Overall, last Friday’s Napa Community’s Growth Summit was a good start in the right direction. Not much was produced in terms of tangible solutions, other than an agreement that Napa County’s challenges are increasingly regional and, as such, require cooperative solutions. While I was discouraged by some of the passive-aggressive public statements made by other city’s planning officials directed at American Canyon, I found it at least beneficial to get the sentiments out in the open, so we can begin working past them.

A populist frustration increasingly finding voice in Napa County is that the wine and hospitality industries are pulling in services and attractions that cater principally to upscale vacationers and tourists, while neglecting any sense of a local living wage and inadvertently threatening the very Ag preserve that those industries depend on through, among other things, jumbo-sized developments and hotel mega-resorts in areas that were once only the purview of B&B’s.