Yountville has become one of California’s wealthiest and most charming small towns, welcoming visitors from around the world while offering remarkably few opportunities for the people who work here to make it their home. Its elementary school has closed, young families have nearly disappeared, and ordinary community life is increasingly overshadowed by luxury hospitality. With a consequential election just days away, the future of the Commons, the preservation of historic landmarks, and the security of existing residents are all in question. The challenge is no longer simply protecting the Yountville you love, but deciding whether all this extraordinary prosperity can make room for another generation to love it, too.

California spent fifty years using zoning, building restrictions, and development fees to make existing homeowners wealthy while making new housing increasingly unaffordable. In Napa Valley, we protected the vineyards, perfected luxury tourism, and gradually priced out the people who make the place function. Somehow, government policies that enrich property owners are celebrated as capitalism, while government efforts to house working families are denounced as socialism. The Yountville Commons offered a remarkably modest alternative to this absurdity: using publicly owned land to create a beautiful, walkable neighborhood and make room for the next generation.

Gary Jabara has declared Yountville the victim of wasteful government spending while enthusiastically endorsing Hillery Trippe, the councilmember who voted to authorize much of it. After two years of studies, public hearings, and unanswered opportunities to lead, Trippe has perfected the art of asking questions without accepting answers. The result is a town with fewer families, an empty former school, and a remarkable talent for confusing obstruction with leadership. Now she wants four more years. Yountville deserves better.

Four exclamation points. Zero specific proposals. And tens of thousands of dollars in outside campaign spending in a town of roughly 2,500 people. Gary Jabara's political committee is supporting candidates for the very Town Council that will decide Yountville's future, including questions about historic preservation, commercial development, and the former elementary school. Among the decisions ahead are proposed alterations to the historic Groezinger Winery, a property associated with Jabara's business interests. The postcard promises responsible leadership without explaining what its preferred candidates would actually do. All aboard! The passengers are blindfolded, the wine is flowing, and nobody has thought to ask where Gary’s train is heading.

What kind of Yountville will we leave to the next generation? Town Council candidate Matthew Chrzanowski, a scientist, educator, and father raising his young family in Yountville, argues that preserving the town's character means making room for the people who sustain it. Drawing on his professional experience and the extensive planning already completed for the former elementary school property, he makes a thoughtful case for workforce housing, responsible public investment, and a Town Council willing to listen carefully, follow the evidence, and make decisions. His vision is of a Yountville that remains not only a world-class destination, but a genuine community where working families can build their futures.

Joe Tagliaboschi wants to be Yountville’s next mayor. He promises kindness, healing, oversight and difficult questions, but after years in municipal government, he has offered remarkably little explanation of what he would actually do in office. His record includes two unsuccessful election campaigns, a seven-month tenure as city manager, and opposition to the Commons housing plan that cost Yountville years of work and valuable development certainty. Now, with substantial independent campaign spending financed by hotelier Gary Jabara, Tagliaboschi is asking voters to entrust him with the Town’s future. A closer examination of his record, his proposals and the powerful interests supporting him raises an uncomfortable question: What, exactly, qualifies this man to be mayor?

Opponents of the Yountville Commons rarely say what they are against. This essay opens one modest building on the former school site and introduces the six households who could live there. It explains why federal tax-credit financing would turn half of them away, and why Measure S is the Town's only tool for housing the middle class who make up the Town’s workforce.

It took 235 signatures to stop workforce housing on land the Town already owns. That is roughly one tenth of Yountville's voters, in a town where 74 percent approved Measure S to fund workforce housing. The method has a name: vetocracy, the use of studies, surveys, task forces and resets to keep a town from ever reaching a decision. Four candidates have now said in their own words how they would handle the Commons, and their answers point in the same direction. Ballots arrive this week, and the election is the one decision in Yountville that cannot be sent back for further study.

The plans to put a ballroom in the Groezinger Wine Cellar arrived with one environmental study out of roughly eight. The study was written by the applicant's own historian, who awarded the project a perfect score while conceding the 1870 brick would never come back. Here is what California law requires, which requirements this application skipped, and what any resident can do about it before the Town Council votes.

Yountville is not simply choosing who will sit on the next Town Council. It is choosing who may ultimately decide the fate of one of the town’s most important historic buildings.

