A payroll is not a constituency, tax revenue is not a vote, and a Sinatra party is not a council meeting.

Volume III: The Town of Yountville Is Not For Sale

The Town of Yountville Is Not For Sale is a series about who controls the assets the public already owns, a subject that sounds dry right up until you meet the people trying to control them. It begins with The Town of Yountville Is Not for Sale, which traces how a promise made in 2018, when 72 percent of voters taxed hotel guests to fund workforce housing, became an actual place when the elementary school closed and more than $3 million of that revenue helped buy the site. The Town then spent more than two years and more than 20 public meetings getting the project ready to build, at which point a petition signed by 235 people, roughly a tenth of the electorate, stopped it. Eight years of public work, paused by a stack of signatures that would not fill the front rows of the Lincoln Theater. The essay examines what was actually lost in that interruption, and why a Town that builds in small phases, keeps the asset, and prices the homes for the people who work here turned out to threaten interests considerably larger than one project.

The series then turns to the record. The second essay, What the Chamber Is For, examined the July 21 Council meeting, where Vice Mayor Reeves described the petition campaign from the dais and was answered with a speech about the First Amendment, delivered on behalf of people whose devotion to open debate is most fully expressed in private living rooms or during public comments where they can’t be questioned. The essay makes the unfashionable case that a town's argument with itself belongs in the council chamber, which offers microphones, minutes, an agenda, and the feature no living room can match, which is that everyone is allowed in.

Two days later, the Sun answered, in its way.The third essay, Bezos Bought the Post. Ellison Bought CBS. Yountville Got Gary., examines that answer: the town's only newspaper, dead in May for lack of money and back from the grave by July, disclosed that it had been purchased by the Orange County telecom entrepreneur who owns 22 acres of the town's center, backed the petition campaign, cannot vote here, and bought the towns only newspaper for an undisclosed sum 103 days before the election. The paper announced its new owner in an admiring profile written by his own employee, a genre previously confined to airline magazines, and did not report the price, the seller, or who can fire the editor. The essay leaves readers with the two questions to carry into November: who owns this, and what does he want.

Then Gary answered that one too, in writing. The fourth essay, You Are Not Invited, arrived courtesy of Jabara himself, who emailed the entire Town Council on Aug 4 and every declared candidate to announce that none of them may attend his August 13 Frank Sinatra evening, that his attorney is preserving email metadata, that a Jane Doe lawsuit stands ready to identify the "exact residential address" of an anonymous critic, and that his "deep telecommunications background comes in very handy here." The Moon could not have invented this document and, more to the point, did not have to. The essay reads it closely, observes that the veterans get Sinatra while their caregivers get another hour on Highway 29, and goes looking for the one thing no amount of telecommunications expertise has yet located, which is a single affirmative idea Gary Jabara has ever proposed for Yountville.

The fifth essay, What the Whistleblower Actually Said, prints the document he described, characterized, and lawyered over but somehow never showed anyone. The complaint runs in full, exactly as received. It alleges that confidential Town information traveled from a closed session to a public podium, and it names names. The Moon sorts what the public record supports from what remains allegation, discloses that this series took its title from the complaint's closing line, and offers the underlying documents to any newsroom that wants them, including the Sun, which has so far located no news in any of it.

Future essays of this series will assemble the public comment ledger from meeting minutes, publishing the recurring voices alongside the electoral arithmetic. They will examine how the language of preservation gets put to work for private development, how the phrase "failed project" entered circulation and who keeps repeating it, what the Housing Element actually requires and how thin the alternatives to Town-owned land really are, and what every candidate for mayor and Council should be asked to disclose before November. One question will recur throughout: name the specific place in Yountville where you support workforce housing. It is a short question. The silences it produces are not.

At its heart, the series is about a mechanism, and the mechanism is simple. Nobody has proposed selling the school site, because nobody has to. The Town owns the seven and a half acres outright and governs them completely. It could build tomorrow. So is the strategy to keep the land idle? A petition signed by 235 people, barely 10 percent of the town's registered voters, suspended the work of years while proposing nothing in its place, and the delay was rebranded as stewardship. Meanwhile, every public conversation gets steered toward land the Town does not control, the Veterans Home campus, private parcels, anywhere the Town can approve nothing, while the one property it actually owns sits and waits.

What makes this worth recording is that Yountville's elected leadership did the hard part first. The Council took a voter mandate, bought the land, held more than 20 public meetings, chose a model that towns across California now study, small phases, public ownership, homes priced for the people who work here, and carried it within reach of a groundbreaking. That is what got shot down, and it is worth being precise about who shot it down: a hotel owner with 22 acres of the town's center and a newspaper to go with it, and a chorus of comfortable voices, some of whom arrived here decades ago, when a waiter's paycheck covered a Yountville apartment, climbed the exact ladder the Commons was built to extend, and have spent this year explaining from the public comment podium why the ladder must now be pulled up for the town's protection. They stand on third base convinced they hit a triple, and the young cook renting in Fairfield never even gets an at-bat. The Council offered a model. The opposition offered a pause. Only one of those is a plan.

So the pause does its quiet work. Revenue accumulates while proposals circulate to route it through private hands. Deed restrictions expire on schedule, quietly, the way they were always going to. Control passes without a transaction, a signature, or a sale, through nothing more sophisticated than time lost, and the strategy works best when it persuades a town that nothing is happening at all. It has stopped housing in Yountville, and this tactic is stopping housing across California. It is, in its way, a real accomplishment, though not the kind anyone tells their grandchildren about, since the grandchildren are the ones it was accomplished against. They will love this valley the way their grandparents do. But they will do their loving from Fairfield or Bakersfield.

These essays are offered as a record, not a grievance, though lately the record has been doing the grievance's work for it. They rely on meeting minutes, public documents, election results, and the statements the participants keep making in their own words, which remain the Moon's most productive source. Where facts are disputed, the Moon shows its evidence. Yountville retains every institution of self-government it has ever had, including the oldest one, the ballot, and a mayor and two Council seats are on it November 3. The series will keep publishing until then. The participants (even the ones not on the ballot), on current form, will keep providing material. ☾