[Comments made at the June 22, 2015 APAC Meeting]

Chairman Hall, members of the committee, Director Morrison

My name is Bill Hocker. I submitted one of the proposals for this June 22nd APAC meeting. I figured that my proposal was so off topic, or off the wall, that I'd better say something - even though I've got a morbid fear of public speaking.

I'm here because a winery has been proposed next to our place at the top of Soda Canyon Road. I've spent the last year laying awake at night thinking about the project and its impact on the remoteness and quiet we have enjoyed these last 20 years. As a weekender, without an economic stake in the county beyond the property, I know I have little standing to be making proposals to this committee. But as we've found out over the last year, we're not alone in having to face the impacts posed by similar projects.

I talked to the developer about mitigations. His attitude was we can work something out. I then asked about deleting the tourism component. No, that was not negotiable.

It's been clear in almost all of the projects coming up before the planning commission in the last year that it was the tourism component driving the projects, not the need to make wine.

I made my proposal because I've been frustrated that the APAC discussions thus far, while acknowledging a desire to curb winery proliferation, have posed solutions that seem to me marginal to the real cause of that proliferation, their use as tourist venues.

These APEC meetings should be the place to begin to talk about the transfer from an agricultural to a tourist economy that the projects represent, - what that means for the wine industry and the residents.

What do you want this place to be known for 35 years from now? Still a first-tier wine producing region of the world, or a second-tier, perhaps over-the-hill, tourist destination?

The Napa wine industry is finite. New vineyard development is approaching its limits. But the tourism industry can expand indefinitely if allowed. Tourism needs to be a part of the county's economy. But real agriculture will survive only if the tourism industry remains, in the words of the WDO, incidental and subordinate to the wine industry.

Others have pointed out that protecting agriculture is part of a bigger picture than just winery development. Urban development throughout the county, whether for tourism or not, will only increase - not relieve - pressure for the Ag zones to be urbanized. We need a committee to address that probability.

But here you are trying to address a specific piece of that bigger picture - the "interspersing of non-agricultural activities throughout agricultural areas " warned about in the preamble of the 1990 WDO. Short of a moratorium the best way to do that, I think, is to insure that the decision to build a winery is based on the need to process grapes and not on the desire to process tourists.