CALISTOGA, Calif. — For the first time, the Calistoga Fairgrounds Advisory Committee put a vote on a master plan consultant on its agenda. On Thursday night it declined to take one.

Agenda item 6.2 was noticed as a discussion and vote to send a request-for-proposals recommendation to the City Council. Instead, after public comment and discussion at the committee’s 6 p.m. meeting in the Tucker Building at 2025 Grant St., Pavitt moved to continue the item to September so residents would have time to absorb what a consultant might cost. The motion carried.

The committee report recommends that the council authorize staff to prepare and issue an RFP for a multidisciplinary consultant to lead revitalization planning, public engagement, conceptual design, phasing and preliminary cost estimating. It calls for up to three conceptual design alternatives and outreach conducted in both English and Spanish.

The report proposes three phases. Phase 1 covers immediate priorities — RV park improvements and the water, wastewater, electrical, drainage, lighting, circulation and accessibility work needed to support revenue-generating operations. Phase 2 covers near- and mid-term building and site improvements. Phase 3 is the long-range site plan.

On cost, the report says only that the figure is not known and would be determined through competitive procurement, with any agreement and appropriation returning to the council.

What the Council Actually Approved

The advisory committee cannot hire anyone. It recommends; the City Council decides and appropriates.

The council created the committee on Feb. 4, 2025, after hearing from six residents, among them Doug Allan, Tim Reilly, Charlotte Williams and Kerri Abreu. Councilmember Lisa Gift moved to establish a standing committee of two councilmembers and five citizens with a staff liaison, directed on specific tasks such as the survey, with a one-year sunset and an option to extend. Councilmember Kevin Eisenberg seconded. It carried 4-1, Mayor Donald Williams voting no.

The council made the committee permanent on Jan. 27 of this year, with staggered two-year terms, and approved its 2026 work plan the same night.

That work plan makes consultant selection the committee’s first action item and lists approximately $100,000 to $500,000 in General Fund money among the resources needed — to contract with both a sponsorship and grant consultant and a master plan consultant. It does not appropriate the money. It also conditions the next step on the council: Staff prepares and issues the RFPs upon council direction, after which the committee chair appoints two members to a review team that scores proposals and participates in interviews.

The proposed timeline attached to that action item is stated only as 2026, running to the conclusion of a plan approved by the council. No month-specific deadline appears in the document.

Pavitt told the committee he had asked around for a figure so residents would have something concrete to react to, and he said he had been given a range of $300,000 to $600,000. The upper end exceeds the entire two-consultant figure in the work plan.

“I think the public needs to digest that a little bit,” he said.

Asked afterward where the range came from, Pavitt said it came from two people with experience in the industry, which he said he does not have. He declined to identify them because he had not told them they would be quoted.

He also said the agenda was posted within the required window but that residents told him it did not leave much time to rearrange their schedules. The city’s notification telling subscribers the meeting packet had published went out at 3:52 p.m. Monday — about two hours inside the Brown Act’s 72-hour requirement for a Thursday evening meeting.

"Since it was my agenda item, I made a judgment call that continuing the item until the next meeting would benefit our community at very little cost," he said

He said he hoped the delay would show the committee is committed to transparency and public engagement.

A Petition and a Committee That Did Not Yet Exist

Allan, of 224 High St., told the committee that he and others collected signatures on a statement urging the council to hire professionals for a master plan. At the lectern he placed the effort in November 2025. He corrected the year afterward: The signatures were gathered over about a week in November 2024 and submitted to the council’s public comment address on Nov. 19, 2024, ahead of a special fairgrounds workshop that evening.

That places the petition nearly two years before Thursday’s meeting and roughly three months before the council voted to create the committee it was addressed to.

“Now that the city owns the property without the burden of a bond, it is essential that the city council engage with professionals to embark on a master plan for this once-in-a-generation opportunity,” the statement reads.

