.Napa Envy: Sprawl

Foes of sprawl in Livermore want wineries to save the day.

For now, the peaceful rectangle of golden grassland is a no man’s land, the last undeveloped property between the foothills of Mt. Diablo and the suburban sprawl of Livermore. Interstate 580’s creeping traffic serves as a line in the sand, dividing the golden terrain from a dense commercial zone where Home Depot rubs shoulders with OfficeMax and In-N-Out Burger. “It really is the last frontier,” said Livermore’s mayor, Marshall Kamena.

For more than thirty years, slow-growth advocates such as Kamena have fought to keep bulldozers off this frontier. They thought they’d finally won in 2000, when Alameda County voters approved an urban growth boundary that made the land off-limits for most development. Seen as a check upon sprawl at a time of incessant demand for new housing, such boundaries can only be changed with voter approval, and have flourished in the Bay Area since Oregon adopted the first one in 1973.

But establishing a development perimeter in Livermore did not provide supporters of open space with the peace of mind they expected. Five years later, the valley is once again a battleground. City residents will vote next month on an initiative that would annex 1,400 acres in North Livermore and then permit construction of 2,450 houses. With county and city governments unable to approve such developments on their own, Pardee Homes is going straight to the voters for permission to develop land that many residents thought they already had protected for good. Government officials disdainfully call this “ballot-box planning.”

There’s more at stake than just one plot of land in North Livermore. The Home Builders Association of Northern California recently extolled Pardee’s approach as “a fresh strategy” for developers to use to build more housing in the growth-wary Bay Area. In an article in Bay Area Home Builder, an association official lauded this tactic as the model for a new era in which “large master-planned communities will often have to go to the ballot for approval.”

Opponents of the development make several familiar-sounding arguments: that it would spoil the scenery, dump too many cars on the already clogged highways, and force a tax increase to fund the expansion of city services. But open-space advocates have a fresh strategy of their own. They aren’t simply trying to keep the landscape undeveloped or prevent property owners from making a return on their investment. Instead, they’re pushing for a new kind of farmland — upscale and tourist-friendly — as the key to a bold, modern city. In place of the waving grasses of today’s North Livermore, they envision an agricultural solution tailored to fit the prosperous towns of the Tri-Valley: groves of olive and pistachio trees, rows of strawberries and boysenberries, and, most importantly, neat vines of chardonnay and cabernet sauvignon.

It’s all part of a larger project: the city’s reinvention of itself from a sleepy suburban research town to the heart of the “Livermore Valley Wine Region.” The campaign has forged some unusual partnerships. Environmentalists, vineyard owners, and champions of sustainable agriculture are teaming up with the mayor and even some business interests in their fight for open space. Their alliance is based upon a realization that was late to dawn upon open-space advocates.

“You’re kidding yourself if you think you’re going to have a successful urban growth boundary without having something profitable on the other side of that line,” said Tom O’Malley, president of the Tri-Valley Business Council. The pressures in favor of development are too strong to resist, and the land adjacent to most growth boundaries is too valuable to be left alone.

For precisely that reason, a growing number of open-space advocates now believe that establishing farms outside a growth boundary is the final step in smart city planning. The idea behind this thinking is that farmland can do what boundaries can’t do alone: stop sprawl and provide permanent open space by meeting community needs and giving landowners a way to make a profit.

“It makes no sense to plan a city, but leave the area outside the city limits unplanned,” said O’Malley’s unlikely ally, Sibella Kraus of Sustainable Agriculture Education, a Berkeley nonprofit. “It creates a vacuum that’s actively sucking cities outward.”


Livermore’s roots in viticulture go back to its founding, when Robert Livermore planted the first vines in the valley in 1846. Over the ensuing years, the tradition has been carefully tended by a handful of Livermore loyalists.

Charles Wetmore of the now-defunct Cresta Blanca Winery was the biggest early booster of Livermore’s wines. He gathered cuttings from famed French vines, ran a one-man publicity campaign that convinced other viticulturists to stake their claims in Livermore, and sent his bottles to the Paris Exhibition of 1889, where his Sauvignon Blanc won a gold medal and the Grand Prix. It was the first such award won by an American winemaker.

