The Candidates and Your Choices: Jill Turner
UNPREPARED
This election is not about the Yountville Commons. It is about who runs Yountville.
One choice is the residents who have governed this town for decades through slow, responsible, incremental work. That work produced a certified Housing Element, Measure S, the purchase of the school site, and two years of public meetings about what to build there. The other choice is a small number of the town's largest business owners, who have decided the next Council should answer to them.
The Commons became the battlefield because it was the first project big enough to show which side each person is on. Gary Jabara, owner of The Estate Yountville, backed the petition that stopped it, bought the Yountville Sun this summer, and now funds a committee spending to elect four candidates. In all that time, neither he nor any other large business owner opposing the Commons has offered a single alternative way to house the people who work in Yountville. No site, no project, no number of homes, no price.
Their silence is striking because they have the most to gain from solving the problem. Yountville's hotels, restaurants, and wineries depend on workers who cannot afford to live here. Housing those workers would cut commutes, steady their staffing, and strengthen their businesses more than anyone else's. They have fought the one serious plan to do it and proposed nothing in its place.
This series takes the candidates one at a time. Each essay sets the candidate's own words, from campaign websites, candidate statements, and public comments, beside the public record: the Housing Element, the Town's financial analyses, Council minutes, and campaign filings. The test is the same for everyone. What does the candidate propose to do about housing, what would it cost, and who would it serve? And is the candidate prepared to govern for the residents, or running to hand the town to the people funding the campaign?
As the candidate forum’s take shape over the next few weeks, the questions for that candidate will be published here, so readers know in what was asked and can judge the answers themselves. Each title carries one word. It is the Moon's judgment of what the record shows, and each essay lays out the evidence behind it.
The order is not alphabetical. Jill Turner is first because she is the clearest example in this race of a candidate with no plan for housing, backed by the local business interests that have offered none either.
Bon Voyage, Jill
She has arrived late, studied little, and confidently promises a safer, cheaper, easier harbor that appears to exist only in her imagination.
Jill Turner Would Like Everyone to Wait
Jill Turner opens this series because her website states, more completely than any other candidate's, the case for postponing the Yountville Commons. Her three priorities ask the Town to rethink, research, and revisit work it already finished in public over the past two years. She is unprepared to meet the challenges of being on the Yountville Town Council.
Jill Turner has lived in Yountville for 28 years. According to her campaign website, her civic service in town during that time consists of a seat on the board of her homeowners' association. This summer she found Town Hall. The Council responded to a petition Ms. Turner submitted with resident Stephen Becker, signed by more than 100 residents, asking the Town to delay hiring a permanent town manager until after the November election. The Council declined and hired Heather Abrams, the former town manager of Fairfax, who starts October 19.
Her platform asks the Town to wait on the Yountville Commons as well. Taken together, her public record this year and her campaign website make a consistent case. Delay is not a side effect of Ms. Turner's platform. It is the platform, and that is why she is first in this series.
A book about people like this
In 2019, three political scientists at Boston University published Neighborhood Defenders, a study of who shows up to local housing hearings and what they say there. They found that the residents who participate hold far more negative views of new housing than their communities as a whole, and that they are socioeconomically advantaged. These participants use the permitting process to raise concerns that produce long delays, higher costs, and smaller projects. They tend to be older homeowners, and one of their most common complaints is that local residents were never properly consulted.
The authors called them “neighborhood defenders”. Their method is “concern” rather than open opposition. Few people at a hearing say they oppose housing for working people. They say they support it, then object to the site, the schedule, the method, and the price, and ask for more study.
Ms. Turner's first priority, in her own words: "I support the 'what' and 'who' of this project." Then: "I do not agree with the 'where,' 'when,' 'how,' and 'how much' of what has been proposed so far." Then a request for a business plan, a budget, and new research. Ms. Turner is a NIMBY. The sentence she chose for her campaign platform is the NIMBY position word for word: yes to housing, no to building it here, now, this way, or at this price.