The summary document contains 252 entries. Eleven are repeated names, leaving 241 unique, and two more appear to be variant spellings of names already on the list. Several rows recur as blocks, consistent with duplication during transcription from paper sheets. Allan told the committee the total represents about 5% of the town’s voting population; the certified statement of vote from Calistoga’s March 2023 special election lists 2,703 registered voters citywide, which would put 252 signatures closer to 9%.

Among the signers are several of Thursday’s participants — Lana Richardson, Tim Reilly, and Deanna and Bruce Gardom — and committee member Hal Taylor, who will vote on the recommendation in September. Taylor signed before the committee existed.

Richardson, who was appointed to the City Council on Aug. 19 and takes office in January, said she has asked for the item at every committee meeting since. She spoke Thursday as a resident; she was not in office at any meeting described in this story.

Reilly, who also submitted written comments, said the report builds on the work plan rather than replacing it and that the delay objection does not hold. In writing he put Phase 3 at less than 24 months, with Phase 1 proceeding during that time subject to limits on spending public money on actions that are non-essential and irreversible.

“There’s no reason to think that it’s going to in any way delay implementation of a successful plan,” he said at the lectern.

The Other Argument

No one at the lectern opposed hiring a consultant. The opposition arrived in the meeting packet.

Williams, who wrote that she could not attend, said she was sorry to see the committee hand responsibility for the revitalization to a paid consultant and that the members — capable professionals and longtime residents, in her description — could do the same job for far less with community help.

“Don’t let the bullies get you down. You can do this,” she wrote.

She made the same case by example at the council meeting two days earlier, telling members that 18 volunteers repainted the Calistoga Speedway sign in less than an hour after a single social media post. At that meeting she also asked where the city’s water-sale revenue goes and how the water is measured.

Alf Burtleson asked that any RFP be widened to cover companies that would operate an event center spanning the racetrack, golf course and RV park. The Gardoms, who signed the 2024 petition, wrote that the city should stay on the master plan rather than patch items and described the RV park — the property’s largest revenue producer — as an eyesore.

Cheryl Smith, of 1912 School St., submitted a proposal to restore the golf course as a dual-use facility: open to the public Friday through Monday and a career technical education lab for Calistoga High School and Palisades students Tuesday through Thursday, supported by CTE base funding, Perkins V and ROP money.

At the lectern, Francis Tedeschi said the city already has a park with a playground and trees at Logvy Community Park that often sits empty as well as a bike path running the length of the valley. She said that what the fairgrounds needs is something that brings in money.

She was referring to the Napa Valley Vine Trail, whose 8.2-mile Calistoga-to-St. Helena section opened in August 2024. The trail is planned to run 47 miles from the Calistoga Depot to the Vallejo ferry terminal; three sections are complete, and a gap of roughly 10 miles between Yountville and St. Helena remains in design.

One speaker, who said she and her husband built and ran a 36-hole golf course in Oregon for more than 35 years, told the committee she had come expecting a discussion of an overall plan rather than the golf course.

The Foundation and the Capital Campaign

The revenue-first position has organizational form and a history.

Friends of the Napa County Fairgrounds formed to press the city to buy the property from Napa County, recruiting letter-writers, canvassers and signature-gatherers under the leadership of Molly Towey. Three months after escrow closed, the group incorporated as Calistoga Fairground Friends, a nonprofit public benefit corporation registered with the secretary of state on Oct. 11, 2024, with a narrowed stated purpose: donations for renovations on the fairgrounds property. It now operates as the Calistoga Fairgrounds Foundation and announced 501(c)(3) status in October 2025. Cindy Yant is its secretary.

On March 26 the advisory committee’s Capital Campaign Subcommittee moved to work with the foundation and Native Sons of the Golden West Parlor 86 on a drive to fund heating and air conditioning in the Butler Building. The council waived a $2,500 rental fee in April so the groups could hold the event in the Tubbs Building. Committee member William Squire, who belongs to both partner organizations, said at the time that the campaign was meant to raise money and raise awareness of the fairgrounds’ broader needs. Squire was absent Thursday.