The region thrived, thanks to a few wine-making families who believed in the valley’s promise, led by the Wente and Concannon families, both of which established wineries in 1883. Around the turn of the last century, the region had more acres in grapes — 15,000 — than either Napa or Sonoma. But Prohibition struck a blow. The big wineries kept up their vines and some shifted production to altar wine, but smaller operations folded, and the region never recovered. After the repeal of Prohibition, development began pushing out agriculture. While farmers in the mostly rural Napa and Sonoma regions turned to grapes, Livermore’s leaders shifted their attention to housing workers brought in by the new Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which opened in 1952.

Development pressures threatened to force out even the biggest, most established vineyards several times, said Phil Wente, vice-chairman of Wente Vineyards. “In the early ’60s, the threat was strong enough for us to begin buying land in the Salinas Valley, with the anticipation of moving our operations there 100 percent,” he said. As housing shortages and the skyrocketing population of the Bay Area drove up land values, the Wentes were being taxed out of business.

But the deeply rooted family made a commitment to the region, and worked successfully with the state legislature to reform the tax codes. Then, in the late 1980s, the Wentes encouraged the establishment of more small vineyards in the region, hoping for a critical mass that would get the appellation noticed.

The South Livermore Valley Area Plan, which was approved by voters in 1993, addressed that goal with a bundle of incentives and regulations. The plan allowed property owners of large agriculturally zoned lots to break up the land into smaller, cheaper parcels that better fit the budgets of entrepreneurial vintners. It also ensured that for every housing development built in South Livermore, a number of acres had to be planted with vines or crops. Now, brand-new subdivisions butt up against neat plots of knee-high vines.

Meanwhile, north of the interstate, popular consensus sufficed to keep the bulldozers at bay. But as Livermore grew — its population is now believed to exceed 80,000 — different interests came to the fore. In 2000, when 56 percent of all Alameda County voters supported the open-space initiative Measure D, Livermore residents passed it by fewer than five hundred votes. Many residents clearly hoped that nearby homebuilding would bring down housing prices.

Those pressures have only grown in the five years since that vote. “People in my age group are younger and trying to buy homes for the first time,” said Dan McDowell, 24, a spokesperson for the pro-development group Livermore Tomorrow. “But nobody can really afford much in Livermore.”


At the Pleasanton office of Pardee Homes, elements of the proposed Livermore Trails housing development are lovingly displayed: here patches of carpeting to be made from recycled soda bottles, and there advanced roofing shingles designed to help the development become the largest solar-powered community in the United States.

On the conference room walls, maps show the 130-acre sports park; the 250 acres of open space laced with five miles of equestrian trails; and the environmental preserve to protect an endangered plant, the bird’s-beak, found on the eastern edge of the property. A black-and-white photo shows the historic May Schoolhouse, which burned down in 1979 and which Pardee has pledged to rebuild as part of the project’s “village commons.”

Pardee promises all this and more at Livermore Trails, which it promotes as an exemplar of green design and smart growth. In November 2002, Pardee vice president Carlene Matchniff moved to the area and began meeting with residents in living rooms and community centers, asking them what their town lacked. In response, the company carefully tailored its proposal to meet the needs of a vibrant and expanding town — with more homes, new schools, and recreation facilities — while also answering residents’ concerns. These features are a direct result of urban growth boundaries, Matchniff said.

“I tell the opposition, ‘You’ve won with the urban growth boundary,'” Matchniff said, “because the builders are in a position where they have to go to the people and see what they want on that land.”

Pardee — a subsidiary of Weyerhaeuser, the Fortune 500 forest products company — began collecting signatures for the initiative in January 2005. The company has already spent $2.2 million as of September 24 to promote its plan. Company employees hand out soccer balls and T-shirts every Thursday from a booth at the Livermore Farmers’ Market, and their ads play at the movie theater and on TV. Flyers have landed in almost every mailbox in town. In contrast, the opposition group, Friends of Livermore, had spent only about $90,000 on its campaign, relying on volunteers and shoe leather to tell its side of the story.

