It was 1987. I asked an appraiser out in Pope Valley, “What is land going for these days?”

“Kid, I appraise the water. I reckon they throw the land in for free.”

Anyone who grew up in the country knows not all land has the same amount of water. It is not uncommon for one 40 acre parcel to sport a gusher, while its neighbor produces nothing. One has enough water to grow grapes. One doesn’t. The market place then fixes the price for each. A plantable acre is more expensive than an unplantable one.

Rural people literally live off their wells. (We grew up on a well that produced only three gallons a minute. We would often drain it dry. We’d have to wait a minimum of 24 hours for it to replenish}.

Our showers were limited. Heaven help you if you mistakenly left a spigot on to fill a water tub.

One day, during the last drought, it just stopped producing. We had to buy water from a truck.

Laurie Wood came up and witched another spot. Soon we had 20 gallons per minute—more than we could ever use. On the other hand, it was rife with silica and stained glasses, toilets, and sinks, brown.

Hey. That’s life in the country.

Want better water? Spend more dough for a reverse osmosis machine. You get what Mother Nature gives you. Country people understand that. Stained glassware became one of the many tradeoffs one made in order to live in the remote beauty of Conn Valley.

In the past few years a powerful minority in this Valley has been flexing its muscle. They tried to pass Measures O & P. Measures so dranconian that one couldn’t cut a tree within a thousand feet of another dwelling. Measures that would prohibit fences, barns, or any clearing within 150 feet of wherever a Benthic Macroinvertebrate (read: round worm) called home. That meant a swath of 300 feet, through the middle of each parcel in the hills, would have to remain virgin.

It was done in the name of “water” quality and erosion.

The good people of Napa Voted those measures down—resoundingly.

Apparently, the “Central Committee” won’t be quieted. They’ve come back with a new “Water Resources Element” of the General Plan.

In other words, if you lose at the ballot box, work it into a document, formulated by “staff” which will accomplish the same goals-- giving local government authority over private property—all for the greater good, of course.

Here’s the give-away from the proposed document: “The County SHALL protect and enhance water shed lands, including the downstream delivery of essential watershed resources and benefits from headwater channels.”

If you live in the hills, you know exactly what that means. The land is no longer yours. They will dictate what you can build, plant, grow and harvest, in the best interests of “headwater channels.”

To some In Napa, the ballot counts about as much as Pakistan.

The buzz words that float around are depleted aquifers (not true), conservation, and recycling.

There are bad water areas to be sure. Wells often stop producing. But there is no less water in the ground, or falling from heaven, than there ever was. In fact, with climate change, rainfall is predicted to increase.

Water in Napa is fairly simple. We have homes, vineyards, and businesses. That’s where the water goes—which doesn’t flow down the river to the ocean.

At an average rainfall of 33 inches per year, that means we get something like 1.4 million acre feet from Heaven each year. Some 90% of that goes to the ocean, via run off. The rest is either captured above ground, or hangs out under the ground in various aquifers.

The county reports that each year around 400,000 acre feet stays under the ground. That number is not going down. That means that roughly a million acre feet escapes to the ocean.

How much water do we use? How much will we need in the future?

Are vineyards depleting the aquifers?

An acre foot is 326,000 gallons. Few homes use one acre foot per year, but pretend that they did. We have some 48,000 homes in Napa County. That means around 50,000 acre feet are needed each year for residential use.

We have 40,000 acres of grapes. They use about one third an acre foot per year, but call it an even acre foot. That means between residences and ag, we use less than 90,000 acre feet each year! Out of 1,400,000 acre feet which heaven delivers.

Vineyards are not depleting our aquifers. There are not enough of them to put a dent in our underground supplies.

If in 50 years we add 10,000 acres of vines (highly unlikely) that means only an additional 10,000 acre feet of water are needed (more like 3,000). The same holds true if we add (God forbid) 10,000 more homes.

With 400,000 acre feet under ground, we have more than enough to sustain additional plantings.

Capturing or recycling just two percent of the run-off would provide adequate water for the next 100 years.

No one will say it, but the discussion should be about how to mine for more water, and how to capture more of the abundant water that mother nature gives us.

Millikin reservoir has been overflowing since December. Couldn’t we pump that back into the ground somewhere, or at least raise the dam a few feet?

But the dialogue is not about water development--capturing and drilling-- but how to control private wells and private property.

Why is that?











Jeffrey Earl Warren
James Warren & Son
1414 Main St.
St. Helena, Ca.
94574
707-963-2748