The Town already met the neighborhood defenders like Jill Turner.
In 2022, while preparing its state-required housing plan, the Town held two public workshops. The February session, held online, drew about 12 people. The March session at the Community Center drew eight. The finished plan records receiving two comment letters. That was the public participation of a town of 3,436 people in its own eight-year housing plan.
The people who did attend were asked what stood in the way of housing in Yountville. According to the Town's certified Housing Element, the majority named two barriers: land availability and community opposition to new housing.
The Town went to work on the first barrier. In 2024 it bought the 7.5-acre former elementary school site for $11 million, and more than $3 million of Measure S revenue went toward the purchase. Between 2024 and 2025 it held workshops, surveys, open houses, advisory committee meetings, Planning Commission discussions, and Council meetings on what to build there, along with community dinners. The Council approved the Commons vision unanimously in March 2025. That September, the Yountville Sun, then independently owned, described a thoughtfully planned design shaped by six months of extensive community outreach.
On February 17, 2026, the Council held a study session with one item on the agenda, the Commons. The Town's consultants presented the workforce data, the preliminary financial model, and the phasing scenarios, which together make up the business plan Ms. Turner is asking for. The Sun counted nearly 150 people in Schmitt Hall at the height of the meeting, standing room only, on a rainy night.
Ms. Turner's third priority makes the neighborhood defenders' standard complaint without quite stating it: "Engage ALL of Yountville's Stakeholders," then "listen, hear and ACT." The record shows two years of meetings, a study session that filled the room, and a candidate absent from it. Ms. Turner is campaigning on the claim that residents were not heard. They were heard, at two years of public meetings, and she was not there.
The Housing Element named two barriers to housing in Yountville: available land and community opposition. The Town solved the first by buying the school site. The second problem are residents like Jill Turner, and she is running for Town Council.
Her website, read closely
Time in Yountville. "My husband Steve and I have owned our Yountville home for 28 years." Neighborhood defenders, in the study's findings, are long-tenured homeowners. Ms. Turner leads with it.
Professional background. "Business planning, project management, marketing, advertising, PR, property management, real estate and other investing, consulting." She has held a real estate license since 2008. This résumé prepares its owner for one civic task above all, reading a pro forma and explaining what is wrong with it. The Town presented one to a full room in February. Ms. Turner's response was to ask for one.
Community service. "Current or past Board member of Yountville's Vintage Homeowners' Association, Junior League of San Francisco, BizWorld." None is a Town commission, committee, or advisory body. Yountville's volunteer commissioners read hundreds of pages of staff reports for no pay and vote in public on specific things at specific addresses. Ms. Turner proposes to start at the top.
Education. She spent two years at the University of Strasbourg, whose Christmas market is among the oldest in Europe. This explains priority two.
Military service. The entry reads: "None for me personally." A paragraph follows about her father, a Navy lieutenant who attended the Naval Academy at Annapolis, and her parents' wedding under the Arch of Swords, followed by 72 years of marriage. The Moon congratulates her parents sincerely. Their story is also the full extent of her stated background on veterans' affairs, one of her three priorities.
Politics. "I'm a capitalist and believe in hard work, personal responsibility, financial transparency, following the law, making memories, and enjoying myself along the way."
A capitalist who objects to the Town owning an asset
Ms. Turner lists property management and real estate investing among her professional qualifications. She knows how rental property works. The owner collects the rent, the tenants pay down the debt, and when the loan is gone the owner holds a building that produces income every month for as long as it stands.
The Commons applied that model to the Town. Yountville owns the land. Measure S, the hotel tax surcharge voters approved on November 6, 2018, would repay the construction bonds. The rents would cover operations and a small bank loan. Once the debt was retired, the Town would own a debt-free apartment complex and its income permanently. The Moon's white paper on the Commons illustrated the scale. Seventy-eight apartments averaging $1,500 a month, with 40 percent of the rent going to operations and reserves, produce about $842,400 a year in net income, an asset worth roughly $16.8 million when valued the way any appraiser values income property.