In July, the two sides skirmished at a public forum. Amid about three dozen elderly residents who showed up to learn about the proposed development, Joseph Perkins, president of the Northern California Homebuilders Association, took his stand.

Current residents of Livermore have a slice of suburban heaven, Perkins said, but are being selfish by refusing new residents a slice of their own. “Where are the sons and daughters of Livermore going to buy houses in the next ten years?” he asked. “One person’s sprawl is another person’s dream come true. One person’s unchecked growth is another person’s home sweet home.”

Perkins noted correctly that Livermore — like many other Bay Area cities — is contributing to the region’s housing crisis by not meeting the growth targets established for it by the Association of Bay Area Governments. “Livermore is ground zero in terms of its complete intolerance of new home construction and its hostility to new building,” he said.

No one denies there is a housing crunch, both in Livermore and throughout the greater Bay Area. In September 2005, the median price for a home in Livermore was $629,500, creating a high hurdle for first-time buyers to overcome. Pardee’s Matchniff said the project’s inclusion of 15 percent affordable housing and 25 percent housing for middle-income families will be a boon. “Right now, you’ve got families struggling to find housing they can afford,” she said. “People get jobs in the area, but they have to drive in from over the Altamont Pass, or from Brentwood or Oakley. They have to spend two hours on the freeway every day, and it takes away from their quality of life.”

Opponents of the Pardee development say they too favor residential development, but want it done within the current growth boundary. Some of this so-called “in-fill housing” already is underway, such as Signature Properties’ 110-unit condo development in the heart of downtown.

Development in downtown Livermore has gained momentum as part of a full-scale city revitalization effort. This summer, construction workers tore up a traffic lane to make more room for pedestrians, sidewalk cafes, and public art. In July, the city council set aside $25 million for a five-hundred-seat performing arts theater. A multiplex cinema is expected to open in 2006, and several developments that combine commercial and residential units are in the works.

To Mayor Kamena, it’s all part of a grand plan that starts with the wineries. “Combine that with the revitalized downtown, with restaurants and cultural and entertainment opportunities,” he said. “The last step is a wonderful agricultural program in the north that would help the appellation — help the branding, you could say — of the wine region.”

Kamena can see it now: floods of daytrippers spilling out of their cars, clutching maps of the yet-to-be-finalized agritourism trail. He can hear the gentle splash of wine at destination restaurants, and the clangor of tourist money pouring into the coffers.

The economic benefits of wine tourism can be substantial. Look at Sonoma: According to Nick Frey of the Sonoma County Grape Growers Association, in 2004, wine-related tourism brought a whopping $664 million into the county. On a smaller scale, the Paso Robles Vintners and Growers Association reports that “Visitors attracted by wine tasting rooms and wine events contribute $23 million to the local economy in gross lodging sales, retail sales, and services, generating an estimated $1 million in transient occupancy tax and $1 million in sales tax.” Lynn Wallace, executive director of the Livermore Valley Winegrowers Association, cited a 2001 Washington State Department of Tourism study that found that tourists in wine country spent 2.5 times more than tourists in other parts of the state.

“If you look at Napa or Sonoma, many of the tourists will stop at three to four wineries, but they’re really there to be in the country, have a great meal, and get a massage,” said Carolyn Wente, president of the association’s board of directors and director of marketing for Wente Vineyards. “It’s not how many wineries they can go to, it’s about the entire wine country lifestyle.” Toward that end, over the past decade her own winery has established a highly visible concert series, constructed a luxury restaurant, and built a golf course that just netted a lucrative spot on the 2006 PGA tour.

Development of this kind thrills Mayor Kamena. “It could be absolutely beautiful,” he said. “Bed and breakfasts can be put in, golf courses can be put in, restaurants can be put in, viticulture and agriculture of all types can be put in. There can be a peaceful coexistence of beauty and form and function.”

It would be a gratifying outcome for Kamena, who has supported slow growth in Livermore since his first stint on the city council between 1976 and 1985. He primarily credits the educated workforce brought in by the Lawrence Livermore Lab for the town’s early support of smart growth. “Livermore has more Ph.Ds per square inch than any other city in the United States,” he said. But the mayor also takes pride in his own early contributions to the city’s development plan. “I didn’t think that pouring concrete from edge to edge necessarily a good city makes,” he said. “So we developed this theme of better before bigger.”

