How Angwin’s urban bubble has torn a community apart.
West of Napa, on top of Howell Mountain, the small community of Angwin (which often refers to itself as a village) has been the scene of a major controversy involving one of Napa County’s 12 “urban bubbles.” Bubbles are “urban residential” and “rural residential” designations on the county’s land use map, which is part of the county’s general plan. They’re all being reviewed as part of a countywide general plan update that started in January 2005.
Little did the county know then—nor could anyone could have envisioned—the heated debates that have arisen over this one small oval drawn on that map more than 30 years ago. Indeed, not until hearing both sides of the story can one completely understand the scope of the controversy or how sticky the whole situation really is.
“What really struck me is that this has split a community,” says Jim King, Napa County Planning Commission Chairman. “When you look at how many people are on each side [at community meetings], and you understand where they live and what they do and who they are, I think the most important thing at this point is that the community is split. [Angwin] has a really neat village feel to it, and to have something break people apart like this is really sad and hurtful to the community.”
Making plans
The trouble started in early 2005, when the Napa County Board of Supervisors initiated a general plan update and recognized the Angwin community wasn’t well reflected by the existing plan policies and map. The 1983 general plan defines the Angwin area, which encompasses approximately 529 acres, like this: “the Angwin urban area is Pacific Union College and adjacent commercial facilities.”
The problem is, today, a large portion of the residential community of Angwin lies west of the Pacific Union College property—and west of the urban residential designation. Instead of being designated residential, this area was designated agriculture, watershed and open space (AWOS). AWOS land is subject to Measure J, which prohibits the board of supervisors from redesignating it without a public election. Lands within the urban residential designation aren’t covered by provisions of Measure J, even though they may be zoned agricultural.
“We’re currently working to update our county general plan,” explains Napa County Planning Director Hillary Gitelman. “Our current general plan has just one sentence in it about Angwin, and it has this very diagrammatic map of Angwin that’s become known as ‘the bubble.’ As planners in this countywide general plan update, we thought, ‘What a great opportunity to make the plan better represent the community—why it’s so special, what’s there, what it means. Wouldn’t it be great if we could create some policies about the community of Angwin—and a better map?’”
As Angwin residents began getting wind of possible general plan changes that could affect their rural community, several banded together to form Save Rural Angwin (SRA), an organization advocating for preservation of agricultural land and open space.
“We started to see that this urban bubble designation allowed for virtually any kind of urban growth, with a use permit, and that the affordable housing issue was coming up,” explains SRA member Kellie Anderson. “It started to raise folks’ concern about what could be built in an urban designation. We started participating in the general plan update process back in 2005, when the county started hosting meetings to hear what residents thought.”
Campus concerns
As general plan updates continued, Pacific Union College, a Seventh-day Adventist liberal arts institution with about 1,500 students that’s been located in Angwin since 1909, was working on its own proposal to build a 380-unit ecovillage (named for the green building, alternative energy and other environmentally sustainable practices it proposes) on a portion of its land.
The idea for the village stemmed from the college’s need to increase its financial base in response to a number of factors affecting private colleges around the nation, including tuition and fees that are approaching the limit of what most families can pay, a changing student demographic needing more scholarships and an increase in operating expenses. The cost of providing PUC employees with benefits alone doubled between 1996 and 2006 to $7.3 million per year; add to that a downturn in enrollment and a smaller endowment than most private colleges of comparable size, and PUC has become more dependent on tuition income over the years. It’s no wonder PUC started looking to its greatest asset—its land—to help alleviate some of these financial challenges.
“About five years ago, the [school’s] board took a look at its assets and recognized we have a lot of valuable land that’s not being used productively,” explains John Collins, vice president for financial administration at Pacific Union College. “Given a number of challenges based on the changing demographics of our students, the need for more financial resources for them and the needs to improve faculty pay and upgrade the campus, we began looking closely at this issue.”
The $100 million PUC hopes to receive from the sale of the land will provide the college a permanent financial source ($80 million for the endowment and $20 million for campus improvements), which will let it award scholarships to needy students, improve the college’s physical facilities, pay competitive faculty salaries and provide new student and faculty housing, as well as create a new curriculum based on sustainable living. Currently, investment income accounts for only less than one percent of total operating income, which is less than at some other small colleges (significantly less than some highly selective institutions). The average endowment for small private baccalaureate colleges is about $90,000 per student; PUC’s endowment currently equates to approximately $12,000 per student.
“Our enrollment has fluctuated, but the issues go beyond that,” says Collins. “Many schools with our enrollment are on a campus of 40 to 60 acres. We have 1,892 acres. Every foot of fence, street and power line, all the water, and the list goes on—there’s an expense attached to that. Our footprint is too big for the size of our educational program. There’s an imbalance that needs to be rectified.”