The National Register-listed Groezinger Wine Cellars survived because earlier owners understood how to change the use of a building without erasing the building itself. Ray and Nancy Monte turned an obsolete winery into Vintage 1870 without converting it into a stage set. Don and Sally Schmitt helped build a new commercial Yountville inside those walls while leaving the evidence of the old one intact.

The current proposal reverses that logic. It cuts new arched storefronts into historic masonry, closes original winery openings, and reshapes a working nineteenth-century industrial building around a contemporary luxury-retail image. Gary Jabara has also made his political preferences public by supporting candidates in the same election that will determine who exercises the Town’s future land-use authority.

The election will be over in a day. The decisions that follow may last for generations.

Two hundred and fifty residents came to hear seven candidates debate the future of Yountville. Instead, they watched candidates read prepared responses to questions they had received in advance, with no audience questions, no follow-ups and almost no challenge to anyone’s assumptions. Yountville faces serious choices about housing, growth, an aging population and the future of its year-round community. Surely we can be civil without being boring, respectful without avoiding disagreement, and interested enough in our own future to demand an actual debate.

Jill Turner has built much of her case around a reassuring proposition: before Yountville goes anywhere, it should first know where it is going. There should be a business plan, market research, a clearer accounting of risk, a better understanding of the destination. The language is sensible. It is also strangely detached from the years of work already sitting on the table.

That is the tension this essay examines. Turner speaks as though Yountville is standing at the edge of an unmapped sea, when in fact the town has already spent years drawing charts, testing routes, pricing the voyage and arguing over the destination. The Commons may be challenged, revised or rejected. But replacing an imperfect map requires more than declaring that a better harbor must exist somewhere beyond the fog.

The Yountville Sun asked the candidates fourteen questions. This essay answers them with the history, law and planning context put back in and then adds the question the paper missed: after two years of criticizing the Commons, what exactly would you build instead? The answers are free. Understanding them takes work.

Yountville’s deepest division is not being created at Town Hall. It is being amplified by a small group of residents and business interests, then reflected back through newspaper coverage that repeatedly scrutinizes public officials while giving the people driving the conflict far less examination. This essay looks at how that imbalance has shaped the public conversation, why the cost of delay keeps mounting, and what fair reporting should actually require.

Somebody spent real money this week to put a glossy tri-fold in every mailbox in Yountville. It says Wasteful Spending in letters big enough to read from across a tasting room. It has four icons, two thank-yous to the veterans, a date to vote, and a photograph of a Yountville Commons Community Center that does not exist, was never proposed, and, according to the fine print, was generated by a computer. It names no candidate. It proposes nothing. It does not mention the state law that makes the one idea it is too shy to print, selling the school site for luxury second homes, close to impossible. And it asks the men and women at the Veterans Home to vote against housing for the people who bring them breakfast, in exchange for a vague political promise. Hope and Change is not a plan and residents of Yountville know better.

Recovering that distinction does not require anyone to change positions. A resident can still object to the number of homes, three stories, financing, ownership or pace. Those are legitimate subjects for argument. The more useful first step is to stand over the Town's site model and see the proposal whole: the limited building footprints, the continuous public landscape, and the sequence in which complete portions could be built. The model was made so the plan could be seen rather than imagined.

At some point, 'another study' stops being a request for information and becomes one more request request for delay. That is the oldest trick in the book. Nobody has to say no. Nobody has to identify land, money, buildings or a construction date. You simply say the issue deserves more study. It is the public-policy version of 'let's grab lunch sometime.' Everyone can agree to it, nobody has to commit to anything, and a year later everyone can be exactly where they started. A study names no land, commits no money, builds no housing and houses no child.

The contradiction is not that Yountville honors veterans while secretly not caring about them. It is more ordinary and therefore more uncomfortable. It is possible to care deeply about an outcome while resisting some of the difficult choices required to produce it. A complimentary meal and music on a summer evening are generous things to give a veteran. Housing the people who care for that veteran requires land, money, density, compromise and the willingness to accept change somewhere. The first is pleasurable. The second is citizenship.

Gary Jabara is asking Yountville to “turn the page.” His own August 17 email explains how the campaign got here: a petition against the Commons became an invitation list, the list became parties, the parties became a “community,” and that community is now being urged to replace the town’s leadership. Fair enough. Political change is part of democracy. But before Yountville turns anything, its citizens might ask one old-fashioned question: what is actually written on the next page? This is an essay about the mildly inconvenient work of citizenship, and why a comfortable town cannot afford to let somebody else do its thinking for it.