Letter: Is the county wine database haunted?
As a frequent visitor to Napa Valley, I follow developments with interest. As I've been watching from afar, I've been wondering if Napa County's offices are haunted. As I've followed the saga of the Napa County winery database, that might be an explanation. How did the databases get mysteriously changed without anyone knowing how? Why are some missing or not available when they've been requested? Maybe there's a Scrooge-like figure who materializes in the dead of night and knows what computer to go to, how to pull up one of the databases and how to go into it, change it and then to bury it in some way so it's not findable?
Halloween is around the corner, the time for ghosts. Maybe all the wineries whose rights and entitlements are at stake should visit the county offices at midnight one night and try to catch this mysterious character? Maybe they could ask it what's going on? Maybe they'd get an answer that otherwise they can't get? Maybe they'd understand the kind of illogical math that seems to have penetrated the databases (i.e. how zero visits per day equals 20 visitors a week)?
There's another Halloween-themed thing to consider: let's credit Napa County with mastering the art of "trick or treating." Since 2019 the compliance or "amnesty" program dangled the treat of coming into compliance in a streamlined and hopefully collegial fashion. Guess what? There was a trick: no matter your situation, the winery has to go through the extensive use permit process....so there is no streamlining nor amnesty.
Yet another Halloween-themed aspect to the current dysfunction at the county is fear: many wineries are literally scared to be visible, be public, come to hearings or write letters. They fear the county's retaliation; they fear that their entitlements have been mysteriously rewritten and they have no control and thus are a target for fines and worse. So in this season of ghosts and haunting, hats off to Napa County, who is successfully masquerading as a very big bully.
Giovana Godoy
St. Petersburg, Florida