While the two issues—the possible rezoning of Angwin’s urban bubble and PUC’s proposed ecovillage—are completely separate, they’ve nevertheless converged, much to the dismay of PUC and its supporters. Indeed, SRA has proposed an alternative general plan map to county officials (in addition to the three possibilities already proposed by the board of supervisors), that would make the Angwin urban residential area smaller, remove agriculturally zoned land and create an institutional land use designation for Pacific Union College.
“This exemption [the bubble] is a loophole in the protection of agricultural land that the rest of the county enjoys,” says Anderson. “We realized it was only a matter of time until a developer recognized this loophole, and our goal was to preserve the agricultural land and the rural character of the community by reconfiguring the urban bubble in some way.”
Balancing act
On one hand, Pacific Union College is completely within its legal rights to create this development: It owns the land and, according to the current general plan, it’s designated as a developable area. And yet many Angwin residents will argue that what may have made sense more than 30 years ago may not fit the situation today. Thirty years ago, Angwin consisted of a college with a company town. Today, it’s evolved into an active community (with a college) that will obviously be affected by major changes—such as PUC’s proposed ecovillage.
“I think it’s clear that some members of the community would like to change the general plan and the map to preclude PUC’s proposed development from happening,” says Gitelman. “Others would like to change the plan and the map in less dramatic ways and consider PUC’s proposal later, after a detailed, project-specific environmental review.”
Despite the board’s obvious hard work finalizing the general plan and reaching agreement on what the urban bubble should or should not entail, an unfortunate byproduct of the debates has been a tearing apart of a once close-knit community.
“If I were to step back and look at PUC, all the land they own, and what they’re trying to do, I could find some really good points about what they’d like to see happen up in Angwin,” says King. “On the other hand, sitting down with the people who’ve lived their lives in Angwin and aren’t a part of PUC, it’s easy to understand why they want to preserve the rural feel of the place.”
Even those who vehemently oppose the proposed PUC development nevertheless support the college and sympathize with its need to increase its endowment. After all, PUC has shown itself to be a responsible steward of the land it’s owned for close to a century, is a major Napa County employer with a staff of more than 300 people, hosts a variety of cultural events for the community and has proved its merit as a sophisticated institution of higher learning by consistently being named among the top Western regional liberal arts colleges by U.S. News & World Report.
And just as opponents have sympathized with the college’s financial situation, the college has also listened to community input and eliminated 200 housing units, including an entire neighborhood envisioned in earlier versions of the project. This revised proposal, submitted to the county in July 2007, reduced the number of units to 380 and removed ecovillage housing from agriculturally zoned land, confining it instead to land already designated for residential and urban development.
“We both live here. Dr. [John] Collins has lived here a long time and is a graduate of PUC,” says Dr. Richard Osborn, president of Pacific Union College. “So when we’re looking at the project, it’s not just looking at it from an institutional sense of needing more money and needing to save the college for the future by having these kinds of investments. We’re also looking for a quality life for ourselves.
“My wife and I moved here about seven years ago and are just amazed at the quality of life. We wouldn’t want to see anything damage that. So we look at this more than just in a corporate sense. We look at this on a personal level: What would be good for us as a couple? What would be good for us if we still had young children?”
The mutual concern and respect on both sides of the bargaining table has led to some creative problem solving, with suggestions ranging from charging the public to use PUC’s network of hiking trails (currently anyone can access the land) to starting a dairy or an organic farm. In fact, when the idea to sell some land was in its infancy, several diverse proposals were considered, including building a destination resort, a retirement community, or selling or leasing the land for vineyards. This last idea was deemed infeasible, because the college—and the Adventist community in general—is opposed to drinking alcohol. So, in 2005, the PUC board voted in favor of the small residential project, dedicated to principles of healthy and environmentally sustainable living.
“We looked at a number of directions the college could go,” explains Collins. “We took a look at our values, the fact that we’re a school, and what was needed in society. We thought the concept of a sustainable village would be a model for our students, would be beneficial to the community and to Napa County, would take care of some of the housing needs that seem to be pretty pressing, and would also be compatible with the urban bubble designation that had been in existence for many years.”
Sadly, both the decision of whether or not to move forward with the ecovillage development, as well as how (or whether) to redesignate the urban bubble, will most probably degrade into a “you can’t please everyone all the time” situation, and a decision will be made based on what will do the most good, taking into consideration future ramifications and what’s possible given some major obstacles.
“I think PUC is a great institution, so shouldn’t we allow them to do some things that they need to do to support their school?” asks King. “The first answer is yes. The second answer is, only if the infrastructure can handle it. At this point, it hasn’t been demonstrated to me that the infrastructure can handle it.”
