, paths, and shared public spaces. The initial unit mix was therefore a response to an identified shortage, not a permanent limitation on what the property could become. That flexibility is particularly important in a town that has already lost its elementary school and has almost no opportunity to accommodate younger families. The Commons could provide modest homes for workers today while retaining the capacity to welcome growing households tomorrow, potentially contributing to the conditions that might someday support a small school again.

The point of form-based design was never simply to accommodate different kinds of housing. It was to establish the scale, proportions, architectural character, and relationship of buildings to streets, gardens, and public spaces, while allowing their uses to evolve over generations. A well-designed village should not require its buildings to become obsolete every time the economy, population, or community’s needs change. If this sounds like some revolutionary planning theory, consider the old building at Washington and Creek Streets. Built as a saloon around 1900, it later became a steam laundry, then a modest restaurant operated by Don and Sally Schmitt, and eventually one of the most celebrated restaurants in the world. Nobody who laid those original stones could have imagined Thomas Keller, three Michelin stars, or people traveling halfway around the world to eat dinner there. They simply built a good building, and Yountville spent the next century finding new reasons to use it.

Yet there has been remarkably little public discussion of whether portions of the publicly owned Commons property ought to preserve the possibility of a small school someday. Perhaps that school would be public, perhaps it would involve another educational arrangement, and perhaps the demographic conditions necessary to support it will not emerge for many years. Reopening a public school would require the participation of the district and sufficient enrollment, not merely a hopeful resolution from the Town Council. But long-range planning is precisely the discipline of protecting possibilities that cannot yet be exercised. A community that has spent decades preserving vineyard views ought to be capable of considering whether it should also preserve a place for children who have not yet been born.

The irony is difficult to overlook. The site was once a school, and the Town purchased it after the school closed because of declining enrollment. During the ensuing planning controversy, enormous attention was devoted to the precise number, size, appearance, and placement of proposed housing units. Far less attention was devoted to what the community might look like if younger households actually began returning, or whether the site should retain the flexibility to accommodate educational uses in that future. It would be unfortunate if a debate about preserving Yountville’s character concluded without anyone seriously considering the restoration of one of the institutions that once defined it.

The school grounds represent something considerably larger than the acreage shown on a survey. They are one of the few places where Yountville can still make a consequential choice about what sort of community it hopes to become.

The Years of Work Nobody Can Put on a Postcard

The Commons did not appear one morning as an unsolicited architectural rendering slipped beneath the Town Hall door. It emerged from years of discussion about affordable housing, public land, civic facilities, and the continuing disappearance of ordinary working households. In 2018, Yountville voters approved Measure S by an overwhelming margin, dedicating an additional percentage point of hotel occupancy tax to affordable and workforce housing. The political and financial principle was sensible: a portion of the extraordinary wealth generated by visitors could help address the housing pressures associated with the economy they supported. The school property subsequently presented an opportunity to apply that principle to land the community could own and control.

What followed was the occasionally tedious but indispensable work of government. There were community meetings, surveys, advisory committees, financial studies, environmental reviews, architectural investigations, planning hearings, and repeated revisions. Residents expressed competing preferences about parks, buildings, housing, civic facilities, parking, and the future of the old school grounds. The Town Council unanimously adopted a conceptual site plan in March 2025 and completed subsequent environmental and zoning work. An organized referendum effort challenged the zoning, and the Council repealed the ordinance in June 2026 rather than place it on the ballot. The legal framework changed, but the publicly owned land, the previous studies, and the documented housing needs all remain.

None of that means the Commons must be built exactly as previously proposed. Questions about construction costs, public borrowing, housing operators, density, architecture, and the proper role of municipal government deserve serious answers. It is reasonable to explore nonprofit development partnerships, revised unit mixes, alternative financing arrangements, or a longer implementation schedule. But the analysis of an alternative begins with an actual alternative. A smaller project must establish how many homes it would provide and at what cost. A different delivery method must identify who would build, finance, maintain, and manage the property. A substantially revised program must explain which public benefits would remain and which would be surrendered.

This is the difference between questioning a plan and replacing it. The first requires skepticism, which is easy to acquire and occasionally available in wholesale quantities. The second requires knowledge, persistence, professional work, financial judgment, and a willingness to explain tradeoffs to people who will not all be pleased by the result. A community should welcome careful examination of its public projects. It should also recognize that the years spent producing a detailed plan represent something more substantial than the campaign promise to produce a better one.

The Housing Element Needs More Than Encouragement

Yountville’s Housing Element was certified by the State of California in August 2024, an important accomplishment in a state where many communities have struggled to satisfy housing requirements. The document examines the town’s population, land use, employment, housing stock, affordability, and opportunities for future construction. It also contains observations that ought to be familiar to everyone participating in the current debate. The concentration of senior housing, the limited availability of multifamily homes, the shortage of housing affordable to workers, and the extraordinary commuting patterns are not speculative criticisms invented during an election. They appear in the Town’s own adopted planning record.

The most recent production numbers are sobering. During the 2023 to 2031 planning cycle, Yountville must accommodate a regional allocation of 72 homes across several income categories. As of July 2026, 13 had been built and 16 more approved, but only one of the required 19 very-low-income homes had been completed, with one more approved. The Town itself acknowledged in September that it was not on pace to meet this portion of its obligation. Of 1,372 existing homes counted in the same report, only 100 were deed-restricted as affordable to moderate- and lower-income households. These are not catastrophic numbers for a community of Yountville’s size, but neither are they evidence of a problem that will solve itself through continued expressions of good intentions.

There is an additional difficulty that government income categories tend to obscure. A substantial portion of Yountville’s missing younger population consists of people whose household incomes may be too high to qualify for deeply subsidized housing but far too low to purchase a typical detached house in town. They include couples with professional careers, skilled tradespeople, public employees, and working parents who might have been ordinary middle-class homeowners here a generation ago. California’s affordable-housing programs address important needs, but they do not automatically reconstruct the missing middle of a community’s housing market. That requires a broader conversation about housing types, attainable rents, family-sized units, and the relationship between wages and property values.

The Housing Element is a useful diagnosis. What it cannot do is produce a future merely by existing in a handsome binder at Town Hall.

Growing Old in Yountville

The housing question looks different from inside Yountville’s manufactured-home parks. Many residents purchased their homes believing they had found one of the few remaining opportunities for relatively affordable ownership in the village. Unlike owners of conventional houses, however, they generally own the structure without owning the land beneath it. Monthly space rent is therefore an unavoidable expense, and its future increases can affect both household security and the value of the home itself. For retirees living on fixed incomes, that uncertainty can become particularly consequential.

The Town has been considering a mobile-home space-rent stabilization ordinance, with the Council directing further work in August. The issue raises legitimate concerns on both sides. Park owners have expenses and property rights, and residents have substantial investments that can become difficult to protect when the economics of land ownership and homeownership are separated. Designing an ordinance that provides reasonable protections while satisfying legal requirements takes care and expertise. The work is neither glamorous nor especially likely to generate an enthusiastic campaign postcard, but it matters greatly to the people affected.

What is interesting is how closely this issue resembles the Commons debate when the details are stripped away. In one case, Yountville is considering how to make room for people who cannot afford to enter the market. In the other, it is considering how to protect people whose continued residence may become less secure as land values and operating costs change. The first concern often involves younger households, while the second disproportionately involves older residents. Both reflect the increasing distance between the value of Yountville real estate and the financial circumstances of people who would like to make their lives here.

A community capable of protecting its historic architecture and scenic landscape ought to be capable of discussing the protection of its human relationships with comparable seriousness.

When a Town Becomes a Resort

There is a word for what has happened to Yountville over the last several decades: resortification. It is not a formal planning designation, but it describes a transformation that any longtime resident can recognize. Properties that once served local needs increasingly serve visitors. Homes become investments, commercial spaces become luxury destinations, and the economic logic governing the village gradually shifts from the requirements of everyday living to the expectations of people purchasing a brief and expensive experience. None of these changes necessarily involve bad intentions. Most are the predictable decisions of businesses and property owners responding rationally to an extraordinarily valuable location.

The cumulative effect is another matter. Walk through Yountville on a Saturday evening and consider how many illuminated doorways offer a place for local people to gather without purchasing an expensive meal, wine tasting, or hotel experience. There are exceptions, of course, and the Town has invested in public recreation, community facilities, parks, and cultural activities. But the distinction between a vibrant hospitality district and a vibrant town becomes difficult to ignore. Visitors are everywhere, yet the opportunities for spontaneous, inexpensive local social life can seem remarkably limited. A busy sidewalk is not necessarily evidence of a flourishing neighborhood if almost everyone on it has a reservation somewhere.

The old American town possessed an informal social geography that rarely appeared on architectural drawings. There were diners, taverns, bookstores, neighborhood shops, school events, recreation halls, and other places where people encountered one another without requiring a special occasion or an impressive credit limit. These establishments were seldom beautiful enough to feature in a visitor brochure. Their contribution was more consequential: they provided the settings in which familiarity became friendship and people gradually developed a shared sense of belonging. A local teenager could afford to occupy a table, a retired neighbor could recognize the bartender, and a family could go out without calculating whether the evening would consume a substantial portion of its grocery budget.

Yountville retains valuable civic institutions and a community life that many residents work hard to sustain. But there is a difference between organizing an occasional public event and possessing the everyday places where a community gathers naturally. A visitor may regard the absence of ordinary local businesses as evidence of refinement, since there are fewer distractions from the curated experience. A resident may experience the same absence as a loss of social possibility. It is entirely possible for Yountville to become more attractive as a destination while becoming less convenient, less affordable, and less socially varied as a place to live.

The hotel rooms are full. The restaurants are busy. But where does the town itself go on a Saturday night besides waiting for an expensive beer at an already crowded Panchas?

What the Land Becomes Next

The prosperity of Yountville’s hospitality industry is especially interesting when considered beside the economic changes unfolding in the surrounding Napa Valley. In an October 25 essay entitled What the Land Becomes Next, vintner and rancher Ted Hall examines an agricultural economy confronting a structural correction after decades of expanding vineyard and winery investment. Hall chaired the county’s Agricultural Protection Advisory Committee in 2015, giving him an unusually informed perspective on the relationship between land, wine production, commercial expectations, and public regulation. His central observation is that Napa built an elaborate system for creating vineyards and wineries without developing a comparable system for helping landowners decide what happens when those businesses cease to be economically viable.

The numbers are striking. Hall reports that approximately 6,000 acres of Napa vineyard have been removed since the fall of 2024, with an estimated 8,000 acres going unharvested in 2025. His analysis describes a region whose winery capacity expanded far beyond the volume of grapes grown locally, encouraging ever more expensive land, facilities, brands, and hospitality operations. Now the industry is adjusting to demand that no longer supports all the expensive production and marketing infrastructure accumulated during the long expansion. Some vineyards will be replanted, some wineries will survive because of distinctive products and loyal customers, and other properties may eventually find uses as estates, retreats, or alternative commercial facilities. None of those transitions will be simple, and many will involve substantial financial losses.

Hall is not predicting the end of Napa wine, nor does his analysis establish that Yountville’s hotels are about to suffer an equivalent correction. Indeed, the town’s recent hotel-tax receipts demonstrate the resilience of its particular hospitality economy. But the contrast is revealing. Just outside the village, a major industry is reconsidering assumptions about luxury demand that seemed dependable for decades. Inside Yountville, the public finances depend heavily on the continued willingness of affluent visitors to spend large sums on precisely the sort of premium experiences whose economics are being tested elsewhere in the valley. It is not unreasonable to ask whether a town should regard record room rates as permanent evidence of economic security when the industry surrounding it is discovering how quickly expensive assumptions can become obsolete.

The potential realignment of wineries and vineyard properties also raises important land-use questions beyond Yountville’s municipal boundaries. Buildings originally justified as agricultural production facilities may become candidates for retreats, hospitality, private estates, or entirely different activities. Those changes will require their own planning judgments and regulatory decisions, and their effects may eventually influence visitor patterns throughout the valley. The agricultural preserve has been essential to Yountville’s identity, but the economic activity occurring within that preserve is not frozen in time. Preserving the landscape and preserving the businesses that have occupied it are related but separate challenges.

Hall’s essay ends with the recognition that land does not cease to exist when the enterprise occupying it becomes unsustainable. It will become something, whether through deliberate planning or the accumulated consequences of neglect and economic pressure. The parallel with Yountville is difficult to miss. The former school property will become something. The historic winery will become something. The surrounding vineyards will continue changing, as will the community’s population and the economics of hospitality. The question is whether those changes will be guided by deliberate public choices or simply accepted after private markets have made the decisions for everyone.

What the Old Bricks Remember

A few blocks from the former school stands one of the most important surviving witnesses to Yountville’s earlier economic life. The Groezinger Wine Cellars, constructed beginning in 1870 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982, belong to the agricultural and industrial village that existed long before the world discovered its restaurants. The buildings survived changes in the wine business and were adapted into commercial uses, becoming Vintage 1870 and eventually V Marketplace. Their history demonstrates that preservation and commercial activity need not be enemies. Buildings can acquire new purposes while retaining the physical characteristics that connect them to the past.

Now the property owner, Gary Jabara, is pursuing substantial alterations to the historic winery building as part of the Estate Yountville redevelopment. The submitted application proposes retail spaces on the first floor and a ballroom assembly space on the second, with interior and exterior modifications that may require structural and seismic interventions in the original masonry building. Such improvements can raise complicated preservation issues, particularly when changes may affect original openings, structural systems, and other character-defining features. On October 23, the Town issued a request for an independent historical-resource and environmental review. The application has not received final approval, and the independent review is intended to help establish whether the proposed work satisfies applicable preservation requirements.

It is worth considering how these decisions relate to the controversies surrounding the Commons. Much of the criticism of workforce housing has focused on the possibility that new buildings might alter Yountville’s appearance or undermine its cherished village character. But historic character is not merely a question of whether new architecture looks sufficiently quaint. It resides in authentic materials, original construction, inherited relationships between buildings, and the visible evidence of how a place came into being. A newly constructed building can be redesigned if its appearance proves unsuccessful. Original nineteenth-century masonry removed during redevelopment cannot be recreated simply by commissioning a more historically sympathetic rendering.

There is no reason to presume that commercial development and historic preservation are inherently incompatible, nor should the owner of a landmark be denied the opportunity to propose reasonable improvements. But public scrutiny must be as exacting when the applicant is an influential business owner as when the proposal involves public housing or an ordinary residential project. Historic preservation standards are most meaningful when applied consistently, without regard to commercial prominence or political influence. The buildings have survived long enough to deserve a review conducted on their merits, rather than one shaped by the personalities surrounding the current election.

After all, Yountville cannot claim to be preserving its historic character if the standard of preservation changes with the identity of the person holding the building permit.

The Difference Between Loving a Place and Planning for It

The approaching election has generated unusual attention, political activity, and campaign spending for a community of Yountville’s size. A committee called Build a Better Yountville has reported expenditures associated with the campaign, and public debate has focused on the relationship between commercial interests, political leadership, and future land-use decisions. Participation by property owners is legitimate, and campaign contributions or independent expenditures do not themselves establish improper influence. Nor does disagreement with a long-developed public project demonstrate that an alternative cannot succeed. But the concentration of important unresolved decisions makes transparency about money, public positions, and future proposals particularly valuable.

A better Yountville is certainly an appealing ambition, but the phrase does not describe a policy. It offers no explanation of how many workforce homes should be built, what income levels they should serve, how construction should be financed, or whether the Commons should preserve a future educational use. It says nothing about what protections might be appropriate for manufactured-home residents, how a historic winery should be adapted, or whether the commercial center needs more opportunities for ordinary local gathering. These questions do not admit easy answers, and reasonable people can disagree about them. But a detailed public record makes it possible to compare approaches, understand costs, and distinguish intended benefits from consequences that have not yet been considered.

The most useful distinction is not necessarily between incumbents and challengers, longtime residents and newcomers, or people who supported the Commons and those who opposed it. It is between proposals whose costs and consequences can be examined and aspirations that remain undefined. Past decisions deserve scrutiny, and experience should never become an excuse for avoiding difficult questions. New ideas also deserve consideration, but they become useful only when translated into workable policies. The test for any public official is the ability to connect a stated objective with the tedious practical requirements of accomplishing it.

Local governments rarely reward that sort of patience with applause. Much of the important work happens during long meetings in which financing structures, drainage systems, housing regulations, environmental impacts, maintenance obligations, and legal requirements are explained to rooms containing people who had hoped to get home before dinner. The proceedings are not particularly romantic. Yet these are the mechanisms through which communities preserve their assets, avoid expensive mistakes, and make decisions whose benefits may not become apparent for decades. A town as prosperous as Yountville can afford to undertake that work carefully. It cannot afford to substitute enthusiasm for it.

The People Who Are Not in the Room

Among the institutions that define Yountville, the Veterans Home deserves special attention. Its presence is much older than the luxury hospitality industry, and its purpose is inseparable from the community’s history. California has invested heavily in modernizing the campus, including new skilled-nursing facilities intended to improve care for residents whose needs are increasingly complex. But the difficulty of recruiting and retaining qualified employees in an expensive housing market has been recognized in CalVet’s own long-range planning. New buildings are an accomplishment, but they provide little comfort to residents when the staffing necessary to operate them is unavailable.

The connection between housing and caregiving should be obvious, yet it is surprisingly easy to overlook when discussing the appearance of new buildings or the costs of public projects. Caregivers who spend substantial portions of their days commuting have less time for their families, greater transportation expenses, and fewer opportunities to participate in the community where they work. The same is true of many hospitality employees, public workers, maintenance personnel, and service providers. They are essential to the daily functioning of Yountville, even though the town’s housing market largely prevents them from becoming residents. Their absence from neighborhood meetings and political debates is therefore not especially mysterious.

More troubling is the absence of young people who have not yet had the opportunity to establish a life here. They do not attend Council meetings because they live somewhere else. Their children do not appear in local school enrollment because the school is closed and their families live in Napa, American Canyon, Vallejo, and beyond. Their preferences are seldom represented in surveys of existing residents, and their interests are difficult to measure through election results in a community where they cannot afford to vote because they cannot afford to live. A town can sincerely consult everyone within its boundaries while failing to hear from the people its decisions have placed outside them.

This is one of the central limitations of planning exclusively around the preferences of those who already possess a place in the community. Existing residents have legitimate concerns about change, and democratic government must take those concerns seriously. But long-range planning must also consider the people who will live with the consequences of present decisions, including those who cannot yet participate in making them. A generation ago, many of today’s Yountville residents were the young people seeking an opportunity to establish themselves in a desirable place. The circumstances have changed so dramatically that the same opportunity may now require considerably more wealth than it did when they arrived.

The Fork in the Road

Perhaps the most important thing to understand about Yountville is that its prosperity and its demographic difficulties are not competing stories. They are consequences of the same extraordinary transformation. The agricultural preserve protected the landscape, careful planning maintained a desirable village, hospitality made the town wealthy, and scarcity made its existing houses enormously valuable. Those achievements came with costs that were not immediately visible. They appeared gradually in longer commutes, aging households, fewer children, greater dependence on visitors, and the increasing difficulty of sustaining an ordinary middle-class life within the town limits.

None of this requires Yountville to abandon the qualities that made it special. A town does not need large apartment blocks surrounded by asphalt to accommodate more people, nor must it surrender its gardens, historic buildings, village scale, or hospitality industry to welcome a younger generation. It does need to acknowledge that the success of the village as a resort is not necessarily the same thing as the success of the village as a community. Those objectives can reinforce one another, but they are not interchangeable. A beautifully restored hotel is a valuable asset, yet it does not replace a school. A celebrated restaurant contributes to the economy, yet it does not replace the informal social institutions where residents spend time together. And a thriving retirement community, however welcome, is not a substitute for the broader range of households that once populated Yountville’s streets.

What makes this election consequential is the number of decisions arriving together. The Commons needs a workable future. The Housing Element requires sustained attention to its unmet objectives. Manufactured-home residents are seeking greater security. The Groezinger Winery faces an important historic-preservation review. The Veterans Home needs a dependable workforce, the hospitality industry needs employees, and the Town must continue managing the public revenues that make its considerable civic amenities possible. Beyond its boundaries, Napa’s agricultural economy is adjusting to changes that may reshape the use and value of land throughout the valley. Each problem has its own legal requirements and practical constraints, but together they describe a community deciding how the benefits of its prosperity will be carried forward.

Yountville does not need to apologize for being charming or successful. It should celebrate the foresight of the people who protected its agricultural setting, preserved its historic buildings, built its civic institutions, and created one of America’s most admired small towns. That inheritance is immensely valuable, and nobody should casually propose dismantling it. But preserving a community is a more demanding undertaking than preserving its appearance. It requires understanding which qualities made the place worth loving and which opportunities must remain available if future generations are to develop the same affection.

One day the present arguments will become history, just as the controversies surrounding earlier planning decisions have largely disappeared into the attractive landscape they helped create. The people who live here fifty years from now may know little about the personalities who dominated the election of 2026. They will know whether the Groezinger Winery survived with its character intact, whether the manufactured-home communities remained secure, and what became of the former elementary school property. They will know whether the sidewalks are still filled almost entirely with visitors or whether the village also contains younger residents, working families, and children making the ordinary noises that have become so uncommon here.

Perhaps the most telling possibility is a child walking to school in Yountville again. Not because a restored school building would solve every problem, or because a handful of workforce apartments would reverse decades of demographic change, but because such a morning would signify that the community had succeeded in preserving more than its buildings. It would mean that Yountville had found a way to make room for another generation without destroying the qualities that made earlier generations want to live here. For a town that has become exceptionally good at protecting the place it inherited, that may be the most important measure of what happens next.

The question is no longer simply how to preserve the Yountville you love. It is whether you can preserve enough of its possibilities for someone else to love it, too.

Even young middle-class families earning too much to qualify for subsidized housing often cannot afford an ordinary three-bedroom home. Meanwhile, public efforts to address the shortage are dismissed as socialism, although the government restrictions that helped create homeowners’ wealth somehow escape that description.

The Yountville Commons offered a different approach: publicly owned land, thoughtfully designed workforce housing, and inviting civic spaces that could accommodate a new generation without sacrificing the town’s character. This essay examines how we created a housing market that rewards scarcity, why government has a responsibility to help repair the damage, and what it really means to preserve a community.

Because preserving Yountville ought to mean more than preserving the good fortune of those who arrived first. It ought to mean making room for others.

The sketch above is an early architectural study for the Yountville Commons tat imagined something California once knew how to build: a beautiful, walkable community where working families could afford to live. The familiar rooflines, shaded balconies, and modest scale were deliberate, intended to make new housing feel as though it had always belonged in Yountville. The larger ambition was equally simple: preserving the character of a town should mean making room for some of the people who give it life, not merely protecting the property values of those fortunate enough to have arrived first.

Congratulations on Your Excellent Investment Strategy

Suppose you bought a California house in 1985, when a middle-class salary could purchase one without a venture capitalist or deceased aunt. You made mortgage payments and replaced water heaters. You endured a kitchen renovation during which a contractor explained, with the solemnity of a transplant surgeon, why moving the sink three feet required another $18,000. Forty years later the house had made you wealthy. Your financial genius consisted largely of remaining alive and remembering to pay the property taxes.

This is wonderful news for the homeowner, who has little reason to investigate the miracle. His thirty-year-old daughter is less thrilled. Her degree and decent job qualify her for a bedroom in somebody else’s house, possibly with a shared bathroom and a roommate who regards loading the dishwasher as an oppressive social convention. In 2026, a household needed $226,800 in annual income to afford Napa County’s median-priced home, according to the California Association of Realtors. Only 23 percent of county households qualified, making ownership less the American dream than an exclusive postgraduate program with a spectacular application fee.

How to Preserve the Landscape While Misplacing the Residents

California’s Legislative Analyst’s Office explained the mechanism in 2015, apparently imagining that clear explanations would cause somebody to act. The state built too few homes where people wanted to live, and shortages drove prices upward. Geography, jobs, and construction costs mattered, but government restrictions prevented supply from responding normally. When avocados become expensive, somebody plants more trees; when California houses become expensive, we commission an inquiry into whether another house would impair the character of the avocado orchard.

Zoning achieved this without requiring anyone to announce that newcomers were unwelcome. Huge areas were reserved for detached houses, while duplexes, courtyard apartments, and modest buildings where people once began adult life became suspicious activities requiring public hearings. In Napa Valley, this acquired the additional moral authority of the Agricultural Preserve, established in 1968 to protect the valley from becoming another subdivision-infested suburb, an extraordinary and genuinely admirable accomplishment whose success should not be confused with an exemption from consequences. The Preserve protected agriculture while concentrating much of the responsibility for accommodating residents within a handful of towns that were themselves reluctant to build anything denser than somebody’s fondest childhood memories. Meanwhile, the valley underwent its gradual resortification, transforming from a working agricultural community into an international luxury destination requiring an ever-expanding population of cooks, housekeepers, vineyard workers, servers, and maintenance crews, while offering these same people approximately the residential opportunities available aboard a private yacht.

