What It Will Take to Protect the Groezinger Winery
Since 1870, the long east wall of the Groezinger Wine Cellar has kept wine cool, outlasted the winery that built it, and survived its 1960s reinvention as Vintage 1870 with its brick intact. The current application would cut seven doorways into that wall and put a banquet hall on the floor above. The applicant's historian concedes the removed brick will never come back. The engineering to keep the building standing has not yet been submitted.
The ballroom proposal for the 1870 wine cellar arrived with one environmental study out of roughly eight. Here is what the law requires, and what residents can do about it.
Last week's essay, "What Yountville Is Really Voting On," ended with a warning that residents have to pay attention after the party, when the bratwurst is gone and the real decisions move to Town Hall. Since it ran, dozens and dozens of you have reached out by email, by phone and by text, and nearly all of you have asked some version of the same thing: "What can we do to stop Yountville turning into a Disney shopping mall?" This essay is part of the answer, and it starts with one building. The Groezinger Wine Cellar is where the question has stopped being hypothetical: its owner has filed plans to cut seven massive openings into its 1870 brick facade and put a +500 person ballroom on its second floor. The answer is more encouraging than many readers fear. Residents do not get to vote on the brick, but California law sets minimum requirements for a project like this one, and any resident has the right to insist that they be met. What follows explains what those requirements are, which ones this application has skipped, and what you can do about it before anyone votes.
The Studies Nobody Has Done
The application to put a ballroom in the Groezinger Wine Cellar arrives with one environmental study. A project of this size ordinarily needs about eight. The one study is a 12-page memo from Architectural Resources Group, hired and paid by the applicant, which reviewed its client's project against ten federal preservation standards and awarded it ten out of ten. The memo is candid about its purpose, which is to "support project review for the purposes of CEQA." It is less candid about everything else.
The California Environmental Quality Act, known as CEQA, applies whenever a town uses its judgment to approve a project, and this one needs a use permit and design review. Before voting, the Town must decide how much environmental review the project gets. It can declare the project exempt and study nothing. It can prepare an initial study and adopt a negative declaration, which is a formal finding that any harm is minor. Or it can require a full environmental impact report. The memo is plainly written to land the project on one of the first two options, and it is not up to the job.
Ten out of ten
The federal standards are ten short rules from the National Park Service for altering a historic building without destroying the reasons it is historic. They are not obscure, and they are not long. The memo checks the project against each and reports a pass every time, which is a remarkable result for a project that removes original 1870 brick from the front of a National Register building.
Four of the passes fail on the memo's own words.
The ninth standard begins by saying new work "shall not destroy historic materials that characterize the property." The memo's own project description removes original brick from six bays of the principal wall and enlarges the seventh. Its defense is that the openings are small "relative to the large size of the building," a principle under which a large enough landmark can absorb almost anything.
The tenth standard asks whether the building would be unimpaired if the new work were ever removed. The memo concedes the original brick "would not return," then suggests filling the holes with matching brick, as if a replica were the same thing as the building.
The fifth standard requires distinctive features to be preserved. The memo calls the brick, a historic window, historic vents and part of the parapet distinctive, then removes portions of each and explains that the losses are small. The window, it notes, is only "one of 13." By that arithmetic the building can lose twelve more before anyone should worry.
The second standard says removal of distinctive features "will be avoided." The memo opens its discussion of that standard by conceding the project "would affect character-defining features." It closes three original openings on the north wall, covers the small original windows on the east wall, and excuses the lost parapet on the grounds that no one standing on the ground will see it. The federal standards protect a building's historic features whether or not they can be seen from the sidewalk.
Three more passes have serious problems. The first standard allows a new use only if it requires minimal change. A ballroom that requires seven new openings, a rebuilt interior, a new dormer and stair, and a seismic retrofit nobody has designed is not a minimal change by any reasonable reading of the standard. The third standard forbids features that create a false sense of history. The project takes the building's one arched entrance and repeats it across all seven bays, giving the cellar a row of arches it never had. The seventh standard forbids treatments that damage historic material. The memo says the project does not "appear" to involve any, which is true of every document in the application except the rendering, where the vines are gone and the brick has turned the color of a hotel bathrobe.
The remaining passes are thin or empty. The memo treats archaeology as hypothetical, although the plans remove a concrete slab and pour new footings on a site occupied since 1870. It dismisses the 1960s Vintage 1870 rehabilitation as insignificant, a judgment reasonable people can contest. It passes the standard on repairing deteriorated features because nobody checked the condition of the brick, mortar or timber. The memo reports that no historic features need repair, but no one inspected the brick, mortar or timber to find out. A building that has not been examined cannot be shown to need nothing.