An environmental impact report will study these questions. Among the first concerns that needs to be addressed is traffic; it’s a concern raised by both Angwin residents and county officials alike.
“Coming up or going down [Howell Mountain Road], there are 10 caution areas where it’s noted as either a sharp turn, reduce speed, windy road, school or some other potential hazard,” says SRA spokesperson Allen Spence. “It’s a very, very steep hill, so they aren’t going to be able to put a nice straight road up the hill. With additional traffic for about 1,000 people [based on the 380-home estimate], that’s easily 600 additional trips a day just to get to work. That doesn’t include soccer moms, going to the grocery store or other drivers on that road. And all the trucks over 10 years to build the development is going to tear it up.”
Triad Communities, developer of the PUC ecovillage, hopes to reduce dependence on cars within the village by integrating various key elements, including a well-designed network of streets, cycling paths and sidewalks, a high-frequency hybrid vehicle shuttle service between Angwin and St. Helena and a transportation resource center to encourage ridesharing and alternative forms of transportation.
“In addition to the network of newly connected walking and bicycle trails, we’re removing parking lots and certain streets to encourage walking,” explains Curt Johansen, executive vice president of Triad Communities. “We’re unbundling residential parking and introducing shared electric vehicles that are convenient, nonpolluting, quiet, safe and resource-efficient.”
Another major area of concern for Angwin residents, given the remote nature of the location, is public utilities, including gas, electricity, water and sewage.
“Electricity is an issue,” says SRA member Patrick Griffith. “PUC has its own generator, but the electrical power supplied up here is on old lines. In years past, we’ve had a lot of outages ranging anywhere from one minute to five or six hours. In 2005, we had more than 20 power outages.”
According to Griffith, PG&E has said that to significantly expand the electrical services in Angwin, the company would have to either place much heavier lines on all new poles or put the lines underground, which has been deemed infeasible because of the prohibitive cost ($1 million per mile). The company also told him it would be difficult to install heavier poles and lines due to environmental rights of way.
“If the general plan leaves the urban bubble as it’s currently drawn,” says Anderson, “which shows about 600 acres for urban use, it’ll ultimately result in urban land uses that will require additional services. The biggest concern would be groundwater, as our groundwater use here impacts the folks down the hill in Pope Valley.”
Patrick Griffith agrees, noting that several wells have already gone dry and that new wells are being built up to 800 feet deep (versus the existing 100- to 200-foot wells). Triad plans to solve this problem by incorporating sustainable and energy- and water-efficient features into construction, which should result in 50 percent less water use than comparable housing. Indeed, Triad believes it can extract no more groundwater at build out than PUC has historically used.
“We’re committed to conserving water; we won’t extract any increased potable supply beyond the college’s historical use,” says Johansen. “To achieve that, we’ll introduce rainwater harvesting, 100 percent reclamation and reuse of wastewater through tertiary treatment, dual system piping, conversion of campus irrigation to recycled wastewater, and mandate low-flow water technology in all homes and commercial businesses. Enough renewable energy could be produced locally to provide for a zero-energy community, which PG&E is quite interested in.”
If, as it seems, the obstacles can be overcome while maintaining the current, or even an improved, infrastructure for current residents, it’s hard to argue that an ecovillage isn’t the best option (versus an alternative non-environmentally friendly development). Besides state-of-the-art green building and energy and water conservation techniques, including solar and geothermal energy for new homes and businesses, it’ll also be a compact development, with 90 percent of land remaining open space, no net loss of agricultural land and 70 acres of new crops grown locally.
“We think it’s pretty clear that Western society has to discover and practice a different way to live if we’re going to have a future on the planet,” says Collins when asked why PUC decided to focus on a green development. “To us it seems pretty logical.”
“It also grows out of some of the theological tenets of our church, tenets we share with a lot of Christian denominations,” agrees Osborn. “That is, as Christians, we have an obligation to preserve the environment in which we live. So some of this grows out of our old and new testament theology.”
As of the writing of this article, the Napa County Planning Commissioners have yet to make a recommendation about the bubble, and it may ultimately end up before the board of supervisors as part of the general planning process, which could take some time. In October, hundreds of Angwin residents and PUC students, faculty and leadership attended a joint meeting of the board of supervisors and planning commission, where college officials presented a petition of support with more than 1,500 signatures to the board. As the process continues to move slowly forward, PUC plans to move ahead with an environmental impact report, which is scheduled to be complete late in 2008.
One surely cannot envy the administration of Pacific Union College as it tries to convince everyone but God—no, wait, make that everyone and God—that the ecovillage will be the best decision for them, the community and the environment.