We perfected the art of accommodating visitors who could spend $1,000 on a romantic weekend while making it progressively more difficult to accommodate the cook preparing their dinner, the housekeeper changing their sheets, or the agricultural worker responsible for the wine over which they were becoming romantically intoxicated. Second homes multiplied, ordinary houses became investment vehicles, and the valley’s celebrated rural character grew increasingly dependent upon workers commuting from communities where living was still considered an acceptable land use. There was nothing inherently wrong with protecting agriculture, welcoming visitors, or making excellent wine. The perversity emerged from combining these perfectly defensible objectives with land-use policies that refused to provide sufficient housing inside the communities where development was supposed to occur. We managed to protect the vineyards, enrich property owners, welcome tourists, and export families, an arrangement so elegantly self-serving that it could only have been accomplished by people sincerely convinced they were protecting the community.

Katherine Levine Einstein, David Glick, and Maxwell Palmer documented the underlying civic machinery in their book Neighborhood Defenders. Participants in local housing decisions were disproportionately older, established homeowners, and more opposed to new construction than the general population. A working parent commuting from Fairfield has limited enthusiasm for attending a Tuesday afternoon hearing about the shadow of an apartment she cannot afford to occupy. The people already comfortably seated at the table decide how many additional chairs the restaurant may purchase, then congratulate themselves on the democratic elegance of the seating plan. Meanwhile, existing homeowners watch their properties appreciate magnificently, having discovered the extraordinary financial benefits of preserving nearly everything about Napa Valley except the possibility that their children might someday afford to live there.

The Good-Intentions Surcharge

California insists that new buildings be safer, more energy-efficient, more accessible, and better prepared for earthquakes and fires. These are legitimate interests, and advocates for collapsing staircases should probably avoid careers in building inspection. Standards cost money, however, and their cumulative expense falls heavily on new construction. Someone purchasing an older California house inherits a building constructed under yesterday’s requirements, while the person buying tomorrow’s house pays to satisfy today’s considerably more ambitious ones. The state raises the price of admission, then expresses sincere concern that young people cannot afford tickets.

Development impact fees introduce an especially Californian circularity. New housing pays for roads, utilities, parks, and civic facilities, which sounds reasonable until the charges help make the housing unaffordable. A 2026 UC Berkeley Terner Center study found nearly $20,000 per affordable unit in impact fees on average and estimated that waiving them could support roughly 1,250 additional affordable homes annually. We have perfected the technique of charging affordable housing an unaffordability surcharge, then seeking a subsidy to cover it. The resulting administrative process is sufficiently complicated to require professionals whose salaries become another expense, which is rather like hiring a personal trainer to carry the groceries you purchased because you cannot afford a gym membership.

Affordable Housing and the Disappearing Middle Class

Here the situation becomes especially cruel, because California has developed a remarkably sophisticated vocabulary for identifying people who cannot afford housing while demonstrating substantially less ingenuity in providing it. Much publicly subsidized rental housing is financed through the federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program, where 60 percent of Area Median Income, or AMI, is a central benchmark. The rules also permit other income thresholds, including income-averaging arrangements, and different housing programs serve households at 80 or even 120 percent of AMI. But the familiar 60-percent standard illustrates the problem beautifully. In Napa County in 2026, the tax-credit income limit at that level was $105,780 for a family of four.

Now imagine a young couple with two children earning $155,000 between them. They are college-educated, steadily employed, paying taxes, and possibly contributing to retirement accounts with the touching optimism of people who have not calculated the cost of keeping two children in shoes. They earn too much to qualify for a conventional apartment restricted to households at 60 percent of AMI, and their income also exceeds Napa’s separate 80-percent low-income limit of $140,950 for a four-person household. Yet they earn nearly $72,000 less than the income needed to purchase Napa County’s median-priced house. They have achieved the increasingly peculiar distinction of being financially successful enough to be disqualified from much subsidized housing while remaining financially unsuccessful enough to be disqualified from ordinary homeownership.

There are moderate-income programs and exceptions, but eligibility for assistance does not mean an appropriate home actually exists. California has effectively created a class of households that the housing bureaucracy regards as too prosperous to need help and the real estate market regards as too impoverished to be taken seriously. These are teachers married to firefighters, nurses married to technicians, restaurant managers married to municipal employees, and other combinations of respectable occupations that once supplied the population of ordinary American neighborhoods. They have jobs, children, health insurance, and occasionally a dog. What they lack is a sufficiently ancient purchase date, which has become the distinguishing qualification for middle-class security in California.

The Three-Bedroom Ranch House and the Weekend Economist

Consider the ordinary three-bedroom, two-bathroom ranch house down the street, the kind built when California still considered the housing of families a normal civic activity. It has a two-car garage, a lawn, perhaps an elderly citrus tree, and bedrooms sufficiently unremarkable that generations of children managed to grow up in them without architectural trauma. Its longtime owner eventually sells. A flipper purchases it, replaces the kitchen with something involving quartz countertops and imported fixtures, paints everything a shade of white previously available only in expensive dental offices, and returns it to the market at a handsome premium. The house is now described as a curated Wine Country retreat, a phrase that rather efficiently removes any suggestion that someone might actually need to live there.

The prospective buyers include our young family, who imagine bicycles in the driveway, homework at the kitchen table, and children attending the local school. Their competition is a financially comfortable couple from elsewhere who would enjoy spending occasional weekends in Napa Valley. The second-home buyers have access to substantial accumulated wealth, perhaps including equity from another property that benefited from precisely the same scarcity. They can pay considerably more, and because they do not need the house to support the daily economics of raising children, the price can be evaluated partly as a lifestyle purchase and long-term investment. The property appreciates whether anyone is sleeping in it on Tuesday night, a feature considerably less common among automobiles and recreational vehicles.

It would be gratifying to identify a villain here, but the flipper and the second-home buyers are behaving with impeccable economic rationality. Nobody needs to be malicious when the incentives are this thoughtfully arranged. A property in a beautiful, supply-constrained valley is an attractive investment precisely because additional comparable properties are difficult to create. The investor understands what homeowners sometimes prefer not to acknowledge: scarcity produces value, and scarcity protected by government policy offers an especially reassuring prospect of continued appreciation. One might almost admire the efficiency with which public land-use restrictions have been converted into private wealth, were it not for the small detail that the children are now sleeping in Fairfield.

Yountville’s own housing research gives the situation an appropriately surreal statistical dimension. More than two-thirds of the town’s estimated vacant housing units are held for seasonal, recreational, or occasional use, rather than being offered to people seeking somewhere to live. These homes are not necessarily abandoned or neglected. Many are beautifully maintained, contribute property taxes, support local businesses, and provide their owners with immense pleasure. But their availability to the town’s permanent population is roughly equivalent to the availability of a reserved hotel suite. We have arrived at a housing market where an empty house can be financially productive, aesthetically impeccable, and entirely useless to the family that would most like to occupy it.

The Affordable Housing Hunger Games

Organizations such as Burbank Housing, which develops affordable communities throughout Napa and the North Bay, are attempting to navigate this arrangement with commendable persistence. Their financing mechanisms would make an investment banker request a quiet room. Federal tax credits are allocated through competitive state-administered programs and generally exchanged for investment capital, while developers assemble additional loans, grants, local assistance, and other funding. The highly competitive 9-percent credits are particularly valuable, while 4-percent credits operate through different financing arrangements. In 2025, California’s tax-credit allocation agency reported 526 applications and 253 project awards across its programs, meaning that even meticulously prepared projects cannot assume the money will materialize.

Burbank Housing’s Heritage House and Valle Verde developments produced 90 affordable Napa homes, supported partly by nearly $15 million from several state-administered housing grants. These are genuine accomplishments for the households receiving them. They also demonstrate how extraordinary the financing gymnastics have become. We made ordinary housing so expensive that an entire profession now specializes in making small portions of it affordable again, provided the developer successfully navigates a funding competition whose rules bear approximately the same relationship to ordinary construction finance that competitive figure skating bears to walking across a frozen pond.

Howard Husock’s America’s Trillion-Dollar Housing Mistake questions the unintended consequences of elaborate public housing interventions, while Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance examines institutions that proclaim admirable objectives while obstructing their accomplishment. One need not agree with every conclusion of either book to recognize the architecture of the absurdity. Government restricts the production of housing, adds to its cost, offers subsidies to compensate, and then distributes those subsidies competitively because the demand exceeds available funds. The family earning $155,000 watches this elaborate production from the sidelines, having been informed that its income is simultaneously too high and too low. There is probably a government form somewhere on which this condition has been given a reassuring acronym.

Socialism, Except for the Profitable Parts

Someone inevitably declares that government-owned workforce housing is socialism, often from a house enriched by decades of government restrictions on competing construction. This person welcomes zoning boards regulating neighbors, building departments dictating specifications, and municipalities imposing development fees. These interventions are treated as the natural workings of free enterprise. The ideological emergency begins when government proposes using public land to accommodate people who actually work in the community. Apparently government intervention is capitalism when it increases the value of an existing house, and socialism when it creates the possibility of another.

There are serious questions about public ownership, construction risk, operating expenses, and whether a municipality should build directly or partner with private developers. Public control does not suspend arithmetic, however desperately a town manager might desire that power. Municipal workforce housing can serve people who fall outside conventional federal subsidy programs while remaining entirely compatible with private development and private ownership. The justification is unusually straightforward: government helped create the scarcity and therefore bears some responsibility for addressing its consequences. A town retaining land and developing housing for its workforce is exercising considerably less ideological imagination than the government agencies that spent decades determining how few homes everyone else was permitted to build.

The Small Town That Noticed the Missing Children

Yountville offered an exquisitely local illustration. Its former elementary school occupied valuable land near the center of town, a reminder that a community celebrated for hospitality had become increasingly inhospitable to families. Restaurants and hotels needed employees, municipal services required workers, and the local economy depended upon thousands of people whose salaries purchased considerably more housing somewhere else. Meanwhile, the physical evidence of an earlier generation of children sat conveniently across from Town Hall. It was as though Yountville had preserved the museum exhibit while quietly exporting the species.

The Yountville Commons envisioned publicly owned land accommodating workforce homes, civic facilities, local businesses, gathering places, and open space. Environmental planning contemplated as many as 150 homes, with phased construction to manage cost and financing. Retaining the land offered long-term community control while potentially serving households who earned too much for traditional low-income programs and far too little to purchase the newly curated ranch house down the street. Nobody pretended construction was free or municipal development magically immune from California’s expenses. But the proposal involved an asset already controlled by the public, an identifiable workforce needing housing, and a practical opportunity to connect the two, a fairly revolutionary arrangement in a state where housing policy frequently consists of explaining why those two things must remain separated.

The Commons could never solve California’s housing crisis, but it addressed the central absurdity at a comprehensible scale. A town that had benefited from fifty years of rising property values could use a small portion of its collective resources to make permanent residence possible for people who had missed the original opportunity. It would not threaten the vineyards, abolish private property, eliminate second homes, or compel anyone to surrender the profits of an exceptionally well-timed real estate purchase. It would simply recognize that a successful community requires actual residents, including young families, rather than an increasingly exquisite collection of appreciating assets occasionally occupied by people who live elsewhere.

Homeowners should enjoy their good fortune, including the appreciation that has given so many California families financial security. But some portion of that fortune reflects scarcity protected by public decisions, and the bill has arrived on the kitchen tables of their children. We have created a society in which parents can describe buying their first home on a single middle-class income while their professionally employed children calculate whether two salaries will cover the rent, much less a mortgage. The parents quite reasonably regard their houses as the foundation of retirement security, while the children discover that the same appreciated value has become the principal obstacle to establishing families of their own. Everyone is behaving rationally inside a system whose collective result would be regarded as deranged if someone proposed designing it from scratch.

Yountville has become very good at preserving things, from agricultural landscapes and historic buildings to the charming streetscapes that make visitors fall in love with the town. Preservation is a noble undertaking, although a town eventually confronts the awkward distinction between preserving a community and preserving its scenery. Scenery does not volunteer, attend school, serve on commissions, raise children, or repair the plumbing at eleven o’clock on a Sunday night. The Commons represented an attempt to make room for the people who perform those less picturesque functions, including the next generation of families who might otherwise appear in Yountville only as photographs on the refrigerators of their parents’ increasingly valuable homes. One imagines those refrigerators will eventually be replaced with magnificent stainless-steel models, perhaps during another $80,000 kitchen renovation, by contractors who will be commuting from somewhere affordable.

After two years of studies, public hearings, environmental reviews, and answered questions, Yountville’s most tireless defender of further inquiry has discovered the one question nobody can answer: How many more questions must be asked before nothing can finally be accomplished?

Gary Jabara has discovered that Yountville was victimized by terrible spending decisions. He has also discovered that the councilmember who voted for them is our last defense against fiscal irresponsibility. There will be pie.

The Victimhood of Gary Jabara

On Wednesday, October 21, Gary Jabara sent Yountville an urgent communication, beginning with the promise that he would “keep this short,” the political equivalent of “I’m not going to make a speech” at a wedding. The letter began with vineyards and lovely Washington Street, passed through a sweeping indictment of municipal government, endorsed several candidates for office, saluted the veterans, and arrived, six exclamation points later, at a pie-eating contest. There was something almost athletic about the transition, as though a man had leapt from the wreckage of municipal democracy directly into a vat of pumpkin filling.

“We’ve been victimized,” Jabara announced, by City Council spending decisions that were “deeply wasteful.” Staff, on the other hand, had been “terrific.” Cal Fire and the Sheriff’s Office were “amazing.” So the town’s professionals are exemplary, the services keep running, and the place is still breathtakingly beautiful, but the citizens are victims. One hesitates to interrupt such a stirring denunciation with a technical question, but victims of precisely what? Which expenditures? Approved by whom? For what purpose? It is possible that Yountville has suffered the first fiscal catastrophe in American history in which the principal evidence is a future baking contest.

Fortunately, Jabara has identified a savior. Councilmember Hillery Trippe, he writes, “consistently asked the hard questions about spending and accountability.” She “often stood alone.” The difficulty, and it is not an obscure difficulty requiring a forensic accountant, is that Trippe voted to buy the former elementary school, voted to approve the Commons conceptual plan, and participated in authorizing the public money spent advancing it. Jabara has managed to make the person who helped approve the spending into the person who tried to save us from it. By this standard, a bank robber who questions the price of the getaway car qualifies as a whistleblower.

The Strange Case of the Woman Who Voted Yes

Yountville bought its closed elementary school in 2024 for approximately $11 million. The closure itself, in 2020, ought to have been the town’s most alarming budget report: a public school with too few children to remain open, in a prosperous community famous for knowing the price of everything. The Town proposed using the seven acres for workforce housing and public amenities. Trippe voted yes to the acquisition. She voted yes to the conceptual plan in March 2025. She participated in the decisions to fund the studies, architects, engineers, hearings, and environmental review needed to get from a handsome idea to a project that could legally be built.

These were not purchases made from the municipal petty-cash drawer while Trippe was out of town. They occurred in public, with Council votes, staff reports, agendas, invoices, and the other artifacts of accountable government. To hear her principal outside champion tell it, however, she was an isolated sentinel looking down from the ramparts upon a spending spree she somehow both witnessed and authorized. Perhaps she had been voting with one hand while heroically interrogating the other.

After roughly 25 public meetings, years of professional work, and revisions to the plan, the final zoning, subdivision, and environmental approvals passed four to one. Trippe voted no. Not one member of the public spoke against the project at those approval hearings. The vote did not make her dishonest or forbid her from dissenting. It did establish something less flattering than the lonely-hero legend: with the same access to information as her colleagues, and every opportunity to persuade them, she had convinced none of the other four. Standing alone is not intrinsically courageous. Sometimes it means everyone else has heard the argument.

The Sea Lion Gets a Council Seat

Trippe’s much-advertised background in risk management is perfectly respectable, and exceptionally useful if the question is whether a university should insure a laboratory against flooding. It is less obviously a philosophy for a town losing its families. Risk has two sides. A housing project might exceed its budget, encounter an engineering difficulty, or require revision. A town that spends another decade not building homes might discover that its teachers, nurses, cooks, housekeepers, and younger families have learned to live perfectly well somewhere else. The first class of risk produces spreadsheets. The second produces an empty school. Apparently one is more frightening than the other.

There is a form of public argument called “sealioning,” named for a cartoon animal who pursues people with exquisitely polite, unending demands for further evidence. One question is answered, giving birth to two more questions, which require a consultant, whose answer must then be studied for its implications. Eventually everyone dies of old age, including, presumably, the sea lion. Scrutiny is necessary; endless scrutiny makes the meeting the accomplishment. Yountville answered questions for years. At some point the Council had to decide whether the town needed housing or an interpretive center dedicated to the history of discussing housing.

A petition later helped force the repeal of the Commons approvals. But the land remained in public ownership, the bills had been paid, and the need for homes had not miraculously dissolved. The repeal was a political victory, not a replacement plan. Those are two different things, though Yountville has become practiced at celebrating the first while quietly deferring the second.

Transparency, Now Featuring a Pie-Eating Contest

This brings us back to Jabara, an owner of substantial commercial interests in town, whose company has supplied significant financial support to the effort to elect his favored candidates. There is nothing inherently improper about a property owner supporting candidates. There is, however, something almost baroque about a powerful commercial figure demanding transparency from Town Hall while offering the public no comparably specific account of what he hopes to see done with the seven acres that Trippe helped the Town buy and then helped prevent it from developing as approved. He has suggested selling the property to a private developer. Which developer? To build what? With whose benefit uppermost in mind? A man who appreciates “hard questions” should love these. We should have a whole evening of them, perhaps between the baking and competitive eating.

Jabara endorses Joe Tagliaboschi for mayor and Trippe for Council, and suggests two possibilities for the other Council seat. Then the indictment of the town gives way to Oktoberfest, which was evidently wonderful, and then Thanksgiving, which will feature baking and pie-eating contests. “Ready, Set, Eat!!!!!!” he writes. It is hard to say what is most striking: the punctuation, the confidence with which political catastrophe becomes a social calendar, or the magnificent assumption that the recipient can move from the collapse of responsible municipal government to recreational pastry consumption without experiencing whiplash.

This is not an argument against pie. Pie is considerably more accountable than most campaign literature; you can see what is in it, and if you dislike the filling you need not vote to keep it for four years. Nor is hospitality a crime. But hospitality is not a housing policy, a crowded Oktoberfest is not an electoral mandate, and a councilmember cannot become the conscience of municipal spending merely because the man paying to promote her says she asked excellent questions about expenditures she approved.

What She Still Owes the Town

Yountville is wealthy, lovely, and losing the ordinary family life that once justified its elementary school. Its restaurants and hotels need workers. The Veterans Home needs caregivers. Those workers largely cannot vote in the town where they spend their days, and their children cannot attend the school that closed for lack of them. None of this makes every housing proposal wise. It makes the duty to produce a credible alternative especially serious for an official who helped begin one, participated in paying for it, and then opposed its completion.

Trippe is asking for another four years. The question is not whether she has the right to dissent; she does. It is whether a record of approving expenditures, attacking their purpose, and leaving the public with the costs and no equivalent plan deserves to be rewarded as exceptional stewardship. Gary Jabara’s email accidentally supplies the answer. After denouncing waste, praising the woman who voted for it, and inviting everybody to eat pie, he has produced the perfect campaign document for Hillery Trippe: an endorsement so revealing that her opponents need only circulate it.

The Commons still has land, paid invoices, and a missing generation of families. Jabara has a party to organize. Trippe has questions to ask. Yountville needs somebody capable of answering one. On the evidence of what she has done, rather than what her benefactor says about her, she is unworthy of another term.

Disclosure: Brendan Kelly is principal of Kelly + Morgan Architecture, which served as the Town of Yountville’s Owner’s Design Consultant on the Yountville Commons. That work is complete.

All Aboard the Better Yountville Express! The passengers are blindfolded, the conductor is drinking, the bridge is collapsing, and nobody knows where they’re going. But the promises are magnificent, the outside money is pouring in, and everyone is terribly excited!!

Gary Jabara’s political committee is spending record amounts but the best part is that has discovered Yountville’s historic railroad station, photographed it, and announced that exciting changes are coming. The town is invited to admire the scenery while the details are worked out.

Summary: Gary Jabara’s Build a Better Yountville committee has discovered a remarkable new form of political campaigning: spend tens of thousands of dollars, mail residents a nostalgic photograph of their own town, promise absolutely everything, and explain precisely nothing.

Behind the four cheerful slogans and extravagant punctuation lies a consequential Town Council election. The candidates supported by Jabara’s committee could help determine the future of Yountville’s historic buildings, its housing, its former elementary school, and the balance between private commercial interests and generations of community stewardship. The irony is particularly rich when the businessman financing the campaign has substantial interests in the very historic properties whose future the town must consider.

Four exclamation points. Zero ideas. A satirical examination of outside money, political platitudes, and the extraordinary assumption that Yountville residents will climb aboard a train without asking who’s driving, who owns the railroad, or where it’s going.

There is a particular kind of political postcard that appears to have been designed for people whose principal intellectual activity is remembering where they left their reading glasses. It arrives on expensive paper, features a reassuring photograph of something old, and speaks in the warm, patient tones ordinarily reserved for explaining to a Labrador that the veterinarian is his friend. One of these arrived in Yountville this week, bearing a magnificent old railroad station, an approaching locomotive, and the declaration “Yountville Deserves Better,” which is an interesting thing to print across a photograph of a perfectly respectable town minding its own business.

On the reverse, someone has written, in the cheerful handwriting of a person who has just discovered scented stationery, “I’ve heard there are changes coming to our beautiful town. We are so excited!!” The message concludes by encouraging everyone to vote for change, followed by two additional exclamation points, bringing the total to four, a remarkable expenditure of punctuation considering that the entire postcard contains not one identifiable proposal. Four exclamation points and zero ideas. This may represent a new municipal record, although Yountville has lately produced some formidable competition in the field. The postcard comes from Build a Better Yountville, a political committee financed with tens of thousands of dollars from a company associated with Gary Jabara, an Orange County businessman whose Yountville property holdings include the historic railroad depot. His committee is supporting specific candidates in the November election, promising leadership that listens, manages responsibly, plans for the future, and delivers results. One assumes the rejected alternatives included embezzlement, chronic deafness, reckless improvisation, and sitting in the Council chambers eating paste.

A Brief History of Somebody Else’s Railroad Station

The original brick depot was built in 1868, when the Napa Valley Railroad arrived in Yountville and began the considerable business of transforming a small agricultural settlement into a working commercial town. Farmers shipped produce, merchants received goods, passengers came and went, and Gottlieb Groezinger eventually established his winery beside the tracks because, unlike the authors of the postcard, nineteenth-century businessmen generally understood that a transportation system was supposed to transport something. The railroad was an extraordinary investment in the future, requiring engineering, financing, construction, and the participation of people whose names have largely disappeared from local memory. The buildings remain, however, including the original brick depot and the great Groezinger Winery behind it, architectural survivors of a time when Yountville produced things besides memorable dining experiences and credit-card statements requiring medical attention.

The depot eventually became a restaurant. Under the late Michael Chiarello, it operated as Coqueta, a rather sophisticated establishment that demonstrated how a historic building could enjoy a productive second life without pretending it had been constructed for the convenience of contemporary diners. Jabara purchased the property after its conversion, painted the old brick, and reopened it as Clementine. This is a pleasingly efficient sequence of events. A nineteenth-century community builds a railroad station. Generations preserve the building. A celebrated chef helps establish its modern restaurant use. A wealthy investor acquires the property, changes its appearance, and subsequently finances a political advertisement featuring the town’s historic railroad imagery as evidence of his commitment to the town. One might reasonably admire the business model. The original builders supplied the architecture, subsequent generations supplied the preservation, and the current owner supplied the postage.

The Building Behind the Postcard

Immediately behind the brick depot stands the Groezinger Winery, a monumental brick survivor of Yountville’s agricultural economy, now part of the Vintage 1870 complex. It has endured approximately 150 years of weather, changing ownership, commercial reinvention, and the occasional architectural enthusiasm of people who regard a historic masonry wall as an unfortunate interruption between two potentially profitable rooms. The building is nationally recognized for its historic significance, which makes its surviving brickwork rather more consequential than the decorative masonry surrounding the outdoor fireplace of a recently constructed tasting room.

A proposal involving substantial alterations to the winery, including new openings in its historic brick walls and a large upstairs banquet facility, is presently before the town. This creates a marvelous little architectural tableau. In front stands the historic brick depot, now painted and operating as Clementine. Behind it stands the historic winery, whose masonry may be significantly altered to accommodate a new commercial use. And circulating through town is a political advertisement financed by the businessman associated with these properties, inviting residents to contemplate a beautiful photograph of Yountville’s architectural past while promising a better future. The postcard does not mention the winery proposal, although this is perhaps understandable. It is difficult to fit seven proposed openings in historic brickwork between four exclamation points, particularly when the committee has already committed so much space to announcing its excitement.