The Commons was also aimed at the hole the market leaves open. The Town's Housing Element records what local housing providers told it in 2022: where affordable housing exists in Yountville, it is limited to very low incomes, which shuts out the middle- and lower-income population. That population is nurses, caregivers, cooks, and the Town's own employees. The private market builds for second-home buyers. In 2019 the Housing Element made clear that a huge percentile of the town's housing were vacant homes. She has made no comment on her website on how or why this mysterious situtation has contributed to the shortage of middle-class housing.
Ms. Turner believes in owning rental property when she is the owner. When the owner would be the Town, she opposes it.
Eight years, and still too fast
Ms. Turner objects to the "when" of the Commons. Voters approved Measure S almost eight years ago, by 74 percent. The Town adopted its housing plan in 2024, bought the land in 2024, approved the vision in 2025, and presented the first-phase financial model in February 2026. Her website does not say what schedule she would accept in place of eight years, what milestone would satisfy her, or what year she expects anyone to move in.
The Housing Element set deadlines of its own. It required the Town to identify additional sites for rezoning by January 2026 and complete the rezoning by July 2026. Both dates passed without action. The state keeps its own calendar, and it is not waiting for Jill Turner’s Christmas market.
The voters have already spent more than $3 million in Measure S money to buy the school site for workforce housing. Ms. Turner wants that land to sit empty while the Town starts over?
The "where"
Ms. Turner objects to the site. Her website names no other one.
The alternatives circulating in town are two. One is to turn the school site into a park. The other is to sell it. A park is a policy choice with a cost, and it leaves both the housing need and the Measure S fund exactly where they are. A sale runs into California's Surplus Land Act. Before a public agency can dispose of land like this, it generally has to declare the land surplus, notify the state housing department, other public agencies, and affordable housing developers, wait through a mandatory response period, and negotiate in good faith with qualifying housing proposals. The state reviews the process. A council member who wanted to sell the school site would spend her first year learning that the law requires her to negotiate with housing developers before anyone else.
Statistically significant
Her plan calls for "statistically significant market research asking workers what THEY want." The Town's 2022 housing workshops drew about 20 people between them. The Census estimate of how many people work in Yountville carries a margin of error of plus or minus 1,211, because the town is too small for precise sampling. The Town did the research a town this size allows: Census data, employer surveys, focus groups with large employers, public surveys during the Commons process, and dinners where people could tell the designers directly what they wanted.
The Moon described this maneuver on September 3, in "But Sure, Let's Do Another Study." A study names no land, commits no money, and sets no construction date. Everyone can agree to one, and a year later everyone is where they started. Ms. Turner's first priority calls for three.
Her plan closes with this instruction:
"Let's be creative in forging the best past to achieve those goals."
The Moon has checked. That is what it says. As I said, the word to describe her ambitions to be on the Town Council is “Unprepared”.
The veterans, and who cares for them
Ms. Turner writes that Veterans Home residents "have numerous complaints about rules, regulations, and policies," asks "what's taking so long to open the skilled nursing facility," and promises advocates who will not merely "schmooze and attend meetings." In the same paragraph she concedes that the Council "may not be able to unilaterally fix the problems." She is correct. The Veterans Home was founded in 1884, and the Town was incorporated in 1965. The Home is run by the state veterans department, is the largest landowner and largest employer inside town limits, and accounts for approx. 550 citizens of the town's population.
The Town has not been idle about it. Program 20 of the Housing Element commits Town staff to work with the Home and the state on the upgrades in the state's 2020 master plan for its veterans homes, including new or improved on-site housing for employees. Policy 4.13 commits the Town to encourage workforce housing on the Home's campus. The Housing Element describes the Town's work with the Home as diligent. Ms. Turner has discovered, in 2026, an advocacy program the Town adopted in 2024.