The foundation also posts the 2016 consultant assessment of the property on its own website.

Asked about the fundraiser Thursday, Fairgrounds Director Shelli Wright estimated attendance at 150 to 200 and said proceeds would go toward the Butler Building work, but that she did not have a reconciled total because more than one entity was involved.

“I do not have an accounting on that yet,” she said.

What the Purchase Agreement Says

The disagreement is not simply between nostalgia and planning. The 2024 purchase and sale agreement gives the historic-use argument legal weight.

Napa County’s announcement of the sale states the deal aligns with the property’s historical uses — county fairs, event centers, RV parks, golf courses, racetracks and community services. The county also retained the right to use the property for emergency response, a function the grounds have served during wildfires and one the committee report lists among the site’s core purposes. In the FM3 survey the city commissioned in 2025, 86% of residents rated that emergency role extremely or very important — higher than any other use of the property.

An acre leased to the Napa County Office of Education was excluded from the sale. Residents raised questions at the time about contract language limiting future activity to uses conducted in the past.

The county has also described a provision splitting proceeds 50-50, with its share declining 2.5% annually, on new long-term third-party leases for purposes other than historic uses.

By those descriptions, the golf course, the racetrack, the RV park, the event buildings and emergency staging are the uses the agreement protects and the ones that do not trigger a revenue split. Anything else would cost the city money and require notice to the county.

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Officials also describe the agreement as capping operator agreements at 25 years and letting the county repurchase all or part of the property if the city exceeds that. City Manager Mitchell Celaya first raised the question in a July 14 email to county Chief Executive Officer Ryan Alsop, asking that the limit be extended to 40 years. Williams told the City Council on Tuesday that he and Eisenberg had appeared before the Napa County Board of Supervisors that morning to ask for 50. He described the supervisors as sympathetic. The board went into closed session and announced no outcome.

The Calistoga City Council took up the question in its own closed session Aug. 13. Deputy City Manager Rachel Stepp said no staff reports, lease analyses or proposals from either the city’s or the county’s discussions are available because both occurred in closed session.

Alsop has said the county sold below market price and retained a right of first refusal and a buy-back option to protect county taxpayers on any subsequent sale, significant rezoning or lease beyond 25 years. The city may still pursue those, he said, but must notify the county, which then has 90 days.

Williams said no proposal is pending from any operator and that a 25-year limit would not be fatal to redevelopment.

It Has Been Studied Before

The fairgrounds has had a consultant.

In April 2016 the RCH Group delivered a Napa County Fairgrounds Opportunity Assessment to the fair association. It ran to four schematic site plans, financial analysis by program area, stakeholder interviews and demographic projections — much of the scope the current report proposes to buy again.

Its findings map onto Thursday’s arguments almost point for point.

The RV park occupied 3.5 acres and generated the highest revenue per acre on the property, about $308,000 in net operating income in 2015. The golf course, roughly 10 times that footprint, produced the lowest revenue per acre and had posted net operating losses every year since 2011, about $18,800 in 2015. The speedway netted about $45,750 that year. RCH found the racetrack acts as a barrier to any connected land use pattern because of its walls, fencing and single purpose and reported that most stakeholders it interviewed did not consider it the property’s highest and best use. It also identified the golf course as the largest dispersion point for the city’s reclaimed water.

And it reached the lease question a decade early. RCH concluded that bringing in a third-party operator to finance golf course improvements would require an agreement long enough for that operator to recover its capital investment — and that the existing operating agreement would have to be amended to allow it. That is the constraint the mayor carried to the supervisors on Tuesday.

The assessment did not translate into action. A 2016-17 Napa County civil grand jury called the property a victim of long-term neglect in both maintenance and direction and urged supervisors to take responsibility for its future. State support for California fairs had already been eliminated in 2011. The Calistoga Fair Association, which had run the property since 1935, told the county in 2018 it could no longer operate it in a fiscally balanced manner, and the county took over as operator the following January.