Four Principles, Suitable for Framing

The committee’s political philosophy consists of four propositions so broadly agreeable that they could serve equally well as the mission statement of a retirement community, a regional bank, or a reasonably ambitious bowling league. “Listen to Our Community,” announces the first. Yountville recently spent more than two years listening to its community about the future of the former elementary school. There were approximately 25 public meetings, extensive design work, environmental review, and repeated Council decisions. The town listened so thoroughly that residents could reasonably have expected complimentary hearing aids upon completion of the process. The Commons proposal was eventually overturned after opponents organized against its approvals. The town still owns the property, the school remains closed, and the housing needs that inspired the project remain unresolved. Listening, apparently, is not quite the same as deciding what to do after everyone has finished talking.

“Manage Responsibly,” announces the second principle, without the distraction of a proposed budget or financial program. “Plan for the Future,” declares the third, although the postcard contains no plan. “Deliver Results,” promises the fourth, which is an admirable ambition for a committee whose most visible deliverable is presently a postcard. There is a certain elegance to this method of political communication. By declining to identify a single specific objective, the committee has eliminated virtually every opportunity for anyone to disagree with it. A resident who objects to listening, planning, responsibility, or results would presumably require professional assistance.

The Town in the Gift Shop

Yountville was not created as a luxury destination. It was a working town, populated by farmers, laborers, merchants, veterans, children, and families whose daily lives required buildings that served practical purposes. Its architectural character emerged from those activities, not from a marketing consultant’s discovery that weathered brick photographs beautifully beside a glass of Cabernet. Over generations, residents maintained the place through economic changes that eventually transformed it into an internationally celebrated hospitality destination. Restaurants flourished, historic properties acquired extraordinary commercial value, and houses that once accommodated families increasingly became expensive places for people to visit occasionally.

The transformation brought prosperity, but it also introduced a peculiar temptation: to regard the town itself as an inventory of commercially useful assets, its buildings available for adaptation, its history available for branding, and its civic institutions available for persuasion through sufficiently attractive advertising. A town can survive a surprising amount of commercial enthusiasm. What it cannot indefinitely survive is the disappearance of the ordinary community that gives those commercial enterprises a reason to exist. The old railroad station did not become historically important because someone eventually opened a restaurant inside it. It became important because it served the working town that built it. The Groezinger Winery did not acquire its significance by anticipating the modern demand for banquet facilities. It acquired it by helping establish Yountville’s agricultural economy. These buildings have already earned their place in the town’s history. Their owners are merely the latest people entrusted with their care.

Which brings us to the extraordinary self-confidence required to spend so much money by outside players in a local political campaign, distribute a photograph of Yountville’s historic railroad heritage, offer four propositions that would embarrass a fortune cookie, and assume that the residents of Yountville will mistake the entire production for a governing philosophy. The nineteenth-century railroad promoters at least understood that before inviting the public aboard, somebody had to establish where the train was going, what it would carry, and how the tracks would get there. A century and a half later, Build a Better Yountville has supplied the locomotive, the publicity, and four exclamation points, but neglected to identify a destination. Perhaps the committee should consult the old Southern Pacific timetable. At least those people knew the difference between a passenger and someone being taken for a ride.

By Matt Chrzanowski

The Yountville We Hand to the Next Generation

Summary: In this Guest Essay, Town Council candidate Matthew Chrzanowski offers a personal and practical vision for Yountville’s future, shaped by his experiences as a scientist, educator, and father raising a young family in town. He argues that Yountville can remain a world-class destination without becoming a place where the people who sustain its economy can no longer afford to live. Central to his argument is the former elementary school property, where years of public investment, planning, and design have already established a foundation for workforce housing, community amenities, and flexible development partnerships. Rather than beginning again, Chrzanowski advocates building on that work through responsible financing, competitive development opportunities, continued public oversight, and measurable progress. He extends the same evidence-based approach to energy resilience, water infrastructure, and municipal decision-making, insisting that meaningful public participation must eventually produce action. At its heart, the essay asks whether Yountville will simply preserve its appearance or preserve something more important: its identity as a living community where families, workers, and future generations can belong.

A Future for Working Families

What happens with the former Yountville Elementary School site will shape the future of our town. The decisions we make now will help determine what Yountville is in 2076. The challenge is to preserve Yountville’s standing as a world-class destination while ensuring it remains a town where ordinary working families can make a home. Those goals are not incompatible; properly managed, each can sustain the other.

I spend my days in research labs and vineyards, working in the industry that supports this valley. In the evenings, I walk around Yountville with my wife and young daughter. I see two sides of the same Napa Valley economy. At home, I see neighbors who love and know each other. I have watched my daughter grow confident telling them about her day and her latest adventures. At work, I see colleagues who commute from places like Healdsburg, Suisun, Middletown, and Antioch, spending hours on the road each day. Some are leaving an industry they love because they can no longer afford to live near it. Both are Yountville. Making this town work for the people who sustain it is why I am running.

From Planning to Building

I support workforce housing on the former elementary school site, on land the town already owns. Yountville has spent years planning for the site’s development, through public meetings, professional studies, reviews, and approvals. The Council’s June repeal of the zoning ordinance did not erase that work, and we should not start from scratch. We should build on what has been accomplished, reconsider what truly needs reconsidering, and move toward a practical, financially responsible plan we can actually carry out.

Getting there will not be easy. A project this complex involves public land, money, housing, density, character, and competing private interests, so disagreement is unavoidable, even after everyone has been heard. A council member’s job is not to eliminate disagreement. It is to understand it, weigh the evidence, explain the reasoning, and decide, knowing that some decisions will disappoint people who took part in good faith. Research works the same way: gather evidence, test assumptions, reach a conclusion, and adjust when the facts change.

Residents have become far more involved in local decisions. Meetings that once drew a handful of people now draw hundreds. The challenge now is to turn that participation into constructive results. Engagement has to lead somewhere, and it has to start with clear communication. We cannot mistake endless discussion for progress, especially when delay falls hardest on the people who cannot afford to live here. As a former teacher and education researcher, I know that teaching is, at its foundation, communicating complex ideas clearly. Budgets, zoning, and project management get complicated quickly, and when people lack clear information, confusion, rumor, and misinformation fill the gaps. People also learn best by taking part, not by sitting through long, information-dense meetings. So every step of the project should come with a communication plan that uses many formats: informal pop-ups, formal workshops, office hours, a simplified online portal, and regular written updates on what has happened and what comes next. Let us close the loop: what we heard, what changed, and why.

What Belongs on the Site?

Workforce housing, supported by shared amenities such as a licensed childcare facility, laundry services, community gardens, and welcoming public spaces, can make Yountville more affordable, connected, and sustainable for individuals, families, workers, and seniors.

The previous Commons plan established an important foundation by dividing the site into parcels instead of one large lot. That allows the town to build in phases and invite competing proposals from developers serving different income groups, all within common design and affordability standards. The town can retain ownership where that serves the public interest, or lease or sell individual parcels with enforceable development requirements. Recorded affordability restrictions and other binding agreements can protect obligations attached to individual housing parcels.

What matters most is who controls the public purposes of the finished development. Ownership, development, and operation are distinct responsibilities. The town should maintain control of shared civic infrastructure and public facilities, using competitively awarded, multiyear operating contracts with measurable obligations. Individual housing parcels may have different developers and ownership arrangements without sacrificing the standards and public benefits of the neighborhood as a whole.

However we move forward, each amenity carries its own costs, so the mix should depend on demonstrated demand, realistic financing, and capable operating partners. Yountville Fit shows what the town and private partners can accomplish together that neither could alone. Childcare is one of the largest expenses facing young families and one of the most difficult community services to establish and sustain. California has previously supported childcare infrastructure through state funding programs, and I would work with our representatives in Sacramento to identify current opportunities while developing a realistic operating model for infant and childcare in small towns like Yountville. If successful, that approach could provide a useful example for other rural communities facing similar challenges.

None of this has to happen at once. Building in phases lets us learn from each step before committing to the next. Each phase should have a well-defined scope, identified financing, and measurable objectives. Before authorizing major construction expenditures for later phases, the Council should publicly evaluate costs and results, confirm available funding, and demonstrate how the next investment advances the larger plan. Planning and coordination should continue in parallel, so that financial accountability does not become another reason for unnecessary delay.

Applying Research to Local Government

Yountville’s work does not end at the former school site. The same approach, which is to test an idea at a manageable scale, measure the results, and expand what works, applies to energy and water, and it is where my training as a chemist can help most. My work now is making winegrowing more resilient to extreme heat, smoke, and disease, so I do not have to imagine what a changing climate does to this valley.

On energy, California’s building standards already demand high energy efficiency and require solar generation for most new residential construction, subject to applicable exceptions. The previous Commons design included all-electric buildings, solar panels, and battery storage to reduce exposure to future energy costs and improve local resilience. Efficient buildings are only one part of the equation. Our town still depends on a regional electric network whose reliability is largely beyond our control. I would focus on where added storage, backup power, and utility partnerships could keep essential services running during outages and public safety power shutoffs, and require that any investment show measurable benefits at a reasonable cost. Calistoga has paired battery storage with hydrogen fuel cells for that purpose, and it is worth studying, though every town’s utility arrangements and costs differ.

On water, leading research on reuse, lower-energy treatment, and smarter monitoring is happening at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UC Berkeley. As we make our next investments in water and wastewater, I would explore partnerships there and seek state, federal, and research funding for pilots, so that Yountville does not carry the cost alone. A town our size, with the fiscal discipline past councils have left us, is well placed to test ideas at a manageable scale and share what works.

The Next Generation

Underneath all of this is a simple wish. I want my daughter to grow up in a Yountville that remains a real community, not just a beautiful destination kept running by people who have to live somewhere else. That means respecting what earlier generations built while making room for those who follow: listening carefully, making responsible financial choices, relying on sound evidence, and having the courage to act when decisions have to be made. That is what I would bring to the Town Council.

Matthew Chrzanowski is a candidate for Yountville Town Council. He can be reached at mattchrz12@gmail.com or mattchrz.com.

His three-question community survey is available at mattchrz.com and https://forms.gle/sfUDyDgknDtYe4Dq6.

Summary: Joe Tagliaboschi is running for mayor of Yountville on a platform of kindness, healing and restoring confidence in Town government. What he has not offered is a convincing plan for governing it. Despite decades in municipal administration, two unsuccessful election campaigns and a brief tenure as city manager of Trinidad, he has presented voters with almost no specific proposals for housing, infrastructure, fiscal management or the Town’s future.

This examination of his public record reveals a troubling contradiction. A candidate promising to restore Yountville’s financial reserves previously advocated selling the former elementary school property and supported the effort to repeal the zoning that made the approved Commons development possible. Meanwhile, substantial independent expenditures financed by hotelier Gary Jabara are supporting his campaign, even as Jabara pursues development interests requiring Town oversight.

With critical housing deadlines approaching, a new town manager arriving and the future of Yountville’s historic character increasingly at stake, the mayor’s office demands more than agreeable slogans and nostalgia for an earlier administration. The question is not whether Tagliaboschi wants the job, but whether his record, judgment and conspicuous absence of a governing agenda demonstrate that he is fit to hold it.

Early in the public outreach for the Yountville Commons, before there was a site plan to argue about, Joe Tagliaboschi came to our office hours with his conclusion already drawn. The Town never should have bought the old school property, he told us. It should have been sold to a developer. He had no interest in what residents had said in earlier sessions and no interest in a conversation about it.

Mr. Tagliaboschi is now running for mayor on a promise to “restore kindness” and bring “a more thoughtful and inclusive approach to discussions and decisions in town.” Voters who remember the version of him that sat across our table may find the new one hard to recognize. His conversion to the virtues of open discussion is remarkably convenient. A man who would not discuss the Commons when discussion was the whole point of the meeting has discovered the virtue of dialogue now that he needs votes.

The developer solution is a curious instinct for this particular man. His 2024 candidate statement refers to “careers in private and municipal organizations” but names no private employer. The employers identified in his public record include the U.S. Navy, the City of Napa, the County of Yolo, the City of Concord, the Town of Yountville and the City of Trinidad. His professional identity has been built overwhelmingly around public service, a background that ought to confer an appreciation for the value of public assets and the obligations that accompany their stewardship. Yet when the Town finally owned a substantial piece of centrally located land, large enough to address some of the housing problems it had studied for decades, his first instinct was to sell it.

That is a revealing place to begin an examination of a man asking voters to put him in charge of the Town.

Nothing to propose

I have read his candidate statements from 2024 and 2026, listened to his remarks at the September forum, reviewed his public comments to the council this summer, and followed the Yountville Sun’s coverage of his campaign. I could not find a single original proposal to make Yountville better. Not one program, not one site, not one dollar figure, not one ordinance he would write.

What he offers instead is a vocabulary. His 2026 statement promises that the council will “provide oversight of all our resources.” It says his experience positions him “to ask difficult questions.” It pledges to “honor our rich history and past while also realizing how important planning for our future is as well.” At the forum he called for “healing this community.” In July he said he wanted to “discuss differences and get this community back together.” Each phrase is unobjectionable, and none of it describes anything a mayor would do on a Tuesday night.

The difficult questions go unstated. The oversight has no object. The plan for the future is to realize that planning is important. A candidate who has spent his adult life in and around municipal government knows exactly what a proposal looks like, and he has chosen not to offer one. That choice is the platform.

This might be merely disappointing in an ordinary election, but Yountville is not approaching an ordinary four years. The Town faces immediate housing obligations, infrastructure decisions, a new town manager, and the unresolved future of one of its most valuable public properties. Its next mayor will be required to make choices that cannot be settled with an invitation to be kinder to one another. Mr. Tagliaboschi has supplied voters with a reassuring description of the atmosphere he hopes to create, without explaining what he intends to accomplish once everyone has settled comfortably into it.

The voters have answered before

Mr. Tagliaboschi has asked Yountville for its votes twice. Both times the answer was no.

In February 2022 the Town Council appointed him to fill a vacant seat. The motion was made by then-Councilmember Marjorie Mohler, the mayor he is now trying to unseat, who cited the value of his institutional knowledge. Another applicant interviewed that night was Hillery Trippe. That fall he chose not to file for the seat he held, then entered the race as a write-in candidate with less than three weeks to go. He received 42 votes. Hillery Trippe and Robin McKee won the two seats. In 2024 he ran again. He received 483 votes and finished third of four, behind Eric Knight and Pam Reeves.

His 2024 and 2026 candidate statements both say he was appointed to the council in 2021. The Town’s own newsletter records the appointment on February 1, 2022. It is a small error, but a peculiar one on the only line of his résumé that involves service on the Yountville Town Council.

In January 2025 he became city manager of Trinidad in Humboldt County. He resigned effective August 28, 2025, citing personal reasons, which are his own business. His tenure lasted approximately seven months. That is not proof of poor performance, but neither is it much of an executive record on which to base a campaign for mayor. Voters are entitled to ask what he accomplished there, what he learned, and how that experience informs the policies he would pursue in Yountville. His campaign has offered remarkably little assistance in answering those questions.

Prior electoral defeats do not disqualify a candidate. Neither does a short period in office or a career spent in public employment. But experience is valuable because of what it teaches a person to do. Mr. Tagliaboschi offers the experience as the qualification while leaving the lessons, and the proposed applications of those lessons, largely to the imagination.

The good old days

For most of his seven years as public works director, the masthead of the Town newsletter read the same way. John Dunbar, Mayor. Steve Rogers, Town Manager. Joe Tagliaboschi, Public Works Director. Mr. Tagliaboschi is not an outsider arriving with a fresh understanding of Yountville’s problems. He was a senior member of the municipal administration during an earlier period whose priorities and accomplishments deserve examination.

The numbers from those years are in the Town’s own Housing Element. Yountville had 3,297 residents in 2000. By 2022 it had 2,829, a loss of about 14 percent, while the town’s hotel rooms and restaurants kept the place full every weekend. From 2015 through 2021, the Town issued 30 building permits for new homes. Eleven of the homes built in that cycle were backyard cottages. Two of the 30 permits were for households earning less than 80 percent of the area median income.

The state’s target for Yountville in that cycle was 17 homes, so the Town could and did call it a success. This is one of the peculiar achievements of California housing policy. A town can satisfy its assigned numbers while steadily losing the ability to accommodate the people who work in it. Compliance becomes a substitute for ambition, and the annual report looks considerably healthier than the community it purports to describe.

The people who cleaned the rooms and cooked the food increasingly drove in from Napa, American Canyon and Fairfield. Young families found homes elsewhere. The town grew smaller and older while its hospitality economy continued to expand. Nobody needs to accuse Mr. Tagliaboschi of personally creating these conditions to recognize that he was part of the administration responsible for managing a town in which they were becoming entrenched. The question is whether he recognizes that history as a problem requiring a different approach or as an era worth restoring.

The current council, by contrast, purchased the former school property, adopted a Housing Element certified by the state in 2024, and put an actual housing and community plan before the public. Residents were entitled to question its scale, costs, design and priorities. Many did, at great length. Whatever one thinks of the Commons, it was a concrete attempt to address a problem that previous administrations had spent years documenting without resolving.

Mr. Tagliaboschi’s contribution to that effort, when he had the opportunity to examine it with the people doing the work, was to recommend selling the property.

What he says now

At the July 7 council meeting, Mr. Tagliaboschi used public comment to scold the council for its “tone and tenor.” He said the published list of vendors and expenses for the Commons “creates more questions than it answers.” He reminded the room that the Declaration of Independence had only 56 signatures, by way of arguing that a small group can speak for a community. Then he announced his candidacy.

His housing position for the campaign is this sentence: “I think the town should explore all available and viable affordable housing including, but not limited to, the former Yountville Elementary School site.” It commits him to nothing. At the September candidate forum he said affordable housing could serve young people, families and seniors. He has not explained what he would build, where, for whom, or with what money.

In public he says explore. At our table he said sell.

The distinction matters because the Town has already spent years exploring. It has held public meetings, surveyed residents, commissioned studies, evaluated alternatives, developed plans, and completed the lengthy process of bringing a significant development proposal through discretionary review. The Commons was not a drawing that somebody sketched over lunch. It was the product of years of public expenditure, professional work, and formal governmental decisions.

A candidate who proposes restarting the exploration ought to explain which information is missing, what questions remain unanswered, how much additional investigation he proposes to purchase, and what he expects to do differently with the answers. Otherwise exploration becomes a pleasantly respectable word for delay, particularly useful to candidates who prefer not to say whether they intend to build anything at all.

How to make $11 million disappear without spending it

Mr. Tagliaboschi also promises to restore “critical reserve funds.” The largest recent draw on those reserves was the $11 million purchase of the school site in 2024. That money did not disappear. It bought land, and the Town subsequently invested in the planning and approvals necessary to make that land substantially more useful.

This distinction is apparently difficult for some people to grasp, although anyone who has purchased a house ought to understand it. Converting cash into ownership of real property is not the same as spending the money on something that is consumed. The cash leaves the account, but an asset appears on the balance sheet. Whether the purchase was prudent depends on the property’s value, potential uses, carrying costs, and the public purposes it can serve, not simply on the fact that the checking account is smaller.

In development, there is another source of value that is especially important. The right to build something specific on a property can be worth a great deal of money. Land that might accommodate housing someday is different from land for which a government has completed environmental review, established the governing zoning, approved a subdivision, and granted the discretionary approvals necessary for an actual development.

That is precisely why the Commons history matters.

The Town purchased a closed elementary school property whose previous zoning did not permit the proposed housing development as an ordinary, by-right use. The council then undertook the planning and approval process for a mixed-use project accommodating up to 150 housing units under the new Commons zoning framework. The work included environmental review, a tentative subdivision map, and the project’s discretionary approvals, including design approval. This was not merely a conceptual proposal awaiting somebody else’s permission to become a project. The Town had done the substantial governmental work necessary to turn the former school into an approved development proposal.

That work has economic value. It removes uncertainty, establishes what may be built, defines the conditions under which development can proceed, and allows a prospective development partner to evaluate costs against an actual approved project rather than an assortment of hopeful assumptions. Approvals do not guarantee construction, and construction drawings, financing, permits and other implementation requirements still matter. But a project that has received its discretionary approvals occupies an entirely different position in the real estate market from one that has not.

Mr. Tagliaboschi supported the petition challenging the Commons zoning ordinance. The Town Council subsequently repealed Ordinance 26-539 in June, returning the property to its previous zoning framework. The conceptual planning work did not vanish, and the Town did not abandon its ability to pursue housing. Nor did the repeal somehow erase every drawing, study or other approval from the public record. But the zoning framework necessary to implement the approved development was removed, and with it went the immediate certainty that made the property’s development potential economically valuable.

California Elections Code Section 9241 adds another consequence. After repealing an ordinance challenged by a qualifying petition, a city council cannot simply reenact that same ordinance for one year. That is a restriction on reenacting the repealed ordinance, not a permanent prohibition on planning or pursuing other lawful land-use actions. Nevertheless, it imposes a real delay on restoring the particular zoning framework the Town had adopted.

Consider what that means for anyone contemplating the purchase of the property today. A buyer would encounter a site with substantial planning work behind it, but without the implementing zoning that supported the approved development. The buyer would also inherit the political uncertainty demonstrated by the petition campaign. The cost of that uncertainty is not theoretical. Developers account for the time, expense and risk of securing governmental approval when deciding what land is worth. The more approvals remain uncertain, the greater the discount a prudent buyer is likely to demand.

This is why Mr. Tagliaboschi’s two positions deserve to be considered together. He wants voters to believe that he will restore the Town’s reserves. He also advocated selling a valuable public property and supported the effort that removed the zoning necessary to realize an important part of its development potential. One position concerns recovering public wealth. The other made recovering it more difficult.

He spent seven years as the Town’s public works director. He has worked in municipal administration for much of his professional life. These are not obscure principles of development finance that should need explaining to him. If his preferred course remains to sell the property, voters deserve an explanation of how much the Town would receive, what approvals a purchaser would need, and why a sale under the present circumstances would serve the public better than completing or revising the Town’s own plan.

A candidate who promises fiscal responsibility should be able to distinguish between spending public money, investing public money, and destroying the value that public investment was intended to create. Mr. Tagliaboschi has given voters no reason to believe he has made those distinctions.

Who is paying for his yard signs

On September 2, The Club Yountville, LLC supplied $25,000 to a political committee called Build a Better Yountville. The paperwork identifies Gary Jabara as the company’s responsible officer. On September 15, the committee reported approximately $22,000 in independent expenditures supporting four candidates: $7,300 for Joe Tagliaboschi for mayor and $4,900 each for Hillery Trippe, Jessi Bugden and Jill Turner for Town Council.

These were independent expenditures, not contributions to the candidates. The filings do not establish that any candidate requested the spending, coordinated with the committee, or promised anything in return. That distinction is important, particularly in a campaign already burdened by accusations and insinuations. There is no need to invent an arrangement when the public record is interesting enough on its own.

Mr. Jabara owns The Estate Yountville and more than 300 hotel rooms in town. He backed the petition challenging the Commons zoning and purchased the Yountville Sun in July. His company has now financed an independent political effort to elect a mayor and three council candidates. The newspaper he owns covered Mr. Tagliaboschi’s candidacy, and the committee his company sponsors has spent money promoting it. None of these activities is inherently unlawful. Together they demonstrate an unusually extensive interest by a major commercial property owner in the direction of a town whose government makes decisions directly affecting his investments.

The immediate example is Vintage 1870. Mr. Jabara has an application before the Town involving the historic Groezinger Wine Cellar, including the proposed conversion of its second floor to banquet use and changes to the building’s east façade. The merits of that application should be determined through the applicable planning, historic-preservation, building and land-use standards. Ownership does not make an application improper, nor does a property owner’s political activity establish how any future public official will vote.

But the next mayor and council will have influence over the appointments that shape the Town’s Planning Commission and over the broader policies governing land use and preservation. Those responsibilities are not incidental in a town where a handful of large property owners control an extraordinary share of the commercial landscape. They determine whether historic buildings remain subject to meaningful protections, whether hotel expansion is consistent with the community’s long-term interests, and whether the people who sustain Yountville’s economy will ever have a realistic opportunity to live here.

Mr. Jabara is entitled to advocate for his interests and spend money supporting candidates he prefers, subject to California’s campaign-finance laws. Yountville residents are equally entitled to ask why those particular candidates appeal to him and whether their public positions would serve the Town as a whole. The more troubling question about Mr. Tagliaboschi is not whether he has made some undisclosed bargain. There is no evidence presented here that he has. It is whether he has offered an independent governing agenda substantial enough for voters to distinguish his priorities from those of the people spending money to elect him.

A candidate who wanted the Town’s largest housing site sold to a developer is now benefiting from independent political spending financed by one of the Town’s largest commercial property interests. That does not prove what he would do as mayor. It makes his failure to explain what he intends to do considerably more consequential.

What the job requires

The next mayor inherits real work. The Town has missed two of the Housing Element’s three rezoning deadlines, and the third falls in December. The 13 units built in Yountville so far this housing cycle are all market-rate second homes. A new town manager, Heather Abrams, starts October 19 and will need a council capable of establishing priorities, resolving disagreements and making decisions. The Town is planning a one-million-gallon water storage tank, and the Veterans Home needs a steady advocate in Sacramento. The former school property remains a substantial public asset whose future will have to be resolved in a way that acknowledges the housing shortage, the public investment already made, and the legal consequences of the zoning repeal.