Since 1969, three other developments have been proposed for North Livermore, but each has been defeated. Kamena and his fellow slow-growth advocates won two of their greatest victories in the past five years. Two years after the passage of Measure D in 2000 forced Shea Homes to withdraw its plan for 12,500 houses north of Interstate 580 on land outside the city limits, the Livermore council adopted a policy that prohibited future councils from annexing that land and approving residential development there.

“Every time North Livermore development has come before the public in any fashion, the public has rejected it,” said veteran open-space campaigner Don Miller, himself a former city council member. “They rejected it at hearings, they rejected it at referenda, they’ve adopted growth boundaries. People like the idea of urban growth boundaries.”

From his own dining-room window, Miller can look past the highway to see the empty land stretching away to the north. It’s a reminder of the landscape he fell in love with when he moved to Livermore to work at the lab in 1957, back when the town’s population was about 12,000. The view goads Miller to keep fighting for his town’s future.

“You’re supposed to mellow as you get older,” said the mischievous 77-year-old with bright blue eyes. “I ultimately realized I never matured. I still get just as mad now when I see people screwing the public as I did when I was twenty. And I’ve got to admit, it helps you get up in the morning. You read the paper, and say, ‘Look what they’re trying to do now!'”


If housing remains controversial, just about everyone supports the vineyard boom in South Livermore. What’s not to like? The innovative town plan intersperses small vineyards with housing and commercial developments, building a tourist attraction a few acres at a time. The Livermore Valley Winegrowers Association estimates that roughly 500,000 visitors a year are drawn to the region’s wineries, attending both low-key daily wine tastings and larger events, like the Harvest Wine Celebration each Labor Day.

But in spite of the region’s steady progress, the Livermore Valley still has an image problem. Many Bay Area residents think of it as that hot, crowded stretch of highway with all the chain stores and shopping centers, the spot where you turn on the air conditioner and turn up the music as you drive east toward Yosemite. To reach such people, the Winegrowers Association recently took its message right to the highway’s edge with a huge green sign just east of Pleasanton, blaring the message, “Welcome to Livermore Valley Wine Country.”

The sign is part of a campaign to rebrand the area as a wine region and tourist destination. Currently, about half the local winemakers don’t consider the “Livermore Valley” appellation enough of a selling point to print it on their labels. More vineyards would certainly help the campaign; more tract homes probably would not. “Tourists do not come to wine country to experience suburbia,” Kamena said. “They come to get away from it.”

To many vintners, the obvious way to build on the success of South Livermore is by expanding winemaking north of Interstate 580. But as for how to make that happen when Pardee and other developers own most of the land — well, that’s one question that supporters of the viticulture plan haven’t fully addressed. “I don’t know, and that’s an interesting question,” Kamena conceded. “I guess my suggestion is, why not do something with the land that the law provides for on the level playing field that everyone else has to deal with, rather than trying to change the law? Why not, for example, bring in some agribusiness?”

The business council is promoting several ideas to get the ball rolling. After years of study, last January it produced a thirty-page “Working Landscape Plan,” which set down for the first time the comprehensive vision of better living through agriculture. It included a small-scale demonstration project known as an “agriculture park.” The concept is analogous to a business park, where a property owner rents small individual spaces to start-up businesses. In the ag park, a landowner with one hundred acres could lease out ten- or twenty-acre lots to specialty farmers, allowing them to make a small investment and get started in farming.

Sibella Kraus, president of Sustainable Agriculture Education, believes a mix of vineyards and specialty crops, like those often found in farmer’s markets, would suit Livermore well. Her group came up with the idea of the agriculture park, and is working with the city of Livermore to find a test site. “The idea is to create a larger entity that could attract tenants, and could participate in the bigger scheme of planning and development,” she said.

Farmers could capitalize on the traffic the agritourism trail envisioned by the business council, which would keep visitors off the freeway and guide them through rural landscapes of farms, vineyards, and horse ranches. The council also is pushing for a permanent market facility and a “buy local” campaign to give the area’s farmers a broader, more committed client base.

