Dan & Marguerite Capp sent this to the Napa Board of Supervisors, Bill Dodd, Mike Thompson and Barry Eberling among others. This is another example of Napa family farms becoming an endangered species....
My husband Daniel Capp’s great great grandfather and his brothers and sister, including brother-in-law John York, his wife to be Frances Griffith and her brothers, all came to Napa together in 1845 in the Grigsby Ides wagon train, the first wagon train to make it intact over the Sierra. They settled this county assisting Dr. Bale in building the mill, fought in the Bear Flag Revolt, co-founded St. Helena, built a fine house where they helped raise surviving children from the Donner Party, as well as their own children, after planting some of the first vineyards in Napa.
Our point is that development and farming are in our DNA and we’ve been stewards of the land & our family has loved the land for 174 years, well before California became a state. Dan and I planted our first vineyard in lower Wooden Valley in 1973, and slowly expanded our farming interests over the years. While we never formally got the organic designation for our vineyards, we treated them as such. If farmers don’t truly care for the land and environment than nobody does.
This ordinance suggests that we farmers and property owners either do not care about the environment, are incapable of doing what is right, or an ugly mixture of both. As stewards of the land, a title we proudly own, please know that we do care about our property. We also care about our future. We care about the future rights of property owners to develop, plant and harmonize with the land.
This onerous, judgmental and hideous travesty of an ordinance will only reward the wealthy in that future. Only the very rich will want to buy country property, and will no doubt be ready, willing and able to offer us middle-class landowners offers of a sizable discount for our now made worthless properties.
If there was any specific need for this ordinance, we might not be as shocked that the supervisors would consider it, but no such need has been presented to us in any form. Napa County already has some of the most carefully thought out and limiting regulations in California. Why do we even need this? And why is this being considered when not a year and a half ago a similar proposition was voted on throughout Napa County? Why would you go around the will of the people? Do the Supervisors believe that we’re either too ignorant or too greedy to only want what’s in our financial best interests and not what’s good for the land? Or do you think that we don’t care about what happens here in the future after we’ve died?
Do these environmentalists proposing these onerous regulations have a stake in what happens here in Napa? Are they landowners too? Or are they carpetbaggers here to educate us slower, backward country Folk as to the error of our ways?
Please remember that our forbears helped start the Bear Flag Revolt in Napa County when an overreaching demand came from a government to abandon the land, plants, animals, personal belongings, guns, and walk away from their future. That revolt changed everything in California. It could happen again today here.
Thank you for your consideration. Please vote NO on this ordinance.
Daniel and Marguerite Capp