None of these responsibilities can be discharged by promising better manners.

Kindness is a virtue in public life. So are patience, civility and the willingness to listen to people with whom one disagrees. A small town has particular reasons to value all of them, since the people arguing at a council meeting are liable to encounter one another at the post office the following morning. But civility is not a substitute for judgment. Listening is not a substitute for deciding. And a pleasant meeting that produces no useful result is still a failure of government, however warmly everyone thanks the chair on the way out.

Mr. Tagliaboschi has made the emotional atmosphere of Yountville’s political life the centerpiece of his campaign. He wants to restore harmony, ask difficult questions, provide oversight and honor the past while planning for the future. These sentiments would make an agreeable introduction to almost any civic luncheon in America. They do not constitute a program for governing a town with legal obligations, valuable public property, aging infrastructure, a housing shortage and development interests pressing against the limits of its historic character.

His record presents voters with a candidate who has never won a contested election, whose most recent executive appointment lasted seven months, whose participation in the Commons discussion began with a recommendation to sell the property, and whose campaign has produced remarkably little in the way of specific public policy. He has the benefit of substantial municipal experience but offers almost none of the practical proposals that experience ought to make possible.

There is something almost touching about the campaign’s confidence that a return to the good old days will solve the problems the good old days helped leave behind. Yountville was smaller at the end of that era, its workers lived farther away, and its housing production was sufficient largely because the state had asked so little of it. The present council’s efforts have been imperfect, expensive, controversial and occasionally exhausting. They have also involved making actual decisions about actual problems, an activity that tends to generate disagreement in communities where disagreement has become synonymous with incivility.

Mr. Tagliaboschi is offering Yountville a familiar municipal temperament, a résumé heavy with government service, and a promise that everyone will feel better once the people currently making decisions have been replaced. What he has not offered is a credible explanation of what he would do with the authority he seeks.

The choice for mayor should not be a referendum on who sounds kindest at a microphone or who most fondly remembers the way Town Hall used to operate. It should be a judgment about competence, independence, priorities and the willingness to make difficult decisions in public. On those questions, Mr. Tagliaboschi has had ample opportunity to make his case.

He has not made a case for being unhappy with the present council. He definitely has not made a case for replacing its mayor.

The Size of a Decision

There is a peculiar advantage to opposing the Yountville Commons. You can be against it without ever explaining what you are against. It is too big, too expensive, too complicated. The $91 million figure ends most conversations before they begin.

That figure was a long-range estimate for building out the entire 7.5-acre former elementary school site over many years, including housing, infrastructure, and public facilities. It was never a check the Town Council was asked to write. The first phase was scoped at about $25 million for five buildings and 40 homes, financed with roughly $5 million in Town cash, about $16 million paid for with Measure S funds, and a revenue repaid from the buildings’ own rents. Every later phase would have required its own decision. The difference between a master plan and a construction authorization is approximately the difference between drawing a map of California and buying every house on it.

One Building at a Time

Phasing was the central design decision of the Commons, and it was made deliberately. The conventional way to put this many homes on a site this size is one large structure, with long interior corridors, an elevator core, and parking in a podium beneath it or a lot around it. That approach looks efficient on a spreadsheet. It would also dominate a 7.5-acre property in the middle of a small town, and it commits the full cost, the full height, and the full number of residents on the day the permit is issued.

The Commons divided the housing into small buildings scaled to the houses and inns already in town, each one built, occupied, and evaluated before the next began. A Council unhappy with the first phase could stop. Building small did not mean building cheaply. Each building had to be good enough to stand on its own, because each one would be judged on its own. The site is an abandoned school in the center of town, and every building placed on it has to return that ground to public life at the scale Yountville is known for. It’s one of several reasons the full buildout required more than 400 new trees.

Six Doors

The building block in the plan was the Village House, an ordinary wood-frame building of two and three stories, about 3,600 square feet, organized around a single stair. It has no garage, no corridors, and no lobby. Each apartment has a front door to the exterior, with private decks and windows onto the landscape, and each household has one parking space a short walk away.

The six households described here are composites, built from Napa County occupations, regional wage data, and California’s 2026 income limits. They are not applicants but their circumstances are not hypothetical.

The ground-floor studio belongs to a 70-year-old widow who spent three decades in Yountville, waiting tables and later keeping books for a winery. The sale of her house paid off the loan taken during her husband’s illness and helped her two children buy homes outside the valley. Social Security and modest savings give her about $30,200 a year, which the state classifies as extremely low income.

Across the landing lives a 23-year-old dishwasher earning about $42,060. He rents a room in south Napa and drives Highway 29 home after the kitchen closes, because the bus service has stopped for the night.

Upstairs, a certified nursing assistant at the Veterans Home of California earns about $46,467 and is raising a six-year-old son. They live in American Canyon.

Next door are a maintenance worker for the Town of Yountville, her husband, who supervises a restaurant kitchen up the valley, and their toddler. Together they earn about $138,572. That sounds comfortable until one tries to buy a house in a town where the median sale price exceeds $1.6 million.

Across from them are a registered nurse at a Napa hospital and her husband, a sheriff’s deputy. They earn about $217,000 and would pay market rent.

Under the roof live a housekeeper at a Yountville inn, her husband, who works in the vineyards, and their child. They earn about $96,304 and rent in Fairfield, where housing takes 44 percent of their income.

That is twelve people, three of them children, in one building on land the Town already owns.

The Ceiling Nobody Mentions

Most affordable housing in California is financed with federal low-income housing tax credits. The nonprofit developers who use them, Burbank Housing among them, have done valuable work across the region. But the credits carry a fixed rule. A tax-credit apartment must go to a household earning no more than 60 percent of the area median income. Under an income-averaging option, some units may serve households up to 80 percent, provided the building as a whole averages 60 percent.

Apply that rule to the Village House. The widow, the dishwasher, and the nursing assistant qualify easily. The housekeeper’s family earns about 65 percent of the median for three people, which puts them over the standard limit; they could qualify only if the developer elected income averaging. The Town maintenance worker’s family earns about 93 percent of the median and is excluded under either rule. So are the nurse and the deputy.

A tax-credit version of this building would house four of these six households at most, and possibly three. The households it would turn away include the Town’s own employee, a kitchen supervisor, a nurse, and a sheriff’s deputy. They are the middle of Yountville’s workforce, and no other housing program in the valley is designed for them.

Handing the school site to a single tax-credit developer would therefore not be a neutral administrative choice. It would decide, in advance and for decades, that the Commons houses only households below 60 percent of median. The Commons as presented earlier this year was designed to avoid exactly that result. Its income mix was aimed at the households every other program leaves out specifically because the middle class workers serving Yountville and the region have no alternative except longer and longer commute times.

What Measure S Is For

In November 2018, 74 percent of Yountville voters approved Measure S, which raised the hotel tax by 1 percent to support workforce and affordable housing. The Housing Element the state certified in 2024 commits the Town to use the fund for extremely low, very low, low, and moderate-income homes.

The moderate category is the point. Measure S is local money, and it carries no federal income ceiling. It is the only source available to the Town that can serve a household at 93 percent of median as readily as one at 30 percent. Combined with Town ownership of the land, it allows one building to hold restricted apartments across every income category alongside market-rate apartments whose rents help carry the debt.

The state requires Yountville to plan for 72 homes between 2023 and 2031, including 19 for very low-income households, eleven for low-income households, and twelve for moderate-income households. Tax credits can reach the first two categories. The twelve moderate-income homes, for households earning too much for subsidized housing and far too little to buy here, are the Town’s to provide. Measure S is how the Commons proposed to provide them.

Counted by these bands defined by local incomes, a single Village House alone would supply three very low-income homes, one of them at the extremely low level, one low-income home, one moderate-income home, and one market-rate home.

What the June Repeal Changed

In June 2026, the Council repealed the Commons zoning rather than send the petition to repeal it to a townwide vote. The property returned to its Public Facilities zoning, under which publicly owned housing remains possible through a conditional use permit. The repeal did not erase the planning, the housing need, or a hotel tax that keeps accumulating for one legal purpose.

Show Us the Alternative

It is entirely possible to support housing for working families and oppose a particular proposal on financial, architectural, or environmental grounds. Those objections deserve to be examined on their merits. They also carry an obligation.

If the building is too tall, say how tall it should be. If six apartments are too many, say whether four would do. If the Town should not own housing, name the arrangement that would house moderate-income workers without Town land and Town money, because the tax-credit market will not.

The Commons had drawings, costs, phasing, and a site. Its alternatives deserve no exemption from the same scrutiny. Until one appears, the people who clean your hotel rooms, care for our veterans, and maintain your parks will keep commuting into towns further and further away from the Town of Yountville. That, too, is a decision about Yountville’s future, and the people paying its price are largely the ones with no vote in making it.

☾

Disclosure: Brendan Kelly is principal of Kelly + Morgan Architecture, which served as the Town of Yountville’s Owner’s Design Consultant on the Yountville Commons. That work is complete. The households described in this essay are fictional composites. The occupational wage assumptions and housing-income categories behind them reflect the 2026 California income limits for Napa County. They are intended to illustrate the economic circumstances of potential residents, not to represent actual applicants or established eligibility determinations.

It took 235 signatures to stop workforce housing on land the Town already owns, roughly one tenth of Yountville’s registered voters. In 2018, 74 percent of Yountville voters approved Measure S, a 1 percent hotel tax surcharge dedicated to workforce housing. Most of the town voted to fund workforce housing, and a small fraction of it stopped the Town’s plan to build it. Next month, the other nine tenths of Yountville get their say.

That gap is the real division in Yountville this fall, and it has little to do with who loves the town more. On one side is a small group that has learned to work the machinery of local government. On the other is the much larger group that approved the money, supported the idea and then went home after dinner. Ballots for the November 3 election begin arriving this week, and they are the first occasion in two years when every voter in town gets counted at once, with equal weight. That alone is reason to look forward to Election Night.

A Name for the Habit

The political scientist Francis Fukuyama has a word for what has happened in Yountville this past year. He calls it vetocracy: a system in which so many people hold so many chances to stop public action that government becomes far better at preventing things than at doing them.

Vetocracy needs no corruption and no conspiracy. It runs on respectable language. More public input, another study, a better survey, a new task force, a professional facilitator, a fresh look at alternative sites. In Yountville this season the favored word is “reset.” Each request sounds responsible, and many of them are. The trouble comes when they pile up, because there is always one more question worth answering before anyone acts. Nobody has to stand at the podium and announce an intention to block a project. It is enough to say it would be irresponsible to proceed until the town knows a little more, and then to find the next thing it ought to know.

The Town Changed Anyway

All this caution has not kept Yountville the same. The physical town has been preserved with real success. The community living in it has changed a great deal. The town is much older than it was. Houses cost far more. Working families are scarce. A growing share (+85%) of the people who work in Yountville drive in each day from Napa, American Canyon, Fairfield and Vallejo. In 2020 the elementary school closed for lack of enough children to fill it. The cottages, vineyards, parks and Little League field are all still where they were. The people around them are different.

Vetocracy protects what can be seen. A building can be landmarked, a view defended, a parking space counted, a proposed roofline lowered ten feet. What disappears through inaction leaves no mark. There is no photograph of the family that never moved here, and no plaque on the house that became someone’s third residence instead of someone else’s only one. Yountville did not prevent change. It decided, without quite admitting it, which kinds of change would be allowed to happen out of sight.

The Preserve and the Houses

For more than half a century the valley has rightly honored the Napa County Agricultural Preserve. The principle was simple. Growth would not sprawl into the vineyards, because farmland is finite and the valley’s identity and economy depend on it.

Housing inside Yountville was finite too, and the town paid it far less attention. Over the years a substantial share of it became second homes, now in excess of 50%. Nothing on the zoning map changed when that happened. The porch and the garden stayed put. A house lived in all year by a working family and a house used a few weekends a year by owners who live elsewhere still do very different work for a town.

Meanwhile the town’s economy kept needing people. Restaurants and hotels need cooks, housekeepers and managers. The Veterans Home needs nurses and caregivers. Town Hall and the Fire Department and the Post Office needs employees. Yountville never stopped needing these workers. It moved the job of housing them to other cities, which now carry the apartments, the traffic, the schools and the services. Because it happened one sale at a time, it was easy to believe nothing fundamental had changed.

Then the School Closed, and the Town Bought the Land

Housing policy alone did not empty the elementary school, and it would be dishonest to claim it did. Demographics are more complicated. Still, a town known around the world for its food and wine could no longer sustain a grade school, and that deserves more than nostalgia. It happened in a town that had spent decades making it harder for young working families to live here. Yountville can keep its ballfield in perfect condition and still lose the children who would play on it.

The Town’s purchase of the school property, 7.5 acres in the middle of town for $11 million, forced a question the town had been putting off. Here was public land, already developed with a number of valuable buildings, central, tied to the town’s history and large enough for several uses. If workforce housing could not go there, the people who said no owed the town an answer about where it should go instead.

The answer that came back was not a place. It was more procedure.

Nobody Is Against Housing

The genius of vetocracy is that nobody has to oppose the goal. Everyone can support workforce housing while opposing the particular housing the town is actually able to build. The project is too large, too expensive, too dense or not studied enough. The workers have not been properly surveyed. Another property would be better, CalVet should be approached again, the Catholic Church property deserves another look, the Town could buy existing houses, rent subsidies might work, a professional survey should come first, and residents need one more chance to explain what they want.

None of those ideas is foolish, and most of them are not new. The Commons did not begin with a blank page. It was built on years of the Town’s own planning work, and much of what the candidates now propose has already been done, written down and adopted.

The Town’s 2023-2031 Housing Element, adopted in June 2024 and found in compliance by the state that August, records the groundwork. Between February and April 2022, Town staff interviewed nine organizations about local housing needs, among them the Yountville Veterans Home, the Chamber of Commerce and the county’s housing agencies. In March 2022 the Town held a focus group with local business owners and managers of the largest employers, who told the Town that most of their employees cannot afford to live here. The same document found that 67 percent of the town’s vacant homes in 2019 were held for seasonal or occasional use. It already directs the Town to encourage workforce housing on the Veterans Home campus and to put Measure S money toward affordable housing.

Employers have been asked. The Veterans Home has been part of Town housing policy for years. The plan several candidates want to write from scratch already exists, and the Commons was the Town’s effort to carry it out. A political system still needs some way of deciding that it knows enough to act. Without one, careful planning and permanent reconsideration look exactly alike.

What the Candidates Said

Several candidates have now explained in writing how they would handle the Commons and other tough decisions. Their answers are worth reading closely, because they reveal how each one understands the line between listening to the public and governing it.

Jessi Bugden wants Yountville to “start fresh.” On the Commons she says the Town can “start over and do it right.” She proposes new outreach to workers, employers and residents, another review of alternative sites, a look at rent subsidies and buying existing homes, a committee outside the Council to gather ideas, and an advisory public vote before any plan is adopted. She wants a process that “starts with residents instead of ending with them.”

Each idea sounds democratic on its own. Together they skip over the last two years entirely. The Commons was not drawn up in secret. The public record shows open houses, focus groups, one-on-one conversations, advisory commission meetings, Council study sessions and separate public discussions of mobility, sustainability, wellness and the dog park. A resident can have opinions that the Town listened poorly, moved too fast or chose the wrong housing program. Those are arguments about how the process went. They are not proof that it never happened. Starting over throws away time, professional work, public participation and decisions already made, and if every contested decision can be sent back to the beginning, the beginning becomes the safest place for government to stay. And “start fresh” is going to be expensive. Somehow that cost never got on her website.

Jill Turner says plainly that earlier listening sessions happened and that many residents, herself included, were not paying attention. That is a candid admission, and nobody should have to attend every planning meeting to be a good citizen. Her remedy is the problem. She proposes statistically significant research among workers, professional surveys of residents, taxpayers and businesses, another look at the Veterans Home and Catholic Church properties, new scenarios, a full business plan and more listening. She also questions whether young workers even want to live in Yountville, noting that Napa is fifteen minutes away and “hardly an onerous commute.”

That remark carries a policy inside it. If Napa and a commute is the answer, then she is suggesting that Yountville’s plan is for the people who work here to live somewhere else. The cooks, nurses and Town employees remain essential. Only their homes, their children’s schools and their evenings belong to another city. There is a second problem as well. If those who missed the first process can restart it by arriving late, planning has no point at which it can end. Somebody always arrives late. Only in Yountville can these people not just arrive late but now want to also run the town.

Hillery Trippe was asked what she would do when her own judgment about the town’s long-term interest conflicts with strong public opposition. After listening and explaining her view, she says, she would “tend to defer to the community perspective.” She hopes that with enough professional information the Council could reach a decision “acceptable to the community.” For the Commons she proposes neutral professional facilitators and a resident and business task force to develop options before the Council weighs them. But then, if she is on the losing part of a vote, she’ll organize a protest against the council decision in private rather than make her case in public. She never misses an opportunity to tell a crowd she’s a lawyer which explains why her answer to every housing question is more discovery.

The difficulty is the goal which none of these challengers want to touch. There is no single community opinion waiting to be discovered by the right survey. Neighbors want peace and quiet. Businesses want cheap employees. Some residents want actual neighbors living in their neighborhood, some want open space, and some want both and argue hard over the proportions. Representative government exists because those interests collide and somebody elected has to choose. When strong opposition by itself becomes grounds for delay, organized opposition holds something close to a veto. The worker driving in from Fairfield holds none. Neither does the couple who might rent a Yountville apartment two years from now, or the child they have not had yet.

Joe Tagliaboschi, running for mayor, has the shortest phrase for all of this. He wants a “total reset.” Anyone who has fought with a computer knows the appeal. Towns do not come with that button. Yountville owns the land, the school is closed, money has been spent, studies are done, hundreds of residents took part, plans were drawn, opponents organized, and the zoning was repealed. The state housing obligations remain, and so do the amenities already open on the property. A reset cannot return the town to some untouched starting point, because none exists. It can only mean discarding part of what has been learned and beginning another process from where things stand. That may be a defensible choice but it is a choice with significant costs which he conveniently never addresses.

Other candidates on the ballot have answered the same questions differently. Their answers deserve the same careful read.

What the Commons Already Is

To hear the campaign talk, Yountville spent $11 million on dirt and two years paying consultants to look at it. The Town’s own February 2026 report describes something else. Schmitt Hall hosts 15 weeks of youth day camp each year, along with classes, trainings and meetings. The restored Farmstand Garden produced more than 800 pounds of fruits and vegetables in 2025, worked by twelve volunteers. The Farmstand and Coop are open five days a week. Yountville Fit signed up more than 200 members in its first year. The town’s first dog park has become one of its regular gathering places.

None of that proves the housing plan was the right size, affordable or politically wise. It does prove the Commons is not a failure. A serious candidate would separate the parts of the Town’s work that succeeded from the part that drew a petition. In this campaign the dog park, the gym, the garden and the summer camp have dropped out of the conversation entirely. A total reset, it turns out, comes with a selective memory. The proposal for a new dog park was met with howls of resistance from much of this same crowd. And within a month of it opening, it was one of the town’s most used public amenities. And it remains a small but meaningful lesson in how the Council faced down a small mob and got something done for the residents and visitors of Yountville.

Imaginary Projects Have Excellent Budgets

A project that does not exist is almost impossible to criticize. It has no height, no cost overrun, no trees to remove and no neighbor at the microphone. The housing that might someday rise on Veterans Home land, or church land, or somewhere else in the valley, comes with tasteful architecture, plenty of parking, no traffic and broad support.

Real proposals are less cooperative. The moment designers draws something, the costs and tradeoffs appear, along with residents who want it shorter, want twelve fewer units, want more parking or want less. Somebody wants the project moved somewhere else, at which point somebody else will presumably discover that they live next to somewhere else.

The person proposing something real must defend every flaw in it. The person proposing another round of study can stay loyal to a flawless alternative forever. It is difficult to be accused of designing the wrong building when your preferred building has never been designed.

Who Shows Up

Vetocracy does not need a majority. It needs a motivated group that participates more intensely than everyone else.

A resident who mildly supports a project goes home after dinner. A resident convinced it will ruin the town comes to every meeting, writes every letter, gathers signatures and returns the next Tuesday. That is ordinary human behavior and not a sign of bad faith. But intensity and representation are different things. A council chamber measures who came to the council chamber, and a petition measures who signed it. Neither measures the whole town, and neither counts the people who work here and cannot afford to live here.

The costs opponents fear are easy to see and easy to count: a tree, a parking space, a building height, a changed view. The costs of doing nothing arrive as absence. Another worker adds an hour to the drive. Another house becomes a second home. Another young family decides Yountville is a lovely place to visit and an impossible place to start out. Years later the median age shows up in a report, and everyone treats it as weather. Nobody campaigns for more commuters, an older town or fewer children. Those outcomes simply accumulate from hundreds of reasonable requests to wait.

There is always another reasonable reason not to act today. After enough todays, however, a decade has passed.

Why the Ballot Is Different

This is why the election matters, and why it is worth looking forward to.

Every tool of vetocracy rewards whoever has the most time, money and the most stamina. The meeting format rewards whoever can attend at three on a Tuesday afternoon. The petition rewards whoever can organize a clipboard drive. The public comment period rewards whoever writes the longest letters. The ballot rewards none of that. It gives the resident who went home after dinner exactly the same weight as the resident who never missed a meeting. It counts the retiree who quietly wishes there were children on the street again, the business owner who cannot keep a line cook, and the Town employee who would like to live closer to where she works. For one day this fall the quiet part of Yountville gets to speak at a normal volume.

Opponents called the Commons housing plan too big, too costly and too complicated, and repeated it until the phrase did the work of evidence. The Council did not repeal the zoning because it agreed. When the petition to repeal the zoning qualified, the Council could have sent the question to a townwide vote. Instead it repealed the zoning in June as a gesture of good faith, so the town could have a more thorough conversation about the scale of the housing and the timing of its construction.

The Council has received no credit for that decision. The vetocracy crowd saw it as an opening rather than an offer, and the campaign since has treated a deliberate step back as proof that the entire effort was a mistake. A council that pauses to listen and then sees the pause used against it learns exactly how much good faith this process is willing to reward. The open question is what comes next, and the candidates have told voters, in their own words, how they would approach it. Some want resets. Some want new research, surveys, task forces and facilitated dialogues. Each proposal can be judged on its merits. Voters should also see the pattern they make together.

More process does not automatically produce better government. Sometimes another study finds a fatal flaw, and sometimes public outrage rightly stops a mistake. Democracy needs those possibilities. It also needs a government able to finish what it starts. Every candidate promises to listen, and every candidate means it. The useful question to carry into the voting booth concerns what each one intends to do once the listening is done.

There is nothing wrong with protecting the vineyards, the historic buildings, the parks, the trees and the small scale that makes this town recognizable. Those are among the reasons Yountville is worth fighting over. The error is assuming that preserving those things and preserving a living town are the same job. A living town needs people at every stage of life, including some chance that the person serving dinner or caring for a veteran across the road could also become a neighbor. Keeping that kind of town sometimes means changing the physical one.

Yountville can go on perfecting the machinery that prevents visible change while the invisible changes continue, none of them ever requiring a hearing or a vote. Or it can elect people who will gather what they need, accept that unanimity will never arrive, make a decision and own it. For the past year the town has been divided between the few who had the free evenings and everyone else. This fall the count does not depend on who had the free evening, and the larger group finally gets its turn to weigh in.

Disclosure: Brendan Kelly is the principal of Kelly + Morgan Architecture, which served as the Town’s Owner’s Design Consultant on the Yountville Commons. That work is complete.

Summary: The owner of The Estate Yountville has filed plans to cut seven huge holes into the 1870 brick wall of the Groezinger Wine Cellar and put a ballroom for several hundred guests on its second floor. The application arrived with one environmental study out of roughly eight, written by the applicant’s own historian, who gave the project a perfect score while conceding the original brick would never come back. There is no structural design for the unreinforced building yet. This essay explains what California law requires, which requirements were skipped, and why residents have more power here than they think.

The ballroom proposal for the 1870 wine cellar arrived with one environmental study out of roughly eight. Here is what the law requires, and what residents can do about it.

Last week’s essay, “What Yountville Is Really Voting On,” ended with a warning that residents have to pay attention after the party, when the bratwurst is gone and the real decisions move to Town Hall. Since it ran, dozens and dozens of you have reached out by email, by phone and by text, and nearly all of you have asked some version of the same thing: “What can we do to stop Yountville turning into a Disney shopping mall?” This essay is part of the answer, and it starts with one building. The Groezinger Wine Cellar is where the question has stopped being hypothetical: its owner has filed plans to cut seven massive openings into its 1870 brick facade and put a +500 person ballroom on its second floor. The answer is more encouraging than many readers fear. Residents do not get to vote on the brick, but California law sets minimum requirements for a project like this one, and any resident has the right to insist that they be met. What follows explains what those requirements are, which ones this application has skipped, and what you can do about it before anyone votes.