Kraus said an agriculture park could boost agritourism and end the battles over North Livermore by putting the land at the town’s edge to productive use. “Right next to the city may not be the most efficient place to produce tomatoes or grapes, but the land has more potential in other respects,” she said. “You can establish it as a permanent part of the community, a place the school kids come on their field trips, a place that’s loved.”

However desirable it would be to cover North Livermore with lush green rows of grapes, getting them there would be a complicated proposition. The developers that own most of the land would presumably prefer the large profit margins of residential development to the thin margins of agricultural land sales.

Open-space advocates say a ballot defeat would send a firm message to developers that the citizens are committed to a strict urban growth boundary. “If the city shows strength of character, then they may ultimately see the light, and ultimately sell some of that property,” Miller said. After all, Pardee acquired the land only after a group of owners from Danville twice failed to develop it.

But further complicating the dreams of agriculture backers, the land is bone dry. At the city’s suggestion, the Zone 7 Water Agency is studying various irrigation plans, and hopes to reach conclusions by November 16, shortly after the election.

It’s already clear the project would be expensive: the business council estimates the cost of an irrigation project in North Livermore and surrounding areas at $83 million. Unless a number of viticulture entrepreneurs with pockets as deep as the Gallo family’s take up the challenge, the public would have to pick up a large part of that tab. The bald economic realities have led one city council member, Lorraine Dietrich, to call the water plan “wishful thinking.”

Phil Wente has not taken a position on the fate of North Livermore, but should the voters reject the development, he believes the time will be ripe for pursuing the agricultural plan. “We have heard of a variety of people, probably five or more, who are interested in potential viticulture expansion in Alameda County and are looking at various places to invest,” he says. “It would be a leap of faith to buy land in North Livermore on the speculation that a water project would be built, but there may be some ways to get private water projects started. A lot of it has to do with who the potential investors are, and what their resources are.”

The climate and soils are well suited for viticulture, says Wente, with extreme temperature fluctuations and gravelly soil. “Really, the only barrier that I see is whether the current property owners are interested, and whether they’re willing to sell the land at a price that makes it possible. And whether we can get water there. From an analytical standpoint, we know it’s feasible. The water can be obtained from various sources, and there are various ways to do the financing. Whether or not we can find the public will, that’s where the question of feasibility really lies.”

Alameda County Supervisor Scott Haggerty’s staff is at work on a county-wide ballot measure to fund irrigation for agricultural expansion throughout the county. “The voters in this county have said they want to preserve open space and agricultural land, so this is the next step: making it economically viable,” said Chris Grey, Haggerty’s chief of staff. The measure won’t be ready for at least a year, but if a majority of Livermore residents do reject the Pardee proposal this fall, the county measure might be of interest to landowners in North Livermore who are left looking at their empty fields of waving grassland, and wondering what to do next.

As the November vote approaches, Pardee’s TV ads are running with increasing frequency, reminding voters of all the amenities tied to the housing development: a 130-acre sports park, money for schools and cultural institutions, an environmental preserve.

Other developers with holdings outside urban growth boundaries are watching the campaign closely. Some already have followed Pardee’s lead. In Contra Costa County, developers gathered enough signatures last summer to place initiatives on November ballots in Brentwood, Antioch, and Pittsburg to expand their urban growth boundaries and allow for new development.

The proliferation of these efforts to override growth boundaries at the ballot box illustrates the limits of traditional strategies to preserve open space. “All of our victories are temporary, and all of our defeats are permanent,” noted David Reid of Greenbelt Alliance, a nonprofit group that works on land conservation in the Bay Area. “It’s a little sobering, but it’s the truth.”

Yet if you find yourself sipping a North Livermore chardonnay in a decade’s time, you can take it as a signal that a new open-space strategy has taken hold, as the roots of the grape vines dig deep into the soil to hold fast to the open land.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

East Bay Express E-edition East Bay Express E-edition
19,045FansLike
14,611FollowersFollow
61,790FollowersFollow
spot_img