Napa County votes to ban all commercial cannabis outside cities and towns

The battle for and against smoulders on in California.

The SF Chronicle reports.

Napa County has decided it won’t allow pot farming in most of its territory.

In a unanimous vote Tuesday, the Napa County Board of Supervisors voted to indefinitely ban all commercial cannabis activities in unincorporated areas, including the growing, processing and selling of pot in stores. The restrictions won’t affect pot retailers in cities, such as Harvest of Napa in the city of Napa, or cannabis delivery companies.

“For all commercial activities, it’s banned. We’ll talk to community stakeholders and we could revisit the issue of commercial cannabis eventually, but until then, the county’s point is very clear,” said David Morrison, director of the Napa County planning department.

Source: https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Napa-County-votes-to-ban-all-commercial-cannabis-14539327.php

More Information About Davis Morrison…..Napa Valley Register

Napa County’s new planning director enters the fray

Throughout a 25-year career of land-use planning in the Central Valley, including the last 19 years in Yolo County, David Morrison has been a Mr. Fix-It for a litany of problems.

From managing everything from growth and development to natural resources in Yolo County, plus parks, an airport, mining, and negotiations with Indian tribes, Morrison has a handyman’s utility — but also the soft-spoken intelligence required to master the complex problems inherent with land-use planning in California.

Morrison was hired this spring as the new planning director for Napa County where the issues he will face, including the growing controversy over the increased pace of winery development, will be as daunting as those he has faced in his past.

The Board of Supervisors is confronting this contentious issue head-on, saying that the planning staff — with Morrison in charge — should analyze growth in the wine industry and review county laws such as the Winery Definition Ordinance and recommend possible changes.

That thrust Morrison into a critical position in overseeing this process, as well as collaborating with the industry on potential changes to the most important regulations governing wineries in Napa County. It will no doubt invite intense public scrutiny as the recommendations seek to balance the needs of the wine industry with those of residents.

“Welcome to Napa Valley,” Supervisor Mark Luce told Morrison.

In an interview, Morrison said he’s no stranger to difficult jobs or public scrutiny. One of his first tasks when he arrived in Yolo County in the mid-1990s was to draft a plan for managing gravel mining on Cache Creek, which ignited a public struggle over the county’s mining policy.

Environmentalists and farmers fought fiercely to oppose the mining, arguing it would impair habitat and jeopardize groundwater supplies. Industry fought equally as hard to continue mining, as Cache Creek possessed one of the most valuable supplies of gravel in the state, Morrison said. With a tangled, 50-year history of similar struggles as a backdrop, the county hired Morrison to help craft a solution, he said.

Along with a planning consultant, Morrison said he worked 60 to 80 hours a week writing the documents needed for multiple environmental impact reports and two separate plans that had to be drafted. A bachelor and a night owl at that point in life, Morrison said he would stay up until 2 or 3 a.m. writing the documents, save them on floppy disks, and drop them off in the consultant’s mailbox. She would begin working on them when she woke up at 3 or 4 a.m., he said.

A project estimated to take 18 months was completed in nine, Morrison said. More importantly, the plans won approval from industry, environmental groups such as the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club, and Yolo County planners and elected officials. One group withheld support and ran a competing plan against Morrison’s in an election. Morrison’s won with 60 percent of the vote, he said.

“In terms of coming into a high-pressure situation where there’s a lot of public scrutiny, no problem,” said Morrison, shrugging his shoulders.

He won’t be working such long hours in Napa County — he has a wife and son now — but he is ready to tackle its issues. Staff should be back with recommendations on winery development this fall, which is sooner than he anticipated when he took the job as planning director, he said. He expected to take it up in November, after the election cycle had passed, but public pressure has moved it up, he said.

Groundwater usage and traffic congestion are the two most-cited impacts in the debate over winery development, including the industry’s growing reliance on a direct-to-consumer marketing model that needs more tourists to come into tasting rooms. But that also has put more cars on the road, to the chagrin of residents.

On groundwater, Morrison said he believes the county is in good shape managing that resource, particularly when compared to other counties in California.

The county will be looking at adding new elements to its water availability analysis, which all winery and vineyard projects must complete if they want to pump groundwater. That’s mostly under the purview of the Public Works Department, and Morrison said planners will be playing a supporting role.

When it comes to traffic, Morrison said he sees a tougher problem. Traffic plagues many heavily developed areas of California, but the solutions there — building new or wider roads — is anathema in sparsely populated Napa County. The same goes for building new houses for every commuter who comes into Napa Valley for work each day, he said.

“To a certain extent it’s a perceptual problem,” Morrison said. “It’s an inconvenience but it’s not (Interstate) 680 on a Friday afternoon. I don’t think anyone’s interested in cutting tourism back. What options do we have? We have an increasingly constrained infrastructure system. We have to be creative.”

An outsider’s perspective could help, Morrison said. Yosemite Valley gets 4 million annual visitors, almost twice the amount as Napa Valley, with just three highways going in and out. AT&T Park in San Francisco gets 3.7 million visitors in and out in the six months of the Major League Baseball season without too much trouble, he notes.

He sees attaining a jobs-housing balance as a partial solution, along with the more efficient movement of tourists up and down Napa Valley. A public-private partnership between local government, transit agency and the companies that run limos and shuttle buses to wineries could also help, he said.

“We’re not the only tourism region with growth management constraints that is having this issue,” Morrison said. “I think it’s solvable.”

A native son of the San Joaquin Valley, Morrison said he does not want to see Napa County follow the example of the sprawling cities there that tried to build their way out of land-use and planning problems. Napa and neighboring Solano and Yolo counties certainly have that potential and feel that pressure, as 7.5 million people live within an hour’s drive of their borders and would love to build homes there, he said.

It’s up to the counties, cities and their planning departments to keep that kind of development from happening, he said.

“They would love to pave over Yolo, Solano, Napa in a heartbeat,” Morrison said. “I remember buying cherries in Morgan Hill before it got paved over by Silicon Valley. You see urban areas all over California where it’s happened. It’s easy to do. We’re a barrier.”

https://napavalleyregister.com/news/local/napa-county-s-new-planning-director-enters-the-fray/article_ce8a4cc8-c788-5e21-bec2-a32836ff0260.html

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