The Studies Nobody Has Done

The application to put a ballroom in the Groezinger Wine Cellar arrives with one environmental study. A project of this size ordinarily needs about eight. The one study is a 12-page memo from Architectural Resources Group, hired and paid by the applicant, which reviewed its client’s project against ten federal preservation standards and awarded it ten out of ten. The memo is candid about its purpose, which is to “support project review for the purposes of CEQA.” It is less candid about everything else.

The California Environmental Quality Act, known as CEQA, applies whenever a town uses its judgment to approve a project, and this one needs a use permit and design review. Before voting, the Town must decide how much environmental review the project gets. It can declare the project exempt and study nothing. It can prepare an initial study and adopt a negative declaration, which is a formal finding that any harm is minor. Or it can require a full environmental impact report. The memo is plainly written to land the project on one of the first two options, and it is not up to the job.

Ten out of ten

The federal standards are ten short rules from the National Park Service for altering a historic building without destroying the reasons it is historic. They are not obscure, and they are not long. The memo checks the project against each and reports a pass every time, which is a remarkable result for a project that removes original 1870 brick from the front of a National Register building.

Four of the passes fail on the memo’s own words.

The ninth standard begins by saying new work “shall not destroy historic materials that characterize the property.” The memo’s own project description removes original brick from six bays of the principal wall and enlarges the seventh. Its defense is that the openings are small “relative to the large size of the building,” a principle under which a large enough landmark can absorb almost anything.

The tenth standard asks whether the building would be unimpaired if the new work were ever removed. The memo concedes the original brick “would not return,” then suggests filling the holes with matching brick, as if a replica were the same thing as the building.

The fifth standard requires distinctive features to be preserved. The memo calls the brick, a historic window, historic vents and part of the parapet distinctive, then removes portions of each and explains that the losses are small. The window, it notes, is only “one of 13.” By that arithmetic the building can lose twelve more before anyone should worry.

The second standard says removal of distinctive features “will be avoided.” The memo opens its discussion of that standard by conceding the project “would affect character-defining features.” It closes three original openings on the north wall, covers the small original windows on the east wall, and excuses the lost parapet on the grounds that no one standing on the ground will see it. The federal standards protect a building’s historic features whether or not they can be seen from the sidewalk.

Three more passes have serious problems. The first standard allows a new use only if it requires minimal change. A ballroom that requires seven new openings, a rebuilt interior, a new dormer and stair, and a seismic retrofit nobody has designed is not a minimal change by any reasonable reading of the standard. The third standard forbids features that create a false sense of history. The project takes the building’s one arched entrance and repeats it across all seven bays, giving the cellar a row of arches it never had. The seventh standard forbids treatments that damage historic material. The memo says the project does not “appear” to involve any, which is true of every document in the application except the rendering, where the vines are gone and the brick has turned the color of a hotel bathrobe.

The remaining passes are thin or empty. The memo treats archaeology as hypothetical, although the plans remove a concrete slab and pour new footings on a site occupied since 1870. It dismisses the 1960s Vintage 1870 rehabilitation as insignificant, a judgment reasonable people can contest. It passes the standard on repairing deteriorated features because nobody checked the condition of the brick, mortar or timber. The memo reports that no historic features need repair, but no one inspected the brick, mortar or timber to find out. A building that has not been examined cannot be shown to need nothing.

Beneath all ten sits the largest omission. The memo lists the open second-story rooms and the heavy timber framing as character-defining features, then declines to analyze any interior work. The interior is where the ballroom goes, and it is where any seismic retrofit would go.

The exemption problem

CEQA offers an exemption for historic rehabilitation that follows the federal standards, which explains the memo’s perfect score. The same law bars any exemption for a project that may cause a substantial adverse change to a historic resource. When the applicant’s own consultant concedes the loss of original brick that will never return, the exemption argument has a short life.

The infill exemption is limited to sites of five acres or less. The cover sheet lists this lot at 6.53 acres, which puts it well over the limit. CEQA also bars exemptions where unusual circumstances create a reasonable possibility of significant effects. Turning an unreinforced brick winery on the National Register into a ballroom for several hundred people is an unusual circumstance by any measure, including Orange County’s.

The fair argument

If the project is not exempt, the law favors the public on the next question. When substantial evidence supports a fair argument that a project may significantly harm the environment, the Town must prepare a full environmental impact report, even if other evidence points the other way. One qualified preservation professional who disagrees with the memo is enough. In this case, the applicant’s own consultant has already conceded several of the losses that such a professional would point to.

A project nobody has finished describing

CEQA requires an accurate, stable and finite description of a project before review begins. This application does not have one.

Putting several hundred people on the second floor of an unreinforced brick building moves it into a higher seismic risk category. The state’s historic building code then requires a structural survey and a full strengthening plan. At present, the plan for keeping the building standing is a blank box on the cover sheet labeled deferred submittals. Strengthening a building like this usually means steel anchors through the walls, plywood over the old floors and roof, and sometimes steel frames inside the timber rooms. Those are physical changes to a historic resource, and nobody can evaluate them until somebody designs them.

The operation is undefined as well. The application does not say how many events the hall would hold, what hours it would keep, how loud the music would be, or where several hundred guests would park. The occupant count shifts from 400 in the narrative to 457 for the hall and 688 for the upper floor in the code tables. The narrative also mentions that the second-floor retail space was “previously demolished” under an earlier permit. CEQA prohibits splitting one project into smaller permits so that no single piece looks significant, and the Town should find out what that earlier permit covered.

The homework

A proper review works through a state checklist of about twenty environmental topics. Several of them need their own technical reports for this project: an independent historic review prepared for the Town rather than the applicant, the structural survey needed to describe the project at all, a noise study, a transportation and parking study, an archaeological records search with formal tribal consultation, a sewer and water analysis for a commercial kitchen serving hundreds, a hazardous materials survey before demolition, and an air quality screening. The applicant has turned in one of roughly eight, and it was written by his own consultant.

Our colleagues at the Sun

The Yountville Sun, your town’s weekly paper, has not yet found room for story. That is understandable. A weekly has only so many pages, and a season of ribbon cuttings, wine release parties and hotel anniversaries takes up a good deal of them. A ballroom for several hundred people inside the a town landmark building cannot compete with a new seasonal menu. The Moon will cover the story in the meantime.

What residents can do

Many readers have written to say the applicant is so rich he can do whatever he wants. CEQA has no exemption for wealth. Lawmakers have created a long list of exemptions over half a century and never got around to that one. The law asks only whether the required review was done, and any resident or group can ask a court to answer that question.

The most important step is also the cheapest, and it has to happen now. Under CEQA, an issue generally cannot be raised in court unless someone raised it with the Town before the final hearing closed. A letter to the Planning Director, or a comment at the hearing, preserves the issue for everyone. Every reader who writes down a specific concern, whether it is the missing structural survey, the brick or the parking, keeps that issue alive.

If the Town approves the project without proper review, residents and preservation groups such as Napa County Landmarks have standing to challenge the approval in Napa County Superior Court. The deadlines are short: 30 days after the Town files a notice of determination, 35 days after a notice of exemption, and 180 days if no notice is filed. A court that finds the review inadequate can set the approval aside and order the work done properly. Anyone considering that step should talk to an attorney well before those deadlines.

That process is slow, and the applicant decides whether it happens. If the studies are done and the standards are met, there is nothing to litigate. If he continues to treat the standards as suggestions written for other people, the delay will be entirely his own. The fastest route to a ballroom is to do the homework, and the slowest is to keep insisting it is optional.

The Town Council will decide this application with broad discretion over a use the zoning code does not list. That discretion covers whether to approve the project. It does not include the power to excuse the applicant from the law. Before November 3, every candidate should say on the record whether they would vote on this project before all the studies have been submitted.

Disclosure: Brendan Kelly is principal of Kelly + Morgan Architecture, which served as the Town’s Owner’s Design Consultant on the Yountville Commons project. That work is complete.

The building is not merely old. The Groezinger Wine Cellars has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1982, recognized for its significance to architecture, commerce and industry in the Napa Valley.

Summary: This essay argues that Yountville’s November 3 election is not merely a contest over personalities, tone or competing visions of local government. Voters are choosing a mayor and two council members who will serve four-year terms and help exercise the Town’s land-use authority. The composition of that council matters directly to the future of the National Register-listed Groezinger Wine Cellars at Vintage 1870.

Gary Jabara has made his political preferences public. Build a Better Yountville, the political committee associated with his interests, has filed independent-expenditure reports in the current election, while Jabara’s property interests are also pursuing changes at Vintage 1870. The Town itself publishes those committee filings separately from the candidates’ own campaign reports. That does not establish how any candidate would vote on a future application, but it makes the stakes unusually concrete: Yountville residents are electing the people who may ultimately be asked to exercise governmental discretion over proposals affecting one of the town’s most important historic buildings.

The essay traces how Ray and Nancy Monte, Don and Sally Schmitt, and others transformed the obsolete Groezinger winery into a successful commercial destination without erasing the building’s industrial character. It contrasts that tradition of adaptive reuse with the current proposal to cut new arched storefronts into historic masonry, close original winery openings, and reshape portions of the complex around contemporary luxury retail and event uses.

The political question is therefore inseparable from the preservation question. Residents will not vote directly on whether historic brick should be removed, whether original openings should be closed, or how aggressively Vintage 1870 should be altered. They are voting for the officials who may later have to make or review those decisions.

That is why this election matters beyond November 3. Campaign signs, parties and political committees will eventually disappear. Decisions made by the next council may be physically irreversible. The central question of the essay is whether Yountville will elect leaders who approach the Groezinger Wine Cellars as an irreplaceable historic resource requiring extraordinary care, or whether future commercial ambitions will be permitted to reshape the very history that helped make Yountville valuable in the first place.

Bread and Circuses. And Bricks.

There is an old political expression, so old that we inherited it from Rome, about keeping the population content with bread and circuses. The idea was not that food and entertainment were bad. Romans presumably enjoyed a good afternoon out as much as anybody. The point was that spectacle could become a substitute for citizenship. Keep people fed, entertained and pleasantly occupied, and they might pay less attention to the considerably duller places where power was actually being exercised.

Yountville has developed its own rather more agreeable version. There are dinners, concerts, grape stomps, cowboy parties, invitations to veterans and, most recently, Oktoberfest. There is bratwurst. There is beer. There is music. There are photographs afterward of neighbors having a wonderful time together. Gary Jabara has every right to throw these parties, and the people who attend them have every right to enjoy themselves. I hope the bratwurst is excellent.

But bread and circuses were not invented because bread was sinister or circuses were unpleasant. They worked precisely because both were enjoyable.

The consequential question in Yountville this fall is therefore not whether Gary Jabara throws a good party. It is not even, ultimately, whether you like Gary Jabara. It is what happens after the music stops, the folding tables disappear and several hundred people who have spent a pleasant evening together go home. Because sitting quietly in the middle of the property Jabara now controls is one of the most important historic buildings in Yountville, and an application has been submitted proposing to change it in ways that deserve vastly more public attention than any campaign party has yet received. His application to turn Vintage 1870 into a ballroom is a public document and can be found here on the Town website. Every resident who cares about this Town should take a moment and look at the materials.

The Groezinger Wine Cellars survived 156 years without needing to pretend it was a Mediterranean shopping village. The proposal cuts new arched storefronts through its historic masonry, closes original winery openings, and turns one of Yountville’s most authentic buildings into a backdrop for luxury retail. This is the picture Gary Jabara has officially submitted as part of his application to alter Vintage 1870.

Again, that building is Vintage 1870, the historic Groezinger Wine Cellars, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. And what happens to it will not be decided at Oktoberfest.

It will be decided by local government and the state of California as to how the Historical Building Code is used or not used to modify this important landmark.

Before there was a Yountville to sell

Walk down Washington Street and look carefully at the long east wall of Vintage 1870. Do it before anyone changes it.

The brick has been there since 1870. It is not decorative brick pasted onto a commercial building to make the place look old. It is the building. Gottlieb Groezinger, a German-born wine merchant, established one of California’s substantial early winery operations there. The surviving cellar was part of a working agricultural complex that included a distillery, barns and stables, a creamery, a steam plant and a family residence. Wine was produced there under successive owners until the middle of the twentieth century.

The architecture tells you what the building did. The walls are thick because wine cellars had to stay cool. The east elevation is mostly solid because holes in a wall admit heat. Its small windows sit high in the masonry to help with venting. The large working openings are elsewhere, where barrels and equipment had to move. None of this was designed by a branding consultant. Nobody in 1870 was wondering how the wall would look on Instagram. The appearance of the building emerged from its work, its climate, its materials and the accumulated intelligence of people who knew how to make wine in Napa Valley without air conditioning.

That is why the wall is beautiful.

It is also why changing the openings changes more than an elevation. A historic industrial building is a document. The relationship between masonry and opening, solid wall and door, tells us how the building worked. Erase enough of that evidence and the document may still be standing, but we have edited its sentences.

The Groezinger Wine Cellars were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982 for their significance in architecture, commerce and industry. Today the Town itself identifies the property as one of Yountville’s National Register historic resources.

That designation came after perhaps the most important chapter in this story, because the building survived not because somebody preserved it under glass, but because a few people figured out how to give it another life.

What the Montes understood

By the 1960s, the winery was finished. The property was an enormous obsolete industrial complex in a little agricultural town with a few hundred residents, the Veterans Home up the hill and almost none of the restaurants, hotels or visitor economy we now regard as inevitable.

Nothing about what happened next was inevitable.

In 1966, Ray and Nancy Monte sold their cattle herd and part of their own property and bought approximately 22 acres of the old winery. Their partners were Ruth and Jim Wagner, Pam and Mike Soper, and Mortimer Bennett. They gave the place a name that acknowledged rather than disguised its origin: Vintage 1870.

The work was grubby before it was glamorous. Industrial debris had to be hauled away. The Monte children helped clean the place. There was no luxury-hotel market in Yountville waiting to reward them and no established destination economy assuring them that boutiques and cafés inside an abandoned winery would succeed. This was a family and a few partners putting their own money into a difficult old building because they believed the building itself was worth something.

In 1967 they brought Don Schmitt and his family from Fresno to help develop and manage the new project. Sally Schmitt opened the Vintage Café there and later the Chutney Kitchen. Vintage 1870 opened in 1968 with a handful of stores and two cafés. Sweet n Sassy became Yountville’s first clothing store. A wine shop followed. Jean Phillips eventually operated The Little Dress Factory there. The complex became one of the earliest major visitor-oriented developments in Yountville, before the luxury hotels and before this town became internationally identified with eating and drinking well.

The Schmitts eventually carried the same idea farther up Washington Street. They found another old working building, a former French steam laundry, adapted it into a restaurant and kept the building’s name. The French Laundry opened in 1978, long before Thomas Keller arrived on the scene.

It is difficult now to imagine Yountville before any of this because the lesson proved so successful that we mistake the result for destiny. Old agricultural buildings became restaurants. Old industrial buildings became shops. Their imperfections became assets. People came here precisely because Yountville did not look as though it had been invented last Thursday by a hospitality company from Orange County.

That inheritance began with people who understood a wonderfully simple rule: you could change what happened inside an old building without changing the story the building told outside.

The remarkable thing they did not do

This is the part of the Vintage 1870 story that matters now.

The Montes radically changed the use of the Groezinger complex. They converted wine production into retail and restaurants. That is adaptive reuse in its purest form. But they did not decide that an old wine cellar needed to look more like a shopping center in order to become one.

They did not cut a picturesque succession of new arched storefronts into the long east wall. They did not invent architectural history. They did not transform an industrial building into someone’s idea of a Mediterranean village. They did not ask the building to pretend that it had spent the nineteenth century selling resort clothing.

They changed the economy inside and preserved the evidence outside.

That distinction is one reason the building could subsequently be placed on the National Register. The official listing records a nineteenth-century winery whose contemporary uses included restaurants and specialty stores. In other words, the new commercial life did not disqualify the old building. The commercial life helped save it.

That is the paradox preservation gets right when it works. The choice is almost never between freezing a building in 1870 and allowing it to participate in 2026. Old buildings survive by being useful. The difficult and intelligent work is finding new uses that can inhabit the old architecture without requiring the architecture to lie about what it was.

For more than half a century, Vintage 1870 has demonstrated that this can be done.

Now compare that history to what is being proposed.

The wall

There are two images at the start of the essay, and in a sense the whole issue fits between them.

One is the Groezinger Wine Cellar as Yountville knows it: weathered brick, ivy, high square windows, long stretches of masonry, a utilitarian roof, cupola and chimney. The other is a rendering submitted with Gary Jabara’s current application. The wall is presented as a much more conventional retail frontage. New arched openings appear in the historic masonry. Shop windows glow from inside. The old industrial wall has been made more accommodating to contemporary merchandising.

A sandwich board in the rendering says, “Capri Living Made Simple.”

It is an unexpectedly useful caption because it explains the problem better than a hundred pages of architectural vocabulary could. The proposal is no longer asking the retail operation to adapt itself to the historic building. The historic building is being asked to adapt itself to the retail operation.

The applicant’s own historic analysis identifies the masonry walls, their pilasters, the small first-story windows and the historic working openings as character-defining features. That is architectural language for the things that make this building unique. The pattern of wall and opening is not incidental decoration. It is the evidence of how the cellar functioned.

The proposal creates new openings where the historic building did not have them while closing original openings elsewhere. That is a curious approach to preservation. The doors that tell the truth disappear and doors that tell a more commercially convenient story appear in their place.

Once 1870 brick is removed, it is removed. The applicant’s historian acknowledges that future restoration would involve filling the openings with matching brick. Matching brick may be excellent brick. It may be indistinguishable to most visitors. But it will not have been laid there in 1870. There is a difference between restoration and replication, and there is no preservation technique yet invented that can manufacture another 156 years.

This is not an argument that the building can never change. It is an argument that changes to a National Register property should begin with the building rather than with the merchandising plan.

Main Street, Disneyland

There is a familiar architectural trick in Southern California. Take some fragments of historical vocabulary, clean away the inconvenient messiness of actual history, make every storefront inviting, make every opening picturesque, coordinate the finishes, and produce something more emotionally satisfying than an actual old building ever managed to be.

Disneyland’s Main Street does it brilliantly.

But Main Street works because it never had to survive a harvest, hold wine barrels on a 100 degree day or make payroll. It is a stage set of collective memory. Its job is to look more convincingly historic than history itself.

The danger at Vintage 1870 is the opposite process. We have an authentic building and risk turning it into the stage set.

That should bother people across every faction in Yountville because authenticity is not merely an aesthetic preference here. It is one of the foundations of the town’s economic value. Millions of visitors can buy expensive dinners, wine, clothes and hotel rooms in new buildings anywhere in California. One reason they come to Napa Valley is that the commercial experience still occurs among evidence that something was here before the visitors arrived and it was unmistakably connected to the working landscape that remains protected. More protected perhaps than the historic industrial buildings that made it so valuable for succeeding generations.

If we gradually convert that evidence into just more pleasant shop fronts, we will eventually discover that Yountville can be built anywhere.

And upstairs, a ballroom

The storefronts are what people will notice from Washington Street. The larger economic purpose of the proposal appears upstairs.

Gary Jabara proposes an event or banquet space on the second floor, with a commercial kitchen, bar and associated lobby areas. The project materials describe the need for an indoor venue capable of accommodating events currently served by temporary facilities. The submitted calculations contemplate assembly occupancies numbering in the hundreds. That creates a second issue that should be considered entirely independently from whether anyone likes the storefront design: structure.

This is an old unreinforced masonry building in earthquake country. The application materials reviewed for this essay name a structural engineering firm, but the submission described here contained no completed structural survey, seismic evaluation, strengthening drawings or comprehensive explanation of what interventions would be necessary to accommodate the proposed assembly use.

That matters because structural reinforcement is not invisible magic. Strengthening historic masonry can involve anchors, diaphragms, frames, shear elements and connections between walls, floors and roofs. Those things may be entirely achievable. They may even be beautifully done. But nobody can responsibly determine their preservation impact before knowing what they are.

Yountville should want the ballroom question, the structural question and the historic-preservation question considered together rather than considering altering the historic exterior and discovering the difficult parts afterward.

The Napa Valley has already received its reminders about unreinforced masonry. Earthquakes do not care about AI renderings.

Now we can talk about the election

This is where the November election becomes relevant, but perhaps not in the way campaigns normally encourage us to think about elections.

Yountville elects a mayor and two council members on November 3. The Town’s candidate list includes Marjorie Mohler and Joe Tagliaboschi for mayor and multiple candidates for the two council seats.

A political committee called Build a Better Yountville has filed independent-expenditure reports with the Town. The committee is sponsored by The Club Yountville, LLC, associated with Gary Jabara, and has spent money supporting candidates in the current election. The Town publishes those filings separately from the candidates’ own campaign reports, an important distinction because an independent expenditure is not the same thing as a candidate contribution and does not establish coordination or any promise of a favorable future vote.

Those limitations matter. Nobody should write a candidate’s future vote before the candidate casts it. Nor does political spending, by itself, prove why somebody spent the money.

But the public does not have to ignore the institutional relationship staring it in the face.

Gary Jabara is not merely somebody with opinions about Yountville government. He has substantial commercial property interests in Yountville. An application affecting Vintage 1870 is now before the Town. Land-use decisions can determine what a property may contain, how intensively it may operate and what physical alterations may be made to it. The Town Council also has an appellate role in planning matters; the Town expressly informs applicants and opponents that decisions of the Zoning and Design Review Board or Planning Department may be appealed to the Council.

That makes council membership consequential to every large property owner in town, not just Gary Jabara.

It is therefore perfectly legitimate for voters to ask candidates something much more specific than whether they favor “business” or “preservation,” two words broad enough to conceal almost any position. What standards would they apply to alterations of a National Register property? How much original historic fabric are they prepared to sacrifice for an updated commercial use? Would they require structural impacts to be understood before approving architectural changes? What does compatibility mean when a use does not fit neatly within an existing zoning category? What evidence would they require before making those findings?

Those are not gotcha questions. They are the job.

Bratwurst is easier

And now we return to Oktoberfest.

Community parties are easy to understand. You arrive. Someone hands you something to eat. A band plays. You run into people you know. Veterans are welcomed. Somebody says a few words about community. At the end everybody agrees that Yountville is a lovely place.

Municipal government is the opposite. It is documents, findings, structural calculations, zoning language, environmental rules, appeals, public testimony and occasionally several terrible hours in uncomfortable chairs while people argue about six feet of setback. There is no band. Nobody hands you a beer when you enter Town Hall. The reward comes years later when you walk down a street and realize that the place still feels like itself.

That is why bread and circuses remain such a useful warning two thousand years after Rome.

The danger is not that the person providing the bread is secretly poisoning it. The danger is that consuming it is so much easier than governing yourselves.

Gary Jabara is entitled to be generous. He is entitled to entertain his neighbors, support candidates, advocate for his property and make the strongest case he can for changing Vintage 1870. The people who oppose those changes are equally obligated to make their case from facts rather than suspicions. But Yountville’s residents have a different obligation. They have to pay attention after the party.

The inheritance

Think about the unlikely chain of people who had to exercise restraint for this building to reach you intact as a landmark building.

Gottlieb Groezinger built a working winery in 1870. Generations used it for the thing it was built to do. When that economy changed, Ray and Nancy Monte saw value where other people might have seen demolition. They sold cattle, invested their own money, cleaned the old winery with their children and gave the building another purpose. Don and Sally Schmitt helped create something inside those walls that had scarcely existed in Yountville before. Their experiment helped establish the commercial culture from which modern Yountville eventually grew.

The remarkable feature of that history is not that nobody changed anything. Everybody changed everything. They changed the use. They changed the businesses. They changed the economics. They changed Yountville itself.

What they did not casually change was the building that made the place different.

Ray and Nancy Monte sold their cattle to save an obsolete winery when there was no obvious fortune to be made from doing it. Fifty-eight years later, nobody has to speculate about whether the gamble worked. Vintage 1870 sits on Washington Street in one of the most valuable hospitality towns in America. The building that once looked economically obsolete became economically irreplaceable. That is the inheritance sitting before the next Town Council.

The question is not whether Yountville must remain frozen in 1870. The Montes answered that question in 1966. It plainly does not. The question is whether the next generation possesses the same intelligence about change that the previous generation demonstrated: new uses without invented history, new prosperity without erasing the evidence of the old economy, and commercial ambition disciplined by the understanding that certain things become valuable precisely because nobody can build them again.

This election will eventually be over. The signs will come down. The committees will file their final forms. The bratwurst will be eaten, the beer will be gone, and the campaign parties will become photographs. Someone will be mayor, two people will take council seats, and the intensely personal arguments of 2026 will begin their migration into local history. What will not disappear is the authority those people will hold over the future of Yountville, including decisions about one of its most important historic buildings.

Gary Jabara has made his political preferences public. He has backed candidates, spent money to support them, and at the same time advanced plans affecting the National Register-listed Groezinger Wine Cellars. There is no need to speculate about a hidden motive when the relevant facts are already in public view: he owns the property, he wants changes approved, and he has chosen to participate aggressively in the election of the officials who may ultimately sit in judgment of land-use questions affecting that property. That does not tell us how any candidate will vote. It does tell voters exactly why the composition of the next council matters.

