The above parcel of Skyline Park was identified by the State Tuesday, August 27, for the development of affordable housing. It’s official but not unchangeable. Go to this state site and you will find the State’s designation of 20 acres of Skyline Park for affordable housing. Click here for Napa Valley Register story this week: “2 Napa County sites on state housing list: parts of Skyline Park and Veterans Home”
At the August 26 Board of Supervisors Legislative subcommittee meeting they had a discussion about Skyline Park. Click here to view the Facebook video made by James Hinton, Napa Valley News, to whom we all owe major gratitude for attending, reporting, and posting. The meetings are public, but not officially recorded. Also many thanks to Julia Winiarski for creating the transcript. Click here to read it in full. Also, for an excellent summary of the stakes in such an acquisition, click here for Napa County Regional Park and Open Space District’s statement on the prospect of affordable housing in Skyline Wilderness Park.
We want the truth, we need transparency and we must have our supervisors solidly advocating for the purchase of all of Skyline Park. A question we need to be addressed: Are the supervisors willing to carve out some acreage from Skyline Park to satisfy the county’s affordable housing quota? Read more here.
Napa Vision 2050 seeks the sale by the State of all of Skyline Park to the Napa County Regional Parks and Open Space District. Measure K, on the March 2020 ballot, would raise money for park purchase. One of the goals of Measure K is to purchase and protect Skyline.
There are other options for the development of affordable housing nearby in unused lands of Napa State Hospital grounds that do not have the complications of this heavily used portion of Skyline Park. One has to wonder how the State came up with this location when its filters for sites should have eliminated it. Water and sewer are not available for the Skyline Park 20 acre site. It could be available but would require a change in the Rural-Urban Line by the voters in the City of Napa. It would also require approval by LAFCO (the Local Agency Formation Commission).
Significantly, SB 20 uses three terms to describe the land it would affect, (1) “park”, (2) “wilderness park”, and (3) “wilderness area”. None of these terms are defined in SB 20, allowing for mischief in what is considered a “park”, a “wilderness area” or a “wilderness park.” When the County wished, for example, to use part of Parcel Number 046-450-041-000 for the to-be-constructed Napa County Office of Education, the project was referred to as an “educational park.
Please note: We always seek to provide as much information as possible and to ask many questions. We do not ever wish to provide “misinformation.” We referred to the Skyline parcel in question in the colloquial term that has been used for many years, “the lower 50”, however, it is not a 50-acre parcel. The area in question is technically a 20-acre piece of a larger 200-acre parcel. We apologize for any confusion around this.