The city and county agreed in October 2022 on a $15.885 million purchase, contingent on a two-thirds vote. Measure E, which asked Calistoga voters for $27.5 million to cover the purchase and infrastructure, drew about 32% support in March 2023 and failed. The county reopened negotiations, supervisors approved a $2 million sale on Jan. 23, 2024, and escrow closed July 22, 2024.

The full record, with sources for each entry, is online.

Two RFPs Already in Motion

The city is preparing two operator RFPs, not one.

Stepp said this week that one will seek an operator for the golf course and the other an operator for the speedway in conjunction with racing events, and that the city is not currently preparing an RFP for the RV park. Wright told the advisory committee that the council approved moving ahead with the golf course document and that it would go out to the public soon. July minutes show it has been in process with Public Works and addresses four areas: the pond, parking, circulation and infrastructure.

The RFP drew the meeting’s sharpest questioning. Reilly, speaking during general public comment, pointed to news reports that morning describing the county’s concerns about the lease term and tied them to the document’s release. He recalled assurances that it would not support a contract award and a councilmember’s suggestion that a request for information would be the more appropriate instrument — a change the council declined to make. He also noted that the golf course’s size could foreclose other uses before a planning process begins.

“So the public looking in at all of this, I think, is left wondering what really is going on,” he said.

Vice Chair Karen Jensen said she would hold off on any commitment to a golf course operator until a planner reviewed the site, including whether water use and pond management might open grant opportunities.

Racing and a Rodeo

Wright said staff are turning the grounds over on short notice between a private event this weekend and the 15th Louie Vermeil Classic sprint car races at Calistoga Speedway on Sept. 5 and 6. Gates open at 4 p.m. both days, with a separate ticket required each night.

She also said the council approved a vintage rodeo agreement this week, bringing a California Cowboys Professional Rodeo Association event with music and food to the grounds Oct. 9 through 11. July minutes described it as a western-style rodeo with an evening country music concert.

What Comes Back

The advisory committee approved its July minutes with one correction. Taylor, who reported the Rotary Club’s district grant application in July and who serves as an officer of the Calistoga Rotary Foundation, said the minutes wrongly recorded a proposed driveway for the pavilion area; the discussion concerned a privacy panel on fencing. The grant, if approved, would also fund repairs to shade structures at the Fiesta Center.

Jensen reported that new tabs on the city website now carry committee materials, including the survey presentation, with maps and timelines to follow, plus a contact link for residents who cannot attend. The work is being handled by the full-time administrative assistant hired for Wright’s office who started Aug. 3.

Earlier, staff told the committee that a consultant could meet individually with members without triggering the Brown Act but could not carry one member’s views to another and that any gathering of three or more members would have to be noticed.

Pavitt asked that the RV park return on a future agenda, saying public comment suggests residents are unaware of the infrastructure project constraining near-term work there — the same Phase 1 priority named in the committee report. Wright said Public Works Director Derek Rayner should come back to present plans, cost and timeline.

The golf subcommittee, Taylor and David Gates, said it met and discussed the RFP but could not describe specifics because the document is not yet public. The capital campaign and outreach subcommittee, Taylor and Squire, reported no activity because of conflicting travel schedules and said it would meet in September.

The council that receives the recommendation will not be the one that created the committee. On Aug. 19 the council appointed a mayor and two members in lieu of a November election, no one having filed for the seats. Richardson is among the appointees.

The consultant item returns at the advisory committee's Sept. 24 meeting. Whatever it recommends then goes to the City Council, which will decide whether to spend the money.

—

Tim Carl is a Calistoga-based photojournalist.

Editor's note: The author is among the signers of the November 2024 petition described in this story.

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The views, opinions and data presented in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, position or perspective of Calistoga Currents or its editorial team. Any content provided by our authors is their own and is not intended to malign any group, organization, company or individual.