There is one thing a Town Council can do for the Veterans Home on its own authority, and Ms. Turner is running against it. The skilled nursing facility she asks about is a state project of roughly $325 million. CalVet has acknowledged that the cost of living around Yountville makes it difficult to recruit and keep the caregivers who would staff it. The Housing Element names nursing assistants on the Veterans campus among the lowest-paid workers who cannot afford to live here. At $20 an hour, a nursing assistant can afford about $1,040 a month for housing, and nothing in Yountville rents for that. Ms. Turner wants the skilled nursing facility open for the veterans, and she is campaigning against the housing for the people who would staff it. A nursing home with no nurses is an empty building. Her first priority, delaying the Commons, defeats her third priority, helping the veterans. She has not noticed that her own platform contradicts itself.
Excitement
"Interest in wine is down and excitement in the Town of Napa is up," she writes, and proposes reviving the Mustard Festival and adding European-style Christmas markets. In June, Yountville collected $971,724 in hotel tax, a record, up 24.9 percent from the year before. The town she proposes to rescue from boredom just had the best month in its history. Ms. Turner demands a business plan for the Commons. Her own two ideas have none. She does not say what the festivals would cost, who would pay for them, who would run them, or when they would happen.
The verbs
Read her three priorities and list the verbs. Rethink. Prepare. Obtain. Be creative. Forge. Generate. Revisit. Cultivate. Engage. Listen. Hear. Act, in capitals. Apply pressure. The list does not contain "build."
Delay is not free. Someone pays for it, and it is the workers Ms. Turner says she supports. Nationally, over the past 35 years, rent has gone up about 149 percent while household income has gone up only about 35 percent. Rent keeps rising faster than paychecks. Every year the Commons is delayed, the caregiver and the line cook pay another year of rising rent, and they never get that money back. The delay costs the Town too. Construction costs go up every year, and the Measure S money, which can legally be spent only on housing, sits in the bank doing nothing.
The honest version
Ms. Turner is entitled to oppose the Commons. Some residents do, and voters could weigh that position if she stated it. An honest version of her website would take one sentence: the Commons should not be built, the Town should not hire a manager until a new council picks one, and the people who work here should keep commuting.
On September 19, the Moon asked every candidate for the one thing the Sun's questionnaire left out, which is their alternative. Answering means drawing the plan, pricing it, counting the homes, naming who they serve, explaining the legal path, and saying when someone gets a key. The Commons did all of that and was attacked for every number it produced. Ms. Turner's alternative has none of those parts, which keeps it safe from criticism, since imagination has no building department. What she offers instead is support for the "what" and the "who," objection to everything that would produce them, and a slogan, "Rethink What's Possible," from a candidate who does not appear in the record of the years the Town spent thinking.
Who is paying
On September 15, a committee called Build a Better Yountville filed state reports of independent spending supporting Ms. Turner and three other candidates. Its sponsor is The Club Yountville, LLC, the company of Gary Jabara, owner of The Estate Yountville, who backed the petition against the Commons and bought the Yountville Sun this summer. His company put $25,000 into the committee, which reported about $22,000 in spending across the four candidates. The candidates did not receive that money, and the filings do not show coordination or any promised favor. They show which candidates Mr. Jabara wants elected. Ms. Turner's website explains why he chose her.
For 28 years the Town did its incremental housing work without Ms. Turner: the workshops of 12 and eight people, the tax measure, the land purchase, and two years of meetings and dinners with hundreds of residents ending in a petition to stop this effort. Ms. Turner took no part in the Town's housing work, and now she wants voters to give her the power to stop it just as it is ready to build. That is why she is first in this series. Her objection is not really to the Commons. Her website does not offer a single way to house the people who work in Yountville: no other site, no other project, no other policy. She acts as if Yountville has no housing crisis to solve, and she is asking voters to put her in charge of solving it.
Disclosure: The author served as Owner's Design Consultant on the Yountville Commons project for approximately two years. That scope of work is complete. He writes here as a private citizen.