The question before Yountville is therefore not abstract and it is not merely political. It is whether the people elected in November will treat the Groezinger Wine Cellars as an irreplaceable historic resource whose alteration demands extraordinary care, or whether they will be more receptive to remaking it around the commercial ambitions of its current owner. Residents do not get to vote directly on the proposed openings in the brick, the ballroom, the seismic work or the preservation findings. They vote for the people who may eventually decide those things.

That is the real ballot measure.

By the time the public understands what has been lost, the campaign will be long over. The brick will not grow back. The original openings will not reappear. A National Register-listed building can survive a change of ownership, a change of use and even a change of economy, as the Montes proved more than half a century ago. What it cannot survive indefinitely is a succession of irreversible decisions made by people who fail to understand why the building mattered in the first place.

The election lasts one day. The council it produces will exercise power for years. The Groezinger Wine Cellars have already survived for more than a century and a half. Whether the next chapter preserves that inheritance or alters it permanently will be decided not at an Oktoberfest table, but in the votes cast at Town Hall by the people Yountville chooses to put there.

That is what is at stake in Yountville. Do you see it now?

Disclosure: Brendan Kelly is principal of Kelly + Morgan Architecture, which served as the Town’s Owner’s Design Consultant on the Yountville Commons project. That work is complete.

There is a perfectly good word for what happened Monday night at the Yountville Chamber of Commerce Candidates Forum, but unfortunately that word is not forum. A forum is, by definition, a place or meeting for open discussion, debate and the exchange of ideas. What roughly 250 Yountville residents were given instead was seven candidates seated on a dais, answering questions they had received in advance, frequently by reading answers they had prepared in advance. The moderator read each question, reminded everyone whose turn it was to answer first, kept the clock moving, and then proceeded to the next question. It was orderly, civil, fair and almost completely incapable of revealing how any of these people might respond when confronted with an argument they had not rehearsed.

That distinction matters because nobody came to the Community Center Monday night to see whether the candidates could complete their homework. We came to learn something about the people asking us to entrust them with the government of Yountville. We wanted to hear what they believed, certainly, but we also wanted to see how strongly they believed it, whether their assumptions survived scrutiny, whether they understood the policies they were criticizing and whether they could respond intelligently when somebody sitting six feet away disagreed with them. There were seven candidates on that stage. Surely somebody disagreed with somebody about something. For nearly two hours, however, you could have been forgiven for wondering.

The Only Unscripted Question Came From the Audience

The evening’s most revealing moment occurred about three-quarters of the way through the program, when a gentleman in the audience finally stood up and interrupted the proceedings. He wanted to know when the people in the audience would be allowed to ask questions. His frustration was obvious and, judging by the reaction around the room, hardly unique. The candidates were simply reading their prepared answers, he complained, while everybody else was sitting there waiting for an opportunity to ask them some tough questions. It was the first genuinely spontaneous moment of the evening, and for about thirty seconds the Candidates Forum suddenly became an actual forum.

He was politely told to sit down. There would be no questions from the audience. If he wanted to question a candidate, he could approach that person individually after the program was over. The Chamber had apparently provided cards on which people could suggest questions, but that is not remotely the same thing as allowing a voter to stand up, address all seven candidates and ask something that nobody had been given three days to prepare for. Nor is cornering a candidate beside the cheese tray afterward a substitute for asking a question in front of 250 other voters who might be interested in hearing the answer.

The Chamber undoubtedly had sensible reasons for imposing structure on the evening. Seven candidates are a lot of people to manage. Time is limited. Fairness matters. Nobody wants one candidate monopolizing the microphone or two candidates turning a civic event into cable television. But there is an enormous amount of territory between a food fight and an oral examination where everybody received the questions in advance. A competent moderator can ask follow-up questions, challenge an unsupported assertion, invite another candidate to respond and still maintain perfect civility. That is, in fact, what moderators are supposed to do.

The Interesting Question Is Usually the Next One

Consider the question about the relationship between the Town Council and Yountville’s new Town Manager. Every candidate gave some version of essentially the same answer. The voters elect the Council, the Council establishes policy and direction, and the Town Manager administers the organization and implements the Council’s policies. This is all perfectly correct. It is also approximately what one would expect anyone running for Town Council to know before filling out the paperwork.

The interesting question was the one nobody asked next. What happens when the Council establishes a policy and a small but determined group of voters hates it? At what point does listening become reconsideration, and at what point does reconsideration become abandonment? How should an elected official weigh the testimony of fifty angry people at a Council meeting against months of public meetings, professional analysis, adopted plans, state requirements and the interests of hundreds of residents who did not show up that night? When should a Council member compromise, when should a Council member change his or her mind, and when should an elected official politely tell an angry room that representative government occasionally requires making a decision not everyone likes?

These are not academic questions in Yountville. We just spent two years arguing about the future of the former elementary school property. The Commons went through workshops, surveys, advisory meetings, Planning Commission hearings and Town Council proceedings before the implementing zoning ordinance was adopted. A petition was then circulated against that ordinance, the Council ultimately repealed it, and the property returned to its previous zoning framework. Whatever anyone thinks about the Commons, the petition or the Council’s decision, this town has just lived through a nearly perfect case study in the tension between representative government and organized opposition.

Seven people who want to govern Yountville were sitting together on one stage. That was the moment to ask them what they had learned from it. Instead, we moved on to the next prepared question.

Before We Order Another Study, What Exactly Don’t We Know?

Housing produced much the same problem. Several candidates talked about the need for more information, more listening, additional surveys or further study before the Town makes consequential decisions. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of those things. Government should have good information before spending public money or adopting policy. But “we need more study” is not yet a position. It is the beginning of another question, and that question should have been asked Monday night.

For example, has the candidate actually read Yountville’s Housing Element? The Town already has a state-certified Housing Element, adopted after an extensive public process, containing demographic data, housing inventories, constraints, projections, policies and an analysis of the housing needs Yountville is legally obligated to address. If that information is inadequate, what precisely is missing? What survey has not been conducted? What question remains unanswered? What information would cause the candidate to support one policy rather than another? How much more time should the Town spend collecting it, and what happens to the problem while everybody waits?

That is not a gotcha question. It is the difference between an aspiration and a governing philosophy. “I want more information” sounds responsible until somebody asks what information you need. “I want more community input” sounds wonderfully democratic until somebody asks how much input is enough to permit a decision. Yountville has become extremely good at asking for another conversation. At some point somebody has to explain how the conversation ends.

The Most Important Exhibit Was Sitting in the Audience

At some point Monday night I stopped watching the candidates and looked around the room. The turnout was impressive. Approximately 250 people had left their houses on a Monday evening because they cared enough about Yountville to listen to seven people explain why they should be entrusted with its government. In a town this size, that is meaningful civic participation and something worth celebrating.

But the other thing that was impossible not to notice was the age of the audience. This was an elderly room because Yountville is an elderly town. A substantial share of the population lives in protected senior housing, including the Veterans Home and the mobile home parks, and the demographic imbalance has become one of the central facts about Yountville’s future. The 2020 Census counted 3,436 residents in Yountville, of whom 2,295 were 65 or older. The median age was 74. There were only 187 residents under the age of 18. Those numbers are not an argument against older residents. They are an argument for taking seriously what happens to a town when the generations behind them are disappearing.

This is where the familiar promise to “bring families back to Yountville” deserves more than approving nods. Bring them back from where, and put them where when they arrive? The elementary school that served this community for more than a century closed in 2020 after years of declining enrollment. Housing prices have climbed beyond the reach of most working families. Much of the workforce serving Yountville’s hotels, restaurants, wineries, shops and public institutions commutes into town every morning and leaves again every night. Meanwhile, a significant portion of the housing stock functions as second residences, homes that may be beautifully maintained and enormously valuable but do very little to put children in classrooms, customers in the grocery store on a Tuesday morning or year-round neighbors on the sidewalk.

A real candidates forum would have put those facts on the table and asked the seven people onstage what they intend to do about them. If you want families to return, what housing policies are you prepared to support that would allow families to live here? If you oppose additional density, where should those homes go? If you believe the market will provide them, what evidence supports that belief? If second homes are contributing to the hollowing out of the year-round community, is that simply the inevitable consequence of Yountville’s success or something local government should try to address? There may be seven different answers to those questions. Wonderful. That is why there were seven chairs on the stage.

Everything Is Sustainable Until Somebody Has to Choose

If there was one word that united the candidates Monday night, it was sustainable. Tourism should be sustainable. Housing should be sustainable. Development should be sustainable. Town finances should be sustainable. Yountville itself should presumably be sustainable. By the end of the evening, sustainability had been invoked so often that it had ceased to describe a policy and had become a verbal comfort blanket. Nobody is running for office on a platform of unsustainable government.

The problem is that governing begins precisely where these agreeable words stop being useful. Yountville wants to remain a quiet small town while supporting an extraordinary hospitality economy. It wants the people who work here to live nearby while resisting the amount and type of housing many of them could afford. It wants young families while possessing some of the most expensive real estate in the Napa Valley. It wants thriving restaurants and hotels without the traffic their employees and customers create. It wants historic preservation, open space, workforce housing, convenient parking, fiscal restraint, beautiful architecture, low density and very little visible change. Every one of those goals is defensible. They are also not always compatible.

That is where politics becomes interesting. The real question is not whether a candidate supports housing, sustainability, families, fiscal responsibility, small-town character or civility. Of course they do. The question is what happens when preserving one of those things makes another one harder to achieve. Which priority gives way? How much change is acceptable? Who pays for it? What evidence would change your mind? Those are the choices elected officials actually make, and those are the choices voters deserve to hear candidates argue about before filling in the little circles on their ballots.

Instead, we heard a great many statements with which almost nobody could possibly disagree. It was the civic equivalent of seven restaurant menus promising that the food will be delicious.

Disagreement Is Not Incivility

There is an understandable reason communities shy away from genuine political debate. American politics has provided enough examples of disagreement degenerating into ugliness that the words civil discourse now appear in almost every conversation about local government. Yountville has had its own unpleasant moments during the last several years. Nobody should want more personal attacks, jeering from audiences or accusations about motives masquerading as arguments about policy.

But civility does not require agreement, and decorum does not require boredom. In fact, the ability to disagree respectfully may be the most important test we could impose on somebody asking to sit on the Town Council. A candidate should be able to say that another candidate has misunderstood the Housing Element, underestimated a financial risk, exaggerated a problem or proposed something that simply will not work. The other candidate should be able to answer. A moderator should be able to notice when somebody has avoided a question and politely ask it again. None of this requires shouting, humiliation or personal attack. It requires adults who know the difference between challenging an argument and attacking the person making it.

There are major policy decisions in front of Yountville. The former elementary school property remains unresolved. The Town has housing obligations it cannot simply wish away. The population is aging. The year-round community is shrinking relative to the economic machine built around it. The Veterans Home faces its own enormous questions about staffing and the future of its residents. Businesses need workers. Workers need somewhere to live. Residents want to preserve the qualities that made them love Yountville in the first place. These interests overlap, but they are not identical, and pretending that enough listening sessions will eventually cause everyone to agree is not civic harmony. It is avoidance.

Politics is the process we invented to resolve exactly these kinds of disagreements. It is the public discussion, negotiation, resolution and implementation of policy among people who often want different things. There is nothing shameful about that. What matters is whether the arguments are informed, whether the participants are honest about the tradeoffs and whether everyone accepts that losing an argument occasionally is part of living in a democracy.

Let Them Think in Public

I will be profiling the candidates individually in the Moon over the coming week, and there were answers Monday night that deserve closer examination. Some were thoughtful. Some raised questions that I want to pursue. Some contained assumptions worth testing against the Town’s own documents and history. The candidates deserve to have those positions presented carefully rather than reduced to a few impressions from one evening.

That is also why Monday night was such a missed opportunity. I went there hoping to learn something I could not learn by reading seven questionnaires. I wanted to discover which candidate could hear an unexpected argument, absorb it and formulate a response. I wanted to know who understood the difference between a campaign promise and an implementable policy. I wanted to hear somebody explain why another candidate’s proposal would not work, followed by that candidate explaining why it would. Most of all, I wanted the people asking to govern Yountville to demonstrate that they could think in public, because governing is largely the experience of discovering that the question you prepared for is not the one that arrives.

The next Council will not receive Yountville’s problems several days in advance with suggested talking points attached. Residents will be angry about things nobody predicted. Budgets will collide with ambitions. State mandates will interfere with local preferences. Businesses will seek approvals. Neighbors will object to them. Housing decisions will produce opposition. Consultants will disagree. Staff will recommend something unpopular. New information will arrive after somebody has already taken a position. Council members will occasionally discover that the person sitting beside them sees the same facts and reaches the opposite conclusion.

Those are not unfortunate interruptions to governing. They are governing.

Which brings us back to the gentleman who stood up Monday night. His interruption was probably not contemplated by the evening’s program, but he inadvertently asked the question that exposed the weakness of the entire event. Two hundred and fifty residents had come to a Candidates Forum because they wanted to hear seven prospective leaders discuss the future of their town, and he simply wanted to know when the people who actually live here would get to ask them something difficult.

He was told he could talk to them afterward. Next time, give him the microphone.

This election is not about the Yountville Commons. It is about who runs Yountville.

One choice is the residents who have governed this town for decades through slow, responsible, incremental work. That work produced a certified Housing Element, Measure S, the purchase of the school site, and two years of public meetings about what to build there. The other choice is a small number of the town’s largest business owners, who have decided the next Council should answer to them.

The Commons became the battlefield because it was the first project big enough to show which side each person is on. Gary Jabara, owner of The Estate Yountville, backed the petition that stopped it, bought the Yountville Sun this summer, and now funds a committee spending to elect four candidates. In all that time, neither he nor any other large business owner opposing the Commons has offered a single alternative way to house the people who work in Yountville. No site, no project, no number of homes, no price.

Their silence is striking because they have the most to gain from solving the problem. Yountville’s hotels, restaurants, and wineries depend on workers who cannot afford to live here. Housing those workers would cut commutes, steady their staffing, and strengthen their businesses more than anyone else’s. They have fought the one serious plan to do it and proposed nothing in its place.

This series takes the candidates one at a time. Each essay sets the candidate’s own words, from campaign websites, candidate statements, and public comments, beside the public record: the Housing Element, the Town’s financial analyses, Council minutes, and campaign filings. The test is the same for everyone. What does the candidate propose to do about housing, what would it cost, and who would it serve? And is the candidate prepared to govern for the residents, or running to hand the town to the people funding the campaign?

As the candidate forum’s take shape over the next few weeks, the questions for that candidate will be published here, so readers know in what was asked and can judge the answers themselves. Each title carries one word. It is the Moon’s judgment of what the record shows, and each essay lays out the evidence behind it.

The order is not alphabetical. Jill Turner is first because she is the clearest example in this race of a candidate with no plan for housing, backed by the local business interests that have offered none either.

Summary: There is a particular kind of political promise that sounds prudent because it is framed as caution. Slow down. Ask more questions. Do the homework. Demand a business plan. Study the market. Do not leave the dock until everyone agrees on the route.

This essay examines Jill Turner’s use of that language in her campaign for Yountville Town Council and asks what happens when it is set against the record of the Commons itself. The project did not appear overnight. It emerged from years of public meetings, housing analysis, cost studies, design work, phasing discussions and debate over what Yountville could realistically build on the former school site. The essay argues that Turner often describes this body of work as though it were preliminary, incomplete or missing altogether.

That does not make the Commons beyond criticism. Nor does it mean its assumptions cannot be challenged. The more interesting question is what must come after criticism. If the existing route is wrong, where is the alternative route? If the destination is better, where is it? What does it cost? What constraints does it solve? What evidence suggests it can actually be reached?

The cartoon carries that argument into a single image: a traveler standing at the dock with an upside-down map, surrounded by luggage, preparing to lead others toward a destination no one has yet been able to locate.

The essay’s central question is therefore not whether Turner is entitled to question the existing plan. Of course she is. It is whether questioning a map is the same thing as knowing where to go.

Jill Turner Would Like Everyone to Wait

Jill Turner opens this series because her website states, more completely than any other candidate’s, the case for postponing the Yountville Commons. Her three priorities ask the Town to rethink, research, and revisit work it already finished in public over the past two years. She is unprepared to meet the challenges of being on the Yountville Town Council.

Jill Turner has lived in Yountville for 28 years. According to her campaign website, her civic service in town during that time consists of a seat on the board of her homeowners’ association. This summer she found Town Hall. The Council responded to a petition Ms. Turner submitted with resident Stephen Becker, signed by more than 100 residents, asking the Town to delay hiring a permanent town manager until after the November election. The Council declined and hired Heather Abrams, the former town manager of Fairfax, who starts October 19.

Her platform asks the Town to wait on the Yountville Commons as well. Taken together, her public record this year and her campaign website make a consistent case. Delay is not a side effect of Ms. Turner’s platform. It is the platform, and that is why she is first in this series.

A book about people like this

In 2019, three political scientists at Boston University published Neighborhood Defenders, a study of who shows up to local housing hearings and what they say there. They found that the residents who participate hold far more negative views of new housing than their communities as a whole, and that they are socioeconomically advantaged. These participants use the permitting process to raise concerns that produce long delays, higher costs, and smaller projects. They tend to be older homeowners, and one of their most common complaints is that local residents were never properly consulted.

The authors called them “neighborhood defenders”. Their method is “concern” rather than open opposition. Few people at a hearing say they oppose housing for working people. They say they support it, then object to the site, the schedule, the method, and the price, and ask for more study.

Ms. Turner’s first priority, in her own words: “I support the ‘what’ and ‘who’ of this project.” Then: “I do not agree with the ‘where,’ ‘when,’ ‘how,’ and ‘how much’ of what has been proposed so far.” Then a request for a business plan, a budget, and new research. Ms. Turner is a NIMBY. The sentence she chose for her campaign platform is the NIMBY position word for word: yes to housing, no to building it here, now, this way, or at this price.

The Town already met the neighborhood defenders like Jill Turner.

In 2022, while preparing its state-required housing plan, the Town held two public workshops. The February session, held online, drew about 12 people. The March session at the Community Center drew eight. The finished plan records receiving two comment letters. That was the public participation of a town of 3,436 people in its own eight-year housing plan.

The people who did attend were asked what stood in the way of housing in Yountville. According to the Town’s certified Housing Element, the majority named two barriers: land availability and community opposition to new housing.

The Town went to work on the first barrier. In 2024 it bought the 7.5-acre former elementary school site for $11 million, and more than $3 million of Measure S revenue went toward the purchase. Between 2024 and 2025 it held workshops, surveys, open houses, advisory committee meetings, Planning Commission discussions, and Council meetings on what to build there, along with community dinners. The Council approved the Commons vision unanimously in March 2025. That September, the Yountville Sun, then independently owned, described a thoughtfully planned design shaped by six months of extensive community outreach.

On February 17, 2026, the Council held a study session with one item on the agenda, the Commons. The Town’s consultants presented the workforce data, the preliminary financial model, and the phasing scenarios, which together make up the business plan Ms. Turner is asking for. The Sun counted nearly 150 people in Schmitt Hall at the height of the meeting, standing room only, on a rainy night.

Ms. Turner’s third priority makes the neighborhood defenders’ standard complaint without quite stating it: “Engage ALL of Yountville’s Stakeholders,” then “listen, hear and ACT.” The record shows two years of meetings, a study session that filled the room, and a candidate absent from it. Ms. Turner is campaigning on the claim that residents were not heard. They were heard, at two years of public meetings, and she was not there.

The Housing Element named two barriers to housing in Yountville: available land and community opposition. The Town solved the first by buying the school site. The second problem are residents like Jill Turner, and she is running for Town Council.

Her website, read closely

Time in Yountville. “My husband Steve and I have owned our Yountville home for 28 years.” Neighborhood defenders, in the study’s findings, are long-tenured homeowners. Ms. Turner leads with it.

Professional background. “Business planning, project management, marketing, advertising, PR, property management, real estate and other investing, consulting.” She has held a real estate license since 2008. This résumé prepares its owner for one civic task above all, reading a pro forma and explaining what is wrong with it. The Town presented one to a full room in February. Ms. Turner’s response was to ask for one.

Community service. “Current or past Board member of Yountville’s Vintage Homeowners’ Association, Junior League of San Francisco, BizWorld.” None is a Town commission, committee, or advisory body. Yountville’s volunteer commissioners read hundreds of pages of staff reports for no pay and vote in public on specific things at specific addresses. Ms. Turner proposes to start at the top.

Education. She spent two years at the University of Strasbourg, whose Christmas market is among the oldest in Europe. This explains priority two.

Military service. The entry reads: “None for me personally.” A paragraph follows about her father, a Navy lieutenant who attended the Naval Academy at Annapolis, and her parents’ wedding under the Arch of Swords, followed by 72 years of marriage. The Moon congratulates her parents sincerely. Their story is also the full extent of her stated background on veterans’ affairs, one of her three priorities.

Politics. “I’m a capitalist and believe in hard work, personal responsibility, financial transparency, following the law, making memories, and enjoying myself along the way.”

A capitalist who objects to the Town owning an asset

Ms. Turner lists property management and real estate investing among her professional qualifications. She knows how rental property works. The owner collects the rent, the tenants pay down the debt, and when the loan is gone the owner holds a building that produces income every month for as long as it stands.

The Commons applied that model to the Town. Yountville owns the land. Measure S, the hotel tax surcharge voters approved on November 6, 2018, would repay the construction bonds. The rents would cover operations and a small bank loan. Once the debt was retired, the Town would own a debt-free apartment complex and its income permanently. The Moon’s white paper on the Commons illustrated the scale. Seventy-eight apartments averaging $1,500 a month, with 40 percent of the rent going to operations and reserves, produce about $842,400 a year in net income, an asset worth roughly $16.8 million when valued the way any appraiser values income property.

The Commons was also aimed at the hole the market leaves open. The Town’s Housing Element records what local housing providers told it in 2022: where affordable housing exists in Yountville, it is limited to very low incomes, which shuts out the middle- and lower-income population. That population is nurses, caregivers, cooks, and the Town’s own employees. The private market builds for second-home buyers. In 2019 the Housing Element made clear that a huge percentile of the town’s housing were vacant homes. She has made no comment on her website on how or why this mysterious situtation has contributed to the shortage of middle-class housing.

Ms. Turner believes in owning rental property when she is the owner. When the owner would be the Town, she opposes it.

Eight years, and still too fast

Ms. Turner objects to the “when” of the Commons. Voters approved Measure S almost eight years ago, by 74 percent. The Town adopted its housing plan in 2024, bought the land in 2024, approved the vision in 2025, and presented the first-phase financial model in February 2026. Her website does not say what schedule she would accept in place of eight years, what milestone would satisfy her, or what year she expects anyone to move in.

The Housing Element set deadlines of its own. It required the Town to identify additional sites for rezoning by January 2026 and complete the rezoning by July 2026. Both dates passed without action. The state keeps its own calendar, and it is not waiting for Jill Turner’s Christmas market.

The voters have already spent more than $3 million in Measure S money to buy the school site for workforce housing. Ms. Turner wants that land to sit empty while the Town starts over?

The “where”

Ms. Turner objects to the site. Her website names no other one.

The alternatives circulating in town are two. One is to turn the school site into a park. The other is to sell it. A park is a policy choice with a cost, and it leaves both the housing need and the Measure S fund exactly where they are. A sale runs into California’s Surplus Land Act. Before a public agency can dispose of land like this, it generally has to declare the land surplus, notify the state housing department, other public agencies, and affordable housing developers, wait through a mandatory response period, and negotiate in good faith with qualifying housing proposals. The state reviews the process. A council member who wanted to sell the school site would spend her first year learning that the law requires her to negotiate with housing developers before anyone else.

Statistically significant

Her plan calls for “statistically significant market research asking workers what THEY want.” The Town’s 2022 housing workshops drew about 20 people between them. The Census estimate of how many people work in Yountville carries a margin of error of plus or minus 1,211, because the town is too small for precise sampling. The Town did the research a town this size allows: Census data, employer surveys, focus groups with large employers, public surveys during the Commons process, and dinners where people could tell the designers directly what they wanted.

The Moon described this maneuver on September 3, in “But Sure, Let’s Do Another Study.” A study names no land, commits no money, and sets no construction date. Everyone can agree to one, and a year later everyone is where they started. Ms. Turner’s first priority calls for three.

Her plan closes with this instruction:

“Let’s be creative in forging the best past to achieve those goals.”

The Moon has checked. That is what it says. As I said, the word to describe her ambitions to be on the Town Council is “Unprepared”.

The veterans, and who cares for them

Ms. Turner writes that Veterans Home residents “have numerous complaints about rules, regulations, and policies,” asks “what’s taking so long to open the skilled nursing facility,” and promises advocates who will not merely “schmooze and attend meetings.” In the same paragraph she concedes that the Council “may not be able to unilaterally fix the problems.” She is correct. The Veterans Home was founded in 1884, and the Town was incorporated in 1965. The Home is run by the state veterans department, is the largest landowner and largest employer inside town limits, and accounts for approx. 550 citizens of the town’s population.