Our illustrations are produced through a multistep process of generative tools, digital sketching and photo editing, often starting from our own images or sketches.

CALISTOGA, Calif. — Between Aug. 4 and Aug. 21, Calistoga held three public gatherings at two sites: a police open house, the last concert of the summer and the celebration that starts the school year. The last two fell on consecutive nights. Here is what each one drew and who was there.

Tuesday, Aug. 4 — National Night Out at Pioneer Park

Calistoga police hosted National Night Out at Pioneer Park on Aug. 4, the first Tuesday in August, when most communities across the country hold the event. Officer Samantha Arlen, the department’s school resource officer for the Calistoga Joint Unified School District, said 19 organizations took part and estimated about 250 residents attended, along with roughly 25 people staffing partner tables. Calistoga Currents identified 17 of the participating organizations.

Arlen said the department has held the event for 10 years. Police Chief Matthew McCaffrey said it has run at least that long.

Families arrived in a steady stream across the evening rather than all at once, and some appeared to have wandered in without knowing the event was scheduled. Pinewood derby cars ran at one end, a ring toss sat in the middle and a hat bar — where children pressed patches onto blank ball caps — ran at the other. The hat bar drew the longest lines of the night.

McCaffrey, who has led the department about 18 months and grew up in Healdsburg, said the point of the evening is contact that does not begin with a call for service.

“Part of what we’re trying to do is break down barriers, and honestly, I don’t think we have barriers here in Calistoga,” McCaffrey said. “But I’ve worked in different jurisdictions where people have limited exposure to the local law enforcement agency. So anytime we can have that experience on a casual basis like this, that’s awesome.”

Asked why school resource officers do not wear softer uniforms, McCaffrey said the uniform is the point.

“Because I want them to get exposed to the police uniform,” he said. “That’s somebody they can talk to. That’s somebody that’s approachable to them.”

Arlen, who started as a reserve officer before being hired full time, said the school assignment works the same way.

“You are able to build trusting relationships with them,” she said. “So if they have a problem or something comes up that they need your help, you know them, and they know you.”

Her mother, Sue Arlen, drove up with several daughters and grandchildren to watch her work.

“She really wanted her niece and nephews to be able to see her in uniform,” Sue Arlen said. “They haven’t seen her in uniform before.”

Emma Good, Arlen’s sister, said the draw was the town as much as the job.

“I know that this community means everything to her, and she takes a lot of pride in protecting and serving the people of Calistoga,” Good said. “Driving through, it’s absolutely beautiful, and I can see why she loves it so much.”

For some families it was a first. Juan Solorio came with his wife, Fatima, and their two children. The family moved to Calistoga about four years ago.

“I know that they do this every year, we haven’t even have the opportunity to come, so this is our first year coming,” Solorio said. “There’s a lot of ... help for the community, all of the things that we can get help with here in town.”

At the UpValley Family Centers table, Xitlaly Vazquez handed out free naloxone alongside information on family resources and parenting classes.

“It’s pretty simple, and it saves lives,” she said.

The tables ran from health coverage to animal adoption. Aliados Health and CommuniCare+OLE brought certified enrollment counselors for Medi-Cal, Covered California and CalFresh. Soroptimist International of Calistoga brought scholarship information, anti-trafficking materials and books for its elementary read-aloud program. The Upper Valley Cub Scout Pack brought the Pinewood derby cars its roughly 20 scouts built last year. The Rotary Club of Calistoga served chili dogs and beans, with the chili and beans donated by Buster’s Original Southern Barbecue. Also tabling were the Napa County Sheriff’s Office, the Napa County District Attorney’s Office (which served snow cones), the California Highway Patrol, the Calistoga Fire Department, Tobacco Free Napa, NEWS (which provides domestic violence and sexual abuse services in Napa County), Song for Charlie, Matrix Parent Network and Resource Center, Wine Country Animal Lovers and Calistoga Parks and Recreation.