Beneath all ten sits the largest omission. The memo lists the open second-story rooms and the heavy timber framing as character-defining features, then declines to analyze any interior work. The interior is where the ballroom goes, and it is where any seismic retrofit would go.
The exemption problem
CEQA offers an exemption for historic rehabilitation that follows the federal standards, which explains the memo's perfect score. The same law bars any exemption for a project that may cause a substantial adverse change to a historic resource. When the applicant's own consultant concedes the loss of original brick that will never return, the exemption argument has a short life.
The infill exemption is limited to sites of five acres or less. The cover sheet lists this lot at 6.53 acres, which puts it well over the limit. CEQA also bars exemptions where unusual circumstances create a reasonable possibility of significant effects. Turning an unreinforced brick winery on the National Register into a ballroom for several hundred people is an unusual circumstance by any measure, including Orange County's.
The fair argument
If the project is not exempt, the law favors the public on the next question. When substantial evidence supports a fair argument that a project may significantly harm the environment, the Town must prepare a full environmental impact report, even if other evidence points the other way. One qualified preservation professional who disagrees with the memo is enough. In this case, the applicant's own consultant has already conceded several of the losses that such a professional would point to.
A project nobody has finished describing
CEQA requires an accurate, stable and finite description of a project before review begins. This application does not have one.
Putting several hundred people on the second floor of an unreinforced brick building moves it into a higher seismic risk category. The state's historic building code then requires a structural survey and a full strengthening plan. At present, the plan for keeping the building standing is a blank box on the cover sheet labeled deferred submittals. Strengthening a building like this usually means steel anchors through the walls, plywood over the old floors and roof, and sometimes steel frames inside the timber rooms. Those are physical changes to a historic resource, and nobody can evaluate them until somebody designs them.
The operation is undefined as well. The application does not say how many events the hall would hold, what hours it would keep, how loud the music would be, or where several hundred guests would park. The occupant count shifts from 400 in the narrative to 457 for the hall and 688 for the upper floor in the code tables. The narrative also mentions that the second-floor retail space was "previously demolished" under an earlier permit. CEQA prohibits splitting one project into smaller permits so that no single piece looks significant, and the Town should find out what that earlier permit covered.
The homework
A proper review works through a state checklist of about twenty environmental topics. Several of them need their own technical reports for this project: an independent historic review prepared for the Town rather than the applicant, the structural survey needed to describe the project at all, a noise study, a transportation and parking study, an archaeological records search with formal tribal consultation, a sewer and water analysis for a commercial kitchen serving hundreds, a hazardous materials survey before demolition, and an air quality screening. The applicant has turned in one of roughly eight, and it was written by his own consultant.
Our colleagues at the Sun
The Yountville Sun, your town's weekly paper, has not yet found room for story. That is understandable. A weekly has only so many pages, and a season of ribbon cuttings, wine release parties and hotel anniversaries takes up a good deal of them. A ballroom for several hundred people inside the a town landmark building cannot compete with a new seasonal menu. The Moon will cover the story in the meantime.
What residents can do
Many readers have written to say the applicant is so rich he can do whatever he wants. CEQA has no exemption for wealth. Lawmakers have created a long list of exemptions over half a century and never got around to that one. The law asks only whether the required review was done, and any resident or group can ask a court to answer that question.
The most important step is also the cheapest, and it has to happen now. Under CEQA, an issue generally cannot be raised in court unless someone raised it with the Town before the final hearing closed. A letter to the Planning Director, or a comment at the hearing, preserves the issue for everyone. Every reader who writes down a specific concern, whether it is the missing structural survey, the brick or the parking, keeps that issue alive.
If the Town approves the project without proper review, residents and preservation groups such as Napa County Landmarks have standing to challenge the approval in Napa County Superior Court. The deadlines are short: 30 days after the Town files a notice of determination, 35 days after a notice of exemption, and 180 days if no notice is filed. A court that finds the review inadequate can set the approval aside and order the work done properly. Anyone considering that step should talk to an attorney well before those deadlines.
That process is slow, and the applicant decides whether it happens. If the studies are done and the standards are met, there is nothing to litigate. If he continues to treat the standards as suggestions written for other people, the delay will be entirely his own. The fastest route to a ballroom is to do the homework, and the slowest is to keep insisting it is optional.
The Town Council will decide this application with broad discretion over a use the zoning code does not list. That discretion covers whether to approve the project. It does not include the power to excuse the applicant from the law. Before November 3, every candidate should say on the record whether they would vote on this project before all the studies have been submitted.
Disclosure: Brendan Kelly is principal of Kelly + Morgan Architecture, which served as the Town's Owner's Design Consultant on the Yountville Commons project. That work is complete.