The Town has not been idle about it. Program 20 of the Housing Element commits Town staff to work with the Home and the state on the upgrades in the state’s 2020 master plan for its veterans homes, including new or improved on-site housing for employees. Policy 4.13 commits the Town to encourage workforce housing on the Home’s campus. The Housing Element describes the Town’s work with the Home as diligent. Ms. Turner has discovered, in 2026, an advocacy program the Town adopted in 2024.

There is one thing a Town Council can do for the Veterans Home on its own authority, and Ms. Turner is running against it. The skilled nursing facility she asks about is a state project of roughly $325 million. CalVet has acknowledged that the cost of living around Yountville makes it difficult to recruit and keep the caregivers who would staff it. The Housing Element names nursing assistants on the Veterans campus among the lowest-paid workers who cannot afford to live here. At $20 an hour, a nursing assistant can afford about $1,040 a month for housing, and nothing in Yountville rents for that. Ms. Turner wants the skilled nursing facility open for the veterans, and she is campaigning against the housing for the people who would staff it. A nursing home with no nurses is an empty building. Her first priority, delaying the Commons, defeats her third priority, helping the veterans. She has not noticed that her own platform contradicts itself.

Excitement

“Interest in wine is down and excitement in the Town of Napa is up,” she writes, and proposes reviving the Mustard Festival and adding European-style Christmas markets. In June, Yountville collected $971,724 in hotel tax, a record, up 24.9 percent from the year before. The town she proposes to rescue from boredom just had the best month in its history. Ms. Turner demands a business plan for the Commons. Her own two ideas have none. She does not say what the festivals would cost, who would pay for them, who would run them, or when they would happen.

The verbs

Read her three priorities and list the verbs. Rethink. Prepare. Obtain. Be creative. Forge. Generate. Revisit. Cultivate. Engage. Listen. Hear. Act, in capitals. Apply pressure. The list does not contain “build.”

Delay is not free. Someone pays for it, and it is the workers Ms. Turner says she supports. Nationally, over the past 35 years, rent has gone up about 149 percent while household income has gone up only about 35 percent. Rent keeps rising faster than paychecks. Every year the Commons is delayed, the caregiver and the line cook pay another year of rising rent, and they never get that money back. The delay costs the Town too. Construction costs go up every year, and the Measure S money, which can legally be spent only on housing, sits in the bank doing nothing.

The honest version

Ms. Turner is entitled to oppose the Commons. Some residents do, and voters could weigh that position if she stated it. An honest version of her website would take one sentence: the Commons should not be built, the Town should not hire a manager until a new council picks one, and the people who work here should keep commuting.

On September 19, the Moon asked every candidate for the one thing the Sun’s questionnaire left out, which is their alternative. Answering means drawing the plan, pricing it, counting the homes, naming who they serve, explaining the legal path, and saying when someone gets a key. The Commons did all of that and was attacked for every number it produced. Ms. Turner’s alternative has none of those parts, which keeps it safe from criticism, since imagination has no building department. What she offers instead is support for the “what” and the “who,” objection to everything that would produce them, and a slogan, “Rethink What’s Possible,” from a candidate who does not appear in the record of the years the Town spent thinking.

Who is paying

On September 15, a committee called Build a Better Yountville filed state reports of independent spending supporting Ms. Turner and three other candidates. Its sponsor is The Club Yountville, LLC, the company of Gary Jabara, owner of The Estate Yountville, who backed the petition against the Commons and bought the Yountville Sun this summer. His company put $25,000 into the committee, which reported about $22,000 in spending across the four candidates. The candidates did not receive that money, and the filings do not show coordination or any promised favor. They show which candidates Mr. Jabara wants elected. Ms. Turner’s website explains why he chose her.

For 28 years the Town did its incremental housing work without Ms. Turner: the workshops of 12 and eight people, the tax measure, the land purchase, and two years of meetings and dinners with hundreds of residents ending in a petition to stop this effort. Ms. Turner took no part in the Town’s housing work, and now she wants voters to give her the power to stop it just as it is ready to build. That is why she is first in this series. Her objection is not really to the Commons. Her website does not offer a single way to house the people who work in Yountville: no other site, no other project, no other policy. She acts as if Yountville has no housing crisis to solve, and she is asking voters to put her in charge of solving it.

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.

That legal distinction, however, is only the beginning of the story. Jabara is a major Yountville hotel and property owner. Earlier this year he participated in the fight over the Commons. This summer he bought the Yountville Sun. Now his company is financing political advertising supporting four candidates for the government that regulates property and land use in town. He has also submitted a design-review and change-of-use application involving Vintage 1870, although I have requested those records and will not characterize the proposal until I have reviewed the actual application.

None of this proves that a candidate has been bought or that Jabara expects favorable treatment. It does establish something voters are entitled to understand before Election Day: who is spending substantial money trying to influence the composition of Yountville’s government, and what economic interests that spender has in the town.

In a community this small, $25,000 is not background noise. This essay follows the money, explains California’s wonderfully peculiar rules for independent political spending, and asks the questions the disclosure laws leave to voters: Why does this election matter enough to a major property owner to spend this money, what do the candidates supported by that spending say about it, and how much weight should Yountville residents give those facts when they cast their ballots?

By Brendan Kelly

FIRST CAME THE MONEY

On September 2, The Club Yountville, LLC put $25,000 into a political committee with the wonderfully aspirational name Build a Better Yountville, Sponsored by The Club Yountville, LLC. The paperwork identifies Gary Jabara as the company’s responsible officer. Thirteen days later, on September 15, the committee filed four reports showing $7,300 spent on yard signs supporting Joe Tagliaboschi for mayor and $4,900 each supporting Hillery Trippe, Jessi Bugden and Jill Turner for Town Council. Add them up and you get $22,000 spent supporting four candidates for the government of one very small town.

The first thing to understand is what those documents do not say. They do not say Jabara gave Tagliaboschi $7,300. They do not say he gave Trippe, Bugden or Turner $4,900 apiece. They do not establish that any of the candidates asked for the spending, approved it, coordinated it or promised Jabara anything in return. California calls these independent expenditures, and the distinction is not decorative. State law says spending ceases to qualify as independent when it is made in cooperation or consultation with a candidate, at a candidate’s request or suggestion, or through an arrangement or coordination with the candidate or the candidate’s agent.

So let us begin by denying ourselves the easiest accusation. There is no evidence in these filings that Gary Jabara bought four candidates. There is evidence that his company supplied $25,000 to a committee that then spent $22,000 trying to help elect four candidates. That is not the same thing, legally or factually, and pretending otherwise would make this story less interesting rather than more.

Because what Jabara has done openly is interesting enough.

CALIFORNIA HAS A RULE FOR THIS

California has spent half a century worrying about money in politics, which is approximately how long California politics has spent giving it reasons to worry. The Political Reform Act regulates campaign financing, conflicts of interest and governmental ethics. It requires public disclosure of campaign money so voters can identify who is financing political activity, and the Fair Political Practices Commission says one of the law’s purposes is to promote transparency and fair governmental decision-making.

California becomes particularly attentive when campaign money approaches permits, licenses, contracts and other valuable governmental permissions. Government Code Section 84308, generally called the state’s pay-to-play law, restricts certain direct contributions from parties and participants in covered proceedings. Under the current rules, a party seeking a covered permit or other entitlement generally may not contribute more than $500 to an officer of the agency while the proceeding is pending and for 12 months afterward. Certain officials who have received more than $500 from a party or participant during the preceding 12 months can also face restrictions on participating in that proceeding.

The reasoning is not terribly mysterious. A campaign contribution may be worth hundreds or thousands of dollars. A discretionary land-use approval may be worth millions. California therefore decided that when somebody asking the government for something valuable also gives campaign money to the official deciding whether he gets it, perhaps everybody should put down the cheese plate and pay attention.

Independent expenditures are different. California permits genuinely independent political spending because spending money advocating for candidates is not legally the same thing as giving those candidates the money. The California Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) defines an independent expenditure as one not made in consultation, cooperation or coordination with the affected candidate or committee. The law is therefore capable of producing a situation in which a property owner’s company can finance thousands of dollars in political advertising supporting candidates for local office while those candidates can accurately say that the money was never contributed to them.

That is not a loophole I have discovered behind a filing cabinet in Sacramento. It is how the system is designed. And Gary Jabara is using it.

WHY YOUNTVILLE GOVERNMENT IS WORTH CARING ABOUT

If Jabara owned a chain of laundromats in Fresno, his fascination with the composition of the Yountville Town Council might require considerably more explanation. He does not. He owns substantial hospitality and real-estate interests in Yountville, where extraordinarily valuable property sits inside an extraordinarily small municipality and where decisions made by local government can have substantial economic consequences.

This is where my own profession becomes useful. I have spent much of my career working on hotels and complicated development projects. Hotel owners do not hire architects, engineers, land-use lawyers and planning consultants because they have grown lonely. They hire us because owning property and being allowed to do what you want with property are entirely different experiences. The deed gets you through the front door. Zoning, design review, historic-preservation rules, environmental review, conditional-use permits and discretionary approvals determine what happens after you arrive.

That is particularly true in Yountville, where the physical character of the town is both a civic inheritance and an extraordinarily profitable commercial asset. The charm is monetized nightly. The vineyards, old buildings, walkable streets and carefully managed scale that residents think of as their town are also part of what visitors are buying when they spend several hundred or several thousand dollars to sleep here. The public therefore has an interest in controlling change, while major property owners have an entirely rational interest in what changes the government will permit. None of this makes Gary Jabara sinister. It makes him a property owner. It also makes the composition of the Yountville government worth money to him in a way it is not worth money to most of us.

THEN CAME THE COMMONS

Earlier this year, Yountville got an unusually clear lesson in the mathematics of political power in a very small town. The Town had spent years planning the Commons on the former elementary-school property, including workforce housing and public improvements. Opposition coalesced around the ordinance implementing the zoning. A petition gathered roughly 235 signatures, and in June the Council repealed that ordinance, returning the property to its previous zoning framework and forcing the Town to reconsider how to proceed.

The Commons did not vanish. The Town still owns the property. The conceptual planning did not spontaneously combust. Yountville’s housing obligations did not disappear because 235 people signed something. The Council backed up in the entitlement process rather than abolishing the idea that the publicly owned site might have a future involving housing and civic uses.

Politically, however, something important happened. Roughly 235 signatures changed the direction of a major public undertaking. In San Francisco, 235 angry residents constitute the line for brunch. In Yountville, they can alter municipal policy.

That is neither praise nor criticism. It is arithmetic. A town this small does not require a mass political movement to change direction. It requires organization, an issue capable of motivating people and enough voters to make elected officials understand that proceeding has acquired a political price.

Jabara participated in the opposition surrounding the Commons. Whatever else one thinks about that fight, it demonstrated something useful to everyone watching it: Yountville is movable. The levers are close to the ground, the electorate is small and a relatively modest number of people can produce a consequential political result. The next logical question is what happens when the objective is not stopping an ordinance but electing the people who write them.

THEN CAME THE NEWSPAPER

This last summer Gary Jabara bought the Yountville Sun.

That fact does not make the newspaper dishonest. Newspapers have owners, and owners have interests. William Randolph Hearst was not in the newspaper business because he had an unusually deep affection for printer’s ink. The appropriate response to ownership is not hysteria but literacy: readers should know who owns the institution selecting the stories, framing the disputes, questioning the candidates and deciding which facts deserve prominence.

In Yountville, the ownership is particularly relevant because the newspaper’s new owner is not merely a publisher. He is also the major local property owner who had participated in one of the year’s largest land-use controversies and whose company would soon finance political spending supporting four candidates for the government regulating those interests.

Again, chronology is not conspiracy. Buying the Sun does not prove that Jabara bought it to influence an election. Opposing the Commons does not prove that he did so to advance some unrelated property interest. Financing independent expenditures does not prove that the candidates receiving the benefit of that advocacy owe him anything. Serious journalism should be able to hold several facts in its head without immediately dressing one of them in a trench coat.

But serious journalism should also be able to put dates in order.

First came the Commons fight. Then came ownership of the local newspaper. Then came $25,000 from Jabara’s company to a political committee supporting four candidates for Yountville office. At some point, “nothing to see here” becomes a surprisingly strenuous position to maintain. Even for the Yountville Sun.

AND NOW THERE IS AN ELECTION

This is where the story arrives at the ballot.

Build a Better Yountville is not spending $22,000 because it wants residents to admire its typography. Political advertising has a purpose. The four filings themselves mark the expenditures as SUPPORT for Tagliaboschi, Trippe, Bugden and Turner. Whatever else anyone believes about Gary Jabara’s motives, there is no need to speculate about what these particular expenditures are intended to accomplish. They are intended to help those four candidates get elected. That does not make the candidates Jabara’s candidates in some legal or proprietary sense. It means Jabara’s company financed a committee that prefers them to the alternatives. Coca-Cola does not buy advertising because it is neutral about whether you drink Coca-Cola. Toyota does not spend money advertising Camrys because it hopes you will carefully consider all available sedans. Political committees do not spend thousands of dollars putting candidates’ names on signs because they are conducting a sociological experiment in corrugated plastic.

They want those people elected.

The candidates themselves therefore deserve precision rather than insinuation. There is no evidence in these filings that any of the four coordinated with Jabara. There is no evidence here of a promise, bargain or quid pro quo. There is no evidence that any of them would vote a particular way on a future matter involving one of his properties. There is also no reason voters cannot ask them about the support.

A candidate can be asked whether substantial independent spending from Jabara’s company is welcome or unwelcome. A candidate can be asked what independence from a major financial supporter means in practice. A candidate can be asked whether Jabara and his businesses would receive exactly the same treatment before the Yountville government as any other applicant. Those questions do not accuse anybody of corruption. They are the questions disclosure makes possible. And they should be answered before the election, because that is when the answers are useful.

THE BUILDING THAT EXPLAINS THE STAKES

There is one more piece of this story, and its importance is not what happens after Election Day. Its importance is what it tells voters before Election Day about why local government matters to a major property owner.

Jabara has submitted a design-review and change-of-use application involving Vintage 1870, the historic Groezinger Winery complex. I have filed a public-records request for the application and supporting documents and expect to review them next week. Until I have the actual plans in front of me, I am not going to speculate about what Jabara proposes or tell readers what to think about it. Once the records arrive, I will examine the drawings, proposed uses, history of the property, applicable regulations and the public approval process, and report what the application actually asks Yountville to approve.

For this election, Vintage 1870 matters for a narrower and much more immediate reason: it puts an actual property, an actual application and potentially valuable governmental permissions behind all this political spending. Gary Jabara does not merely have opinions about how Yountville should be governed. He owns valuable property there, and he has submitted an application asking the Town to approve changes involving one of those properties. California itself recognizes the financial significance of land-use decisions: its pay-to-play law expressly includes land-use permits and other entitlements among the governmental proceedings where campaign contributions can create concerns about influence.

That is the economic stake voters should understand. A government approval can affect what a property owner may build, how a building may be used, how intensively it may operate and, ultimately, what that property can earn and what it may be worth. I do not yet know what Jabara is asking Yountville to approve at Vintage 1870 because I have requested the application and supporting records and will review them next week. But the existence of the application makes one point unmistakably concrete: the people elected to govern Yountville are not merely debating civic philosophy. They occupy a government that makes decisions capable of affecting the use and value of Gary Jabara’s property and his financial assets.

That does not prove Vintage 1870 motivated his political spending, and it does not prove that any candidate supported by his committee would give him a favorable decision. Those would be conclusions in search of evidence. But voters do not need either proposition to understand the stakes before them. Jabara’s company has put $25,000 into a committee supporting four candidates for Yountville office at a time when Jabara owns substantial property interests in the town and is seeking governmental approval concerning at least one of them. That is not a theory about why this election matters to him. It is an explanation of why who governs Yountville can matter financially to a property owner like Gary Jabara.

THIS IS WHAT THE ELECTION IS ABOUT

Yountville can now dispense with one particularly useless argument: whether Gary Jabara is allowed to participate in its politics. Of course he is, subject to the same campaign laws that apply to everyone else. He can oppose the Commons. He can buy a newspaper. His company can finance independent political advocacy. He can support candidates he believes would govern differently. There is nothing inherently improper about a businessman wanting a government more sympathetic to his ideas.

The interesting question is whether Yountville voters want the same government he does.

That question cannot be answered by counting yard signs, and it cannot be answered by treating every candidate supported by Jabara’s committee as somebody’s purchased employee. It requires voters to examine the people seeking office: their records, their positions, their independence, their answers about land use and housing, and what they say when asked directly about the substantial outside spending being made on their behalf.

This is why the September filings matter now. Not because residents should laminate them and wait three years for an interesting planning hearing. Not because they prove corruption. Not because $25,000 is some staggering amount of money in the universe of American campaigns. They matter because Yountville is holding an election, one company associated with a major local property owner has put $25,000 behind a committee supporting four candidates in that election, and voters are entitled to consider that fact while their votes can still affect who governs them.

The FPPC’s rules cannot tell a voter what weight to give that information. They are not supposed to. California requires disclosure because disclosure leaves the judgment where it belongs: with the person holding the ballot. The state can force political money into daylight. It cannot decide what a citizen should think after seeing it.

That is the call to action in Yountville between now and Election Day. Read the filings. Ask the four candidates what they think about the spending being made to support them. Ask every candidate how he or she would protect independent judgment when major economic interests come before the Town. Examine their records rather than their signs, and decide which candidates have earned your trust. Nobody needs to accept my conclusion about Gary Jabara, because the more important conclusion belongs to each voter.

A man with substantial property interests in Yountville has made his preference unusually easy to identify. His company’s money is on the table, the committee’s expenditures are disclosed, and the four names it supports are printed in black and white on California campaign filings. That is useful information, but it is not the election result. The result belongs to the people who actually cast the ballots, and they get to decide for themselves whether Gary Jabara’s preferred government is also the government they want. That is a considerably more consequential decision than where to put another yard sign.

Summary: The Yountville Sun asked local candidates fourteen questions about the Commons, housing, transparency, civility, Town finances and the future of the former elementary school site. This essay answers those questions directly, within the newspaper’s own word limits, while restoring the history and context that the questionnaire often leaves out.

The larger argument is that Yountville is no longer at the stage where criticism alone is enough. The Town still owns seven central acres, the Commons planning work still exists, the housing problem has not disappeared, and the zoning repeal created time to reconsider and improve the plan rather than erase it. The next Council will have to understand not only what residents dislike, but the Housing Element, Measure S, the Surplus Land Act, municipal finance, phasing and the legal consequences of whatever alternative it chooses.

So after answering the Sun’s fourteen questions, the essay adds a fifteenth: What, exactly, is your alternative? If the Commons is too large, too expensive or simply wrong, then the competing ideas should now face the same test the Commons has faced for two years: draw them, price them, count the homes, explain the law, identify the funding and tell the public what happens next.

The answers are free. The homework is not.

The response to yesterday’s essay, The Sun Keeps Shining in One Direction, produced a question I should have expected: Fine. If I think the Sun’s questionnaire begins with some loaded assumptions and leaves some important subjects untouched, how would I answer it?

So here goes. I am not running for anything, and these are not endorsements of anyone who is. These are answers to the Sun’s actual questions, kept within the newspaper’s actual word limits so candidates are welcome to use them, change them, argue with them or check every fact themselves. In fact, I hope they do. The purpose is not to produce fourteen officially correct political opinions. It is to show what the answers look like when we remember why the Commons was proposed, what actually happened when the zoning was repealed, and what governing the property will require after the campaign signs come down.

One fact needs to be established before we begin because it affects almost every answer. The Town Council did not throw the Commons into a dumpster when it repealed the zoning ordinance. After the referendum petition qualified, the Council chose repeal rather than put the ordinance into an immediate winner-take-all election. The property returned to its previous zoning framework, while the Town retained the land, the Conceptual Site Plan, two years of public work and the underlying housing problem. The Town’s own history describes the Commons as a continuing long-term community planning effort and says that repeal returned the site to its previous land-use and zoning framework.

Question 1

Why are you running for office, and what are the three most important issues Yountville must address during the next four years?

150-word limit

I would focus on three things: housing, stewardship of public assets and restoring confidence in local government. Yountville has a certified Housing Element, Measure S revenues dedicated to affordable and workforce housing, and seven centrally located acres the Town deliberately purchased so the community could control their future. Those are assets, not problems. The next Council’s job is to turn them into measurable results while preserving the quality that makes Yountville worth protecting. That requires more than opposing what the last Council attempted. It requires understanding California housing law, municipal finance and the difference between listening to criticism and surrendering the responsibility to govern. Yountville does not need a revolution. It needs competent people willing to finish difficult public work.

Question 2

The Town purchased the former Yountville Elementary School property for approximately $11 million in 2024. What do you believe should happen next with the property?

200-word limit

Continue the Commons work, but use the zoning repeal for what it actually created: room to reconsider and explain. The Council did not sell the property, abandon the Conceptual Site Plan or erase two years of community planning. After the referendum petition qualified, it chose repeal rather than turn one zoning ordinance into a winner-take-all election. That returned the site to its previous zoning framework and gave the Town another opportunity to improve the plan. I would make phasing unmistakable, separate the first buildable increment from ultimate buildout, revisit assumptions that deserve another look, and preserve the parts that remain sound: public ownership, excellent design, community uses, open space and workforce housing. Starting from zero would waste the very public investment critics say they want protected. The responsible path is to build on what Yountville has already learned.

That is not a charitable interpretation of the repeal; it is what the official chronology shows. The Conceptual Site Plan was adopted in March 2025 as the long-term vision. Zoning and implementation tools followed. When the petition qualified in 2026, the Council repealed Ordinance 26-539 and returned the property to its previous zoning framework. The sequence matters because “repealed the zoning” and “abandoned the Commons” are not remotely the same thing.

Question 3

What type of housing, approximately how many units, for whom and at what level of affordability do you foresee at the Commons? What other uses should remain or be added?

200-word limit

The site should include permanently protected workforce and middle-income housing, with particular emphasis on studios and one-bedroom homes for individual workers, younger residents, seniors and modest-income households who have almost no chance in Yountville’s market-rate housing economy. I would not turn the final unit count into an ideological test. The sensible approach is phased construction: build an initial increment the Town can responsibly finance, learn from actual demand and operations, then decide how later phases should change. The existing garden, Yountville Fit, Locals Lounge, Farmstand, dog park, walking paths and public landscape should remain integral to the plan. Seven acres can do several civic jobs at once. The question is not whether the property should be housing or public space; it is how intelligently those uses can coexist.

Question 4

What public process should occur before the Commons moves forward? Should residents ultimately vote on a future plan?

150-word limit

Continue the public process, but begin by acknowledging that a substantial process already occurred. The Commons went through dozens of meetings, workshops, surveys, open houses, advisory meetings, Planning Commission discussions and repeated Council hearings. The problem was not that nobody was invited; it was that too many residents did not understand the long-range plan, its phasing or what each approval actually authorized. The repeal gives the Town an opportunity to fix that. Show the first phase clearly, put its cost beside it, and explain what is fixed and what remains flexible. I would not automatically require a public vote on the final plan. Representative government exists because land use, infrastructure, financing and California housing law are too complicated to reduce routinely to yes-or-no ballots. Residents should shape the decision extensively; elected officials still have to make it.

The Town’s record documents workshops, surveys, open houses, advisory committee meetings, Planning Commission discussions and Council meetings throughout 2024 and 2025. The reasonable criticism is that the process did not communicate the eventual plan well enough to everyone, not that the process somehow never happened.

Question 5

Beyond the Commons, where and how should Yountville accommodate additional housing while preserving its personality and charm?

200-word limit

Yountville should preserve existing deed-restricted homes, encourage appropriate ADUs and infill, examine every realistic housing site and involve major employers where practical. But it should not squander the unusual advantage of owning the Commons. Public ownership gives Yountville control over architecture, landscape, phasing, affordability and civic uses in a way private development does not. Density should be judged by design quality and neighborhood impact, not treated as a moral category. “Character” also needs a broader definition. Roof pitches, setbacks and mature trees matter, but so do the people who live behind the front doors. A town can preserve every handsome façade while gradually excluding the workers, younger families and middle-income residents necessary for ordinary community life. Good planning should protect both the physical town and the community that inhabits it.

Question 6

Does Yountville currently have the right balance between tourism and residential quality of life?

200-word limit

Tourism has been extraordinarily good to Yountville. It funds public services, supports remarkable businesses and gives a town of this size resources most communities could only envy. The question is whether that prosperity continues to support a functioning residential community. Parking, traffic and noise matter, but so does the fact that much of the workforce serving this economy cannot afford to live here. Large hospitality businesses create jobs, and those jobs create housing demand. That does not make employers villains or make the Town responsible for housing every employee; it simply means workforce housing belongs in the same conversation as hotel expansion and restaurant success. When interests conflict, the Council should weigh measurable neighborhood impacts, economic benefits and long-term community consequences. The goal is not to choose tourism or residents. It is to keep one from hollowing out the other.