The Calistoga Community Emergency Response Team, which has tabled in past years, could not attend because its lead was ill.

Asked what the police department could do better, Arlen returned to the same idea.

“Always reaching out, always seeing who we can build connections with,” she said. “Be wherever we can in events like National Night Out to show it’s not just a badge. There’s a person behind that badge.”

Thursday, Aug. 20 — The Last Concert at Pioneer Park

By Wednesday morning, a day before the final concert of the season, the claiming of territory had begun. Chairs and tables appeared beneath the trees at Pioneer Park. By Thursday evening some of those tables had become picnic stations — spreads of oysters, baskets of fried chicken from Evangeline, food brought from home.

Then the music started.

Maya Latin Tribute Band closed Calistoga’s 10-week Concerts in the Park season on Aug. 20. Eric Reichert, president and CEO of the Calistoga Chamber of Commerce, which produces the series, said the concerts average about 1,200 people a night, a figure that matched what Currents observed at concerts earlier in the summer. The closing crowd was larger. Currents estimated it at about 2,000.

The dance floor stayed full as Maya moved through a bilingual mix of cumbia, salsa, Latin rock, pop and dance standards. Children, older residents, families and groups of friends moved between blankets and tables. Others crowded close to the stage. The crowd extended well past the dance area and across the park.

The season began June 18 with National Park Radio and ran every Thursday through Aug. 20 — 10 concerts of folk, rock, country, funk, tribute acts and Latin music. The series is funded through the Calistoga Tourism Improvement District and sponsorships and costs roughly $20,000 a year, Reichert said in June, a figure that does not include staff time.

The ritual was visible from the season’s first week. In June, chairs and folded blankets dotted the lawn a day ahead of the opening note. Tamara Kalin, co-owner of The Wager winery, was spreading blankets that Wednesday.

“I was driving by and saw how many chairs were down already and got anxious and pulled the blankets out of the back of my car,” she said at the time.

Reichert also described an unwritten rule that shapes the evening: Regulars keep their blankets back from the stage so a dance floor opens in front of the band. On the final Thursday it stayed open, and it stayed full.

Each week paired music with local wineries, food and a community organization. The season opened with Wild Diamond Vineyards and Elusa Winery pouring and Sunrise Horse Rescue as the evening’s nonprofit. It closed with Picayune Cellars and Joseph Cellars and the Brannan Center.

Then the music ended, the tables came down and another summer of Thursdays at Pioneer Park was over.

Friday, Aug. 21 — Back to School at Berry Field

The next evening, the Back to School Community Celebration returned to Berry Field on the campus of Calistoga Elementary School, 1327 Berry St. It was the 22nd year of the event, though not the 22nd consecutive one: The 2025 celebration was canceled because of the Pickett Fire. UpValley Family Centers, which produces it with the school district, counted 779 people and 47 partner agencies. Marcela Rodriguez, the nonprofit's education program manager, said about 40 volunteers and roughly 30 staff worked the field.

The tables ran from early learning to elder care. The theme was country. Napa County Office of Education staff brought a cardboard cutout of Dolly Parton to promote the Imagination Library, which mails a free book each month, in English or Spanish, to children under 5. Anna Johansson worked the Calistoga Art Center table. Student volunteers ran the popcorn and snow cone stations, and a mechanical bull ran most of the evening. A Napa singer, Jazmin Oro, opened, and Generación 05 — a norteño group of Calistoga High School alumni, largely self-taught, formed during the pandemic — closed it.

Rodriguez said the point of putting so many agencies on one lawn is to remove the trip to Napa.

“It’s important so that our community members know what resources are available for them,” she said. “We help reduce the barrier to access to services.”

That is also the logic behind the group’s expansion into the Vermeil House, a former Adventist Health clinic in Calistoga where UpValley now hosts a Medi-Cal representative and legal aid staff alongside its own programs.

Audra Pittman, superintendent of the Calistoga Joint Unified School District, said the arrangement is unusual.

“We as a school district couldn’t do this work without our partnership,” Pittman said. “They partner with us on mental health, supporting students, food, bringing families together. It truly is a true partnership that you don’t see in many places.”

Karina Arias, a bilingual therapist with Mentis, said the shortage she sees is not of services but of services families can actually use.

“It’s being able to get those services in the languages that they know and understand,” Arias said. “So Spanish-speaking services, being able to have that representation, be able to be here at the site.”

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Monique Byro, a community engagement project manager with the Napa County Resource Conservation District, was tabling on climate stewardship and said the mix on the field was the point.

“It’s so lovely to see an intergenerational mix of folks coming together to support our future,” she said.

Laurel Rios, a Calistoga resident, parent of two children in the district and a Calistoga Joint Unified School District trustee, came with her two daughters. Rios is also running this year for one of two open school board seats.

“This is always an event that brings the community together,” Rios said. “It’s beautiful to see community members here that don’t have kids in the school district that are out to support, as well as teachers, faculty, students.”

Indira López-Jones, acting executive director of UpValley Family Centers and a 21-year employee of the organization, said participation has climbed steadily over the years. She also said something has changed this year.

“There is a lot of fear in the community about all the talk at the national level and all the threats against the community in general,” López-Jones said. “Because now it doesn’t matter, you are undocumented person versus a documented one — everybody feels the threats the same way.”

She said the fear has begun to show up in enrollment.

“That has affected our programs and the participation,” she said. “People are afraid ... to give their name and to have their name in some kind of record.”

Pittman said that is part of why the field is crowded with uniforms and agency logos on the same night.

“They know that they are safe in our places, that we are going to welcome them in,” Pittman said. “All of us are here to support whoever lives here and whoever has needs here, regardless of what their immigration status is.”

Doug Boeschen, president of the UpValley Family Centers board and a Napa Valley winery owner who lives in St. Helena, put the organization’s reach at more than 3,000 unduplicated clients a year.

“That includes a little more than a quarter of the population of St. Helena and Calistoga,” Boeschen said. “These are our neighbors and our friends and the people who make our businesses work.”

Asked why the county’s homeless numbers had risen, Boeschen pointed to the same economy that fills Pioneer Park on Thursday nights.

“There’s a wide range of pressures that are getting worse these days,” he said. “Some of that is political. Some of that is economic. It’s been tough on the wine industry lately, which of course is our number one employer in the county.”

Some of that pressure is counted. Napa County’s point-in-time count on Jan. 28 found 428 people experiencing homelessness, a 14% increase over the 2025 count. Of those, 190 — 44%, up from 33% a year earlier — reported it was their first time.

The Count

Over 18 days: about 250 residents and 25 table staff at Pioneer Park on a Tuesday at the beginning of August. About 2,000 at the same park on the last Thursday of the concert season. And 779 at Berry Field the following night.

Then the school year began.

Photographs by Clark James Mishler and Tim Carl.

—

Tim Carl is the editor and publisher of Calistoga Currents.

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The views, opinions and data presented in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, position or perspective of Calistoga Currents or its editorial team. Any content provided by our authors is their own and is not intended to malign any group, organization, company or individual.

Our illustrations are produced through a multistep process of generative tools, digital sketching and photo editing, often starting from our own images or sketches.

CALISTOGA, Calif. — Members set tomatoes out along the kitchen counter inside the Tucker Building on Wednesday afternoon, each paper plate identified in marker with the variety and nothing else. The judges knew what they were tasting. They did not know whose it was.

“These are all homegrown and all by our members, and we do a totally blind tasting,” said Tina Nelle, the Calistoga Garden Club’s president, who has entered all three years of the contest.

Four judges scored the entries: Darlene Leffler, Bobbi Enderlin, Amy Sather and Zia Wesley. The club recruits a different panel each year.

A Cool Summer Shows Up in the Bowls

Members traced a thin year to a swing between heat and