Question 7

What should Heather Abrams’ priorities be, and what should the relationship between the Town Council and town manager look like?

200-word limit

The Council should govern and the town manager should manage. Heather Abrams should lead the professional organization, stabilize staff, provide clear financial information, implement Council policy and make the next stage of Commons planning understandable. The Council should set policy, approve budgets, evaluate the manager and demand measurable results without individually directing departments or employees. The manager, in turn, should give the Council candid professional advice without substituting administrative preference for elected policy. Immediate priorities should include Housing Element implementation, a clear Commons work plan and financial reporting ordinary residents can understand. After a year of political drama, boring competence would be a substantial civic achievement. Residents should be able to tell who made a policy decision, who implemented it and who is accountable for the result.

Question 8

What would you change about public involvement and transparency? What information should be available without a Public Records Act request?

250-word limit

Major projects should have plain-English online dashboards showing approved budgets, spending to date, contracts, amendments, financing assumptions, schedules and the decisions still ahead. Residents should not need a Public Records Act request to reconstruct basic project history. But transparency also requires honesty about what already occurred. The Commons was not planned in secret; it went through years of public meetings and review. If that process failed to communicate the plan clearly, fix the communication rather than erase the record. I would also require proposed alternatives to meet the same transparency standard. If someone wants mostly parkland, show the cost and explain where the housing goes. If someone proposes selling the property, explain the Housing Element and Surplus Land Act implications. Transparency is not merely forcing Town Hall to defend itself. It is requiring every serious proposal to survive contact with the same facts.

Question 9

Measure Y would increase Yountville’s appropriations limit for four years without imposing a new tax. Do you support it?

200-word limit

Yes. Measure Y is routine municipal housekeeping, not a new tax and not authorization for the Commons. California’s constitutional Gann Limit restricts how much qualifying tax revenue a local government may appropriate, and voters may raise that limit for periods of up to four years. Yountville has used this mechanism before. What makes Measure Y unusually important this year is the temptation to turn an ordinary fiscal measure into a protest vote against the current Council. Defeating it would not recover money already spent or repeal any housing plan; it could constrain the Town’s ability to appropriate qualifying revenues it already receives and complicate future budgets. Residents can disagree about the Council and the Commons without confusing an unrelated spending-limit measure with either issue. The danger in Measure Y is not that it is extraordinary. It is that its very mundanity makes it easy to misunderstand.

The Town’s own impartial explanation is wonderfully dull, which is exactly the point. Measure Y creates no tax, increases no tax rate and concerns only the amount of qualifying revenue the Town may legally appropriate during a four-year period. Using a spending-limit measure to express anger about an unrelated project does not change the Commons decision; it simply leaves the next Council with a more constrained fiscal tool. Whatever residents ultimately decide, they should at least know which lever they are pulling.

Question 10

What principles should govern reserves, borrowing and major capital spending?

150-word limit

Yountville should maintain reserves sufficient for downturns, emergencies and foreseeable obligations, while recognizing that excessive caution can become its own form of waste when important public needs remain unmet. Borrowing can be appropriate when a long-lived public asset benefits residents over many years and dependable revenues can support repayment. Major capital projects should disclose lifecycle costs, financing alternatives and realistic downside scenarios, with independent analysis when assumptions are complex or disputed. This is also why phasing matters at the Commons: it allows the Town to limit exposure, learn from early construction and adjust later commitments. Voter approval should occur when legally required or when a truly exceptional decision warrants it, not as a substitute for representative government every time a capital project becomes controversial.

Question 11

How should residents know your decisions are being made in the public interest when conflicts of interest exist or appear to exist?

150-word limit

Disclose relevant interests, follow California conflict-of-interest law and recuse when the law requires it. In a town as small as Yountville, personal and professional relationships are unavoidable; secrecy and selective scrutiny are not. Residents should be able to understand relevant financial interests, campaign relationships and the reasoning behind public decisions. The same standard should apply beyond Town Hall. Developers, major property owners, campaign organizers, donors and people seeking substantial influence over public policy should expect legitimate questions about interests affected by those decisions. That includes local media when an owner is an active participant in the controversy being covered. Public trust does not require everyone to be free of relationships. It requires disclosure, consistent standards and enough transparency for residents to judge those relationships for themselves.

That is why the Sun’s ownership matters journalistically. Gary Jabara was already an active Commons critic, had filed a sweeping public-records request, and had hosted an invitation-only discussion of alternatives before purchasing the newspaper whose Commons coverage he later praised. None of those facts proves that he directs coverage. They do make visible editorial independence especially important.

Question 12

What responsibility do elected officials have to maintain civility, and where is the line between inappropriate conduct and legitimate dissent?

150-word limit

Elected officials have a special obligation to remain professional because they hold public power, but civility is not a rule imposed only on the five people behind the dais. Speakers and audiences have obligations too. Criticism can be sharp, angry and even unfair without becoming improper; threats, harassment, jeering and deliberate intimidation cross a different line. The Council should enforce decorum consistently so every resident can speak without being mocked by the room. Civility also includes factual responsibility. Prominent citizens with unusual access to the press should make a reasonable effort to know the public record before accusing officials of secrecy or exclusion. I would add a camera facing the audience during public comment. The current broadcasts scrutinize every expression at the dais while hiding much of the atmosphere in the chamber. A fuller public record might improve everyone’s manners.

There is a reason I would answer this one more sharply than the Sun probably expects. On February 17, French Laundry General Manager Michael Minnillo participated in the packed Commons study session representing the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group. The Sun reported that Minnillo said TKRG had never opposed workforce housing. Keller himself attended a portion of the same meeting.

Two weeks later Keller publicly complained that nobody had come to him and asked what he thought about the project. That takes some chutzpah. His own general manager had been participating directly in the Town’s housing process, representing his company at a major public meeting and discussing the problem with Town officials. I was in the room when Keller made his accusation and had every opportunity to stand up and call bullshit. I did not. My only, admittedly weak, excuse is that after decades of attending public hearings, I had never watched someone of Keller’s stature make an accusation so plainly at odds with a public record his own company had helped create. Moments like that were part of what convinced me Yountville needed another newspaper voice. Too much of what passed for “civility” had become one-sided: elected officials were expected to sit quietly and absorb accusations while prominent residents and business owners could make claims that deserved considerably more scrutiny.

The same standard belongs in the audience. Residents should be able to stand at the microphone and criticize either side without being snickered at, jeered at or visibly mocked by other residents. I watched too much of that behavior during the Commons hearings, and the Council should have stopped it. A Yountville public meeting is not junior high with better wine. The mayor should enforce decorum consistently, and the Town should add a camera showing the audience during public comment. The broadcasts currently record every expression on the Council’s faces while revealing much less about the atmosphere confronting them. Sunshine remains a useful disinfectant, even if some just came from a Pilates workout.

Question 13

If you believed a decision was in Yountville’s long-term interest but many residents opposed it, whose judgment would you follow?

150-word limit

I would listen carefully enough to change my mind when the evidence warrants it, then exercise the judgment I was elected to use. The Commons zoning repeal is a good example. A referendum petition qualified, demonstrating opposition and creating a legal consequence. The Council responded by repealing the implementing ordinance rather than forcing an immediate election. That slowed the process and reopened discussion without erasing the Town’s ownership, planning work or housing obligations. Representative government requires both responsiveness and judgment. A councilmember who never changes course is not listening; one who simply follows whichever group is loudest is not governing. The obligation is to understand the breadth of public opinion, weigh the evidence and legal responsibilities, explain the decision clearly and accept political accountability for it.

This may be the current Council’s least appreciated decision. It had a legal route to put the ordinance before voters and fight the issue out through an election. Instead, four councilmembers chose the course that gave the community more time and made another conversation possible. In a town endlessly lectured about healing and listening, that act of restraint has received almost no credit at all.

Question 14

To incumbent candidates: What is one decision regarding the Commons and one regarding Brad Raulston’s departure that you would make differently today?

200-word limit

Only the incumbents can honestly answer what they would change about Brad Raulston’s departure because personnel matters and closed-session rules limit what outsiders know. On the Commons, however, the clearest lesson is communication. The Town should have explained phasing earlier, more simply and more often. The ultimate long-range buildout and cost estimate became confused with an immediate construction program, allowing critics to describe a flexible framework as though everything would be built at once. That communication failure had real political consequences. The later decision to repeal the zoning, however, deserves no apology. The Council could have forced the ordinance into a bitter election. Instead it backed up, restored the previous zoning framework and created room for additional discussion. In a town complaining about division, that was an act of restraint that deserves far more credit than it has received.

And Then There Is Question 15

The Sun did not ask this one, which is unfortunate because it may now be the most important question in the election: What, exactly, is your alternative?

For two years the Commons had the terrible disadvantage of becoming real. It developed drawings, unit counts, parking assumptions, infrastructure requirements, rents, financing models, public uses, phasing and costs. Every assumption therefore became visible enough to attack. The alternatives now circulating around Yountville have enjoyed a much easier existence. They remain cheaper, prettier and less controversial largely because imagination has no building department.

One suggestion is that the former school should become some version of Yountville’s Central Park. There is nothing wrong with wanting beautiful open space, and the Commons plan already preserves a great deal of it. But dedicating seven publicly owned acres primarily to parkland is a policy decision, not a watercolor. Yountville is aging, much of its workforce lives elsewhere, Measure S exists specifically for affordable and workforce housing, and the Town still has Housing Element responsibilities. Anyone proposing permanent parkland should therefore explain what public problem that solves and where the housing Yountville still needs would go instead. Nostalgia is a perfectly decent emotion, but it cannot by itself balance a Housing Element.

The other idea floating around is that Town facilities could be reorganized and the property eventually sold or converted to expensive private residences. Here California law intrudes rather inconveniently. Public land is not treated like a private parcel that can simply be listed with a broker. If a local agency decides to dispose of non-exempt surplus land, the Surplus Land Act generally requires the agency first to declare the land surplus, notify HCD, local public entities and affordable-housing developers, provide a mandatory response period and negotiate in good faith with qualifying housing proposals. HCD reviews the disposition process.

Most residents can be forgiven for never having heard of the Surplus Land Act; they have lives that do not require recreational reading of the California Government Code. Candidates asking to control seven acres of valuable public land have less excuse. They may soon be deciding whether Yountville retains this land, develops it, declares it surplus or attempts to dispose of it. Understanding the laws governing those choices seems like a fairly modest qualification for the job.

This is also one of the Sun’s great missed opportunities. Instead of asking candidates primarily how they feel about what the current Council did, the questionnaire could have tested whether they understand what the next Council can legally do. Have you read the Housing Element? Do you understand the Surplus Land Act? If you want fewer homes at the Commons, where do the remaining housing needs go? If you want to sell the land, what happens before a luxury developer ever gets near it? Those questions would tell voters who has actually done the homework required to govern.

The Sun could still write that story. An explanation of the Surplus Land Act and its implications for the Commons might contribute more to the election than another account of Gary Jabara’s latest complimentary wine-and-cheese gathering for Veterans Home residents. The social events may photograph better, but the statutes are what the next Council will actually have to live with.

None of this means the Commons plan should be preserved in amber. Perhaps there should be fewer homes. Perhaps the unit mix should change. Perhaps the first phase will teach the Town something important enough to change the second. That was always the point of creating a project that could be phased. But any alternative should now be subjected to the same treatment the Commons has endured for two years: draw it, price it, count the homes, identify whom they serve, explain the legal path, show what happens to Measure S and the Housing Element, and tell residents when someone actually gets a key.

That is the opportunity the Council created when it repealed the zoning instead of forcing an immediate election. It did not end the Commons; it gave Yountville time to understand the plan better, reconsider what deserves reconsideration and improve it where improvement is warranted. If the people who demanded that time have better ideas, they should be welcomed to the table and expected to bring them. But from this point forward, criticism alone is not a plan. Bring the drawings, the numbers, the legal analysis and a credible explanation of what happens next. The wine and cheese can stay at home. So can the chef’s whites.

The Questions Before the Answers

The Yountville Sun has sent fourteen questions to the candidates running for mayor and Town Council. Every candidate gets the same questions. Everyone gets the same word limits. The answers will apparently be printed without editing. On that narrow procedural level, the exercise is fair.

But journalism is not made fair simply by handing everybody the same questionnaire. The more important editorial decision occurs before any candidate answers: What gets asked? What history is supplied in the question? Which controversies deserve scrutiny? Who is expected to explain himself? And, perhaps most importantly in Yountville right now, who is not?

Read the Sun’s questionnaire from beginning to end and a remarkably consistent picture emerges. The Town spent too much money. The Commons became too ambitious. Residents were not adequately heard. Transparency was questionable. Financial oversight may have been inadequate. Conflicts of interest deserve examination. Civility is a problem. The current Council has a great deal to answer for.

Those are all legitimate subjects, but they are only one side of the story. Where are the equally persistent questions about the residents and business interests that organized against the Commons? Where is the examination of the consequences of delaying it? Where are the questions about what those opponents proposed instead, what their alternatives would cost, how many homes those alternatives would actually produce, or what interests the principal participants themselves bring to the debate? The spotlight somehow keeps returning to Town Hall.

That has become the Sun’s central problem in covering the Commons. The issue is not that it asks difficult questions. It should. The issue is that the difficult questions seem to travel overwhelmingly in one direction.

There Was No Vote Rejecting the Commons

One point needs to be stated carefully because language has begun to distort the history. The Commons was not rejected by Yountville voters. There was no townwide election in which a majority of residents voted against the project.

A referendum petition challenging Ordinance 26-539 qualified under California election law. Once it qualified, the Town Council was required either to repeal the ordinance or place it before the voters. The Council chose repeal. There was no referendum election and therefore no public vote rejecting the Commons. The Town’s own account describes that sequence.

That distinction is not semantic nitpicking. Politically it matters enormously. Repeatedly referring to what happened as “the referendum” can leave residents with the impression that the people of Yountville went to the polls and rendered a verdict. They did not. A petition obtained enough signatures to invoke the referendum process, and the Council subsequently chose repeal rather than an election.

The petition itself represented a relatively small but organized portion of the electorate, not a majority decision by the town. That group had every right to use the legal process available to it. The problem begins when its success is treated as though it settled the larger civic argument or demonstrated that Yountville as a whole rejected the purpose behind the Commons. It did neither.

If the Sun intends to make precision, transparency and accountability recurring themes of its campaign coverage, then it should be precise about this history too.

Opposition Is Part of the Story

The larger problem is what happened before and after the petition. A small but highly motivated group opposed the Commons. Some of their objections were legitimate and deserved serious examination. Cost mattered. Scale mattered. Parking mattered. Financing mattered. The Town should have been pressed hard on every one of those things.

But opposition also has consequences. Stopping a project is not the same thing as solving the problem the project was created to address. The former school did not suddenly become free. The workforce-housing shortage did not disappear. The people who work in Yountville did not suddenly begin living here. Measure S revenues did not lose their legally dedicated purpose. The State did not cancel Yountville’s housing obligations. The millions already invested in acquiring and improving the school property did not magically return to the Town treasury.

Those facts remained after the petition just as surely as they existed before it. Measure S, approved by Yountville voters in 2018, created a dedicated hotel-tax revenue stream for affordable and workforce housing. The Commons grew out of a much larger effort to decide what to do with a rare piece of publicly controlled land in a town where housing ordinary working people has become increasingly difficult.

Residents can disagree, vigorously, about whether the Commons was the right answer. They can believe it was too large, too costly or too ambitious. But once they succeed in stopping it, another question necessarily follows: What do we do instead?

That is the question the Sun has rarely pursued with the same enthusiasm it brings to investigating the people who tried to build something. It is much easier to ask why the Council spent money than to ask what several years of delay will cost. It is easier to ask whether the Commons was too large than to ask where the missing housing should go. It is easier to ask whether elected officials have conflicts than to examine the financial and land-use interests of the people leading the opposition.

The critics get to remain critics. They can object to density without producing a site plan. They can condemn cost without producing a financing plan. They can demand fewer homes without explaining where the remainder should be built. They can invoke “community character” without explaining how a town that imports most of its workforce every morning preserves very much of a community at all.

Through much of this argument, the Sun has provided the microphone.

A Real Project Versus an Imaginary One

The Commons became vulnerable in part because it became real. It had drawings, costs, unit counts, parking assumptions, public meetings, financing problems and all of the other disagreeable characteristics that attach themselves to an actual project. Its opponents therefore had something concrete to attack, while their preferred alternatives could remain pleasantly undefined.

Imaginary projects enjoy enormous political advantages. They are cheaper. They are smaller. Their architecture is always more compatible with “community character.” Their parking works perfectly. Their financing is sensible. Nobody objects to their height because nobody has drawn an elevation. They are wonderfully easy to support because they exist nowhere except in conversations and campaign literature.

The Commons did not have that luxury. It became real enough to criticize.

That asymmetry has shaped much of the public debate, and the Sun has too often reinforced it. The paper repeatedly asks what the Town spent, whether the project became too large, whether the Council listened sufficiently and whether elected officials have conflicts of interest. Those questions deserve answers. But a serious examination cannot end with them.

The people who worked to halt the Commons should also be asked what they would build instead, where they would build it, how many homes their alternative would produce, how it would be financed and what the delay they helped create will ultimately cost. Opposing a government project does not exempt anyone from explaining the consequences of prevailing.

The Searchlight Stops at Town Hall

This is why the Sun’s candidate questionnaire deserves closer scrutiny. The problem is not that its questions are tough. Tough questions are exactly what a local newspaper should ask. The problem is that the toughness continues to run overwhelmingly in one direction.

The Council and the Commons remain the whipping post, while the organized opposition remains mostly outside the beam. The questionnaire asks candidates about Town spending, public trust, conflicts of interest and the future of the school property, but it shows much less curiosity about the residents and business interests who helped derail the adopted zoning or about what those people propose now that they succeeded.

A newspaper calling its work fair and balanced should recognize that fairness is not achieved merely by giving every candidate the same premise and the same number of words in which to respond. Fairness also requires examining the premise itself. If the Town is being asked to explain its spending, the people who stopped the project should be asked to explain the cost of delay. If elected officials are being asked about conflicts of interest, major business and property interests participating in the political fight should be examined too. If candidates are asked what they would do with the school, opponents who demanded a different future for the property should be pressed to describe one that can actually be built.

That is not partisan journalism. It is ordinary reporting.

Ownership Makes Independence More Important

Gary Jabara’s ownership makes this imbalance impossible to ignore, although it should not be exaggerated into a conspiracy for which there is no evidence. Before purchasing the Sun, Jabara had publicly challenged the Commons and filed a broad records request concerning its costs and process. The Sun itself reported his opposition. After the newspaper stopped publishing, Jabara bought it and subsequently spoke of his admiration for its previous Commons coverage.

None of that proves that he dictates coverage, writes questionnaires or instructs reporters what to say. It does create an obvious journalistic obligation. When a major commercial property owner who was already a participant in a contentious land-use dispute purchases the newspaper covering that dispute, the most convincing demonstration of editorial independence is not a statement promising independence. It is visibly independent reporting.

That means turning the same scrutiny toward the people who have so successfully demanded it of Town Hall. The Sun itself asks candidates how the public should evaluate conflicts involving elected officials, residents, business owners, developers and other stakeholders. Good. Apply that standard everywhere.

Who organized the opposition to the Commons? What properties and business interests do the principal participants hold? What decisions of the next Council could affect those interests? What alternative housing plans did they offer, and what would those alternatives actually cost? Who paid for political mailers and other efforts to shape public opinion? Which candidates have relationships with the people who led the opposition? None of those questions assumes misconduct. They are simply the kinds of questions newspapers ask when they are genuinely interested in understanding power rather than merely recording complaints about government.

And that scrutiny should include the newspaper’s owner when relevant. A local newspaper does not demonstrate independence by announcing that it is independent. It demonstrates independence when readers occasionally encounter reporting that is inconvenient to the people who own it.

How a Town Becomes Divided

This is where the Sun’s role in Yountville’s divisiveness deserves more candid discussion. The current Town Council did not invent the conditions that produced the Commons. Measure S was approved years before the current controversy. The housing shortage preceded the project. The Town’s dependence on a commuting workforce preceded the project. The scarcity of publicly controlled land preceded the project. The State’s housing requirements preceded the project.

The Council attempted a solution to problems Yountville had already acknowledged.

Residents are free to conclude that the solution was wrong. What is much harder to sustain is the suggestion that the Council simply imposed an arbitrary project on a town that had never expressed concern about workforce housing and had never been invited into a discussion about the school property. The record is more complicated than that. The school property and the Commons went through workshops, surveys, open houses, advisory meetings, Planning Commission hearings and Council discussions before the zoning was adopted.

A newspaper does not have to support the outcome of that process. It does, however, have an obligation to describe the entire process rather than reducing it to the moment when opposition became loudest.

That matters because newspapers do not merely report civic disputes. They help establish their boundaries. In a town as small as Yountville, a newspaper helps determine which grievances are repeated, which actors become familiar, which facts turn into conventional wisdom and which facts disappear into old staff reports nobody reads.

The Sun did not create the Commons controversy. But repeated coverage emphasizing the failures and alleged overreach of Town government while applying substantially less scrutiny to the organized opposition can deepen a divide that already exists. Distortion does not require publishing false information. Selection, repetition and omission can accomplish quite a lot on their own.

If Town spending appears again and again while the cost of delay receives little attention, readers learn which cost matters. If the Commons is repeatedly described through the objections to it while the workforce-housing conditions that produced it receive less sustained examination, readers learn which part of the story is supposed to concern them. If conflicts involving elected officials merit repeated scrutiny while the economic interests of powerful political participants receive less, readers learn whose motives are open to question and whose can be taken at face value.

A Small Group Does Not Need a Majority

That pattern has political consequences. A disciplined minority does not need to persuade every resident in town. It needs to define the controversy, repeat its preferred interpretation and persuade enough people that the existing government is the source of the problem.

In a town of Yountville’s size, that can be enormously effective. A few hundred signatures can trigger a major legal process. A relatively small number of highly engaged residents can dominate public meetings. A handful of well-financed mailers can shape what people think the election is about. A local newspaper can either widen that field of inquiry or narrow it further by repeatedly returning to the same set of complaints and the same set of defendants.

That is why this election should not be reduced to whether voters approve or disapprove of the previous Council’s handling of the Commons. The more important question is whether residents are willing to look beyond the fight itself and return to the problem that produced it.

Why did Yountville decide nearly a decade ago that workforce housing was important enough to dedicate hotel-tax revenue to it? Why do so many people who work here still have to live somewhere else? What should happen to the former school now that the adopted zoning has been repealed? What is a realistic number of homes there, what will they cost, and what happens to the remaining housing obligation if the answer is dramatically smaller than the previous plan?

Those questions existed before Gary Jabara bought the Sun. They existed before anyone circulated a petition. They existed before the Commons became the most effective political punching bag in town. They will still exist the morning after the November election.

Turn the Light Around

The Town Council did not create those underlying problems, and it did not single-handedly create the division that now surrounds them. It attempted a solution, and an organized group of residents and business interests fought that solution hard enough to stop the zoning. Both sides are therefore part of the story, and both deserve examination.

If the Yountville Sun wants to help restore some measure of trust in a town it repeatedly describes as divided, it should stop treating scrutiny as something owed primarily by Town Hall. Ask the difficult questions of the Council. Examine the spending. Challenge the assumptions. Follow the money. Question the process. That is exactly what a newspaper should do.

Then apply the same standard to the people who helped stop the project. Ask what their alternative is. Ask what delay has cost. Ask what business and property interests are involved in the fight. Ask who is financing the political effort to change the Council. Ask why a petition signed by a relatively small portion of the electorate is so often discussed as though the entire town rendered a verdict. And where the newspaper’s own owner is an important participant in the political and economic life of Yountville, do not pretend that his interests somehow cease to be newsworthy at the newsroom door.

The Sun does not need to support the Commons. It does not need to defend the current Council, and it certainly does not need to agree with the Yountville Moon. Yountville would be poorly served by two publications congratulating one another across Washington Street. What the town needs is something much more useful: two publications willing to investigate different assumptions, challenge one another’s facts and occasionally make their own friends uncomfortable.

That is what fair and balanced reporting actually looks like. There is plenty of sunlight available in Yountville; the problem is where the newspaper keeps pointing it. The Sun’s candidate questionnaire is not simply an innocent list of questions dropped into an already divided town. It carries forward the same framing that helped deepen the division in the first place, once again placing the Commons, the current Council and Town government under the brightest light while leaving the people who organized the opposition, financed it, amplified it and benefited politically from it largely outside the frame. That is not accountability distributed evenly. It is another opportunity to make one side explain itself while the other side gets to keep asking the questions. If the Sun truly wants to help Yountville understand what happened, it should stop treating the Council as the permanent defendant and start examining the people who worked so hard to stop the project, what interests they brought to the fight, what they propose now, and what their delay has actually cost the town. Until it does, the newspaper is not merely reporting Yountville’s division, it is cultivating it and I think very much on purpose. And it is helping preserve the very conditions that allow a small, organized group to keep defining the argument while avoiding the scrutiny it so eagerly demands of everyone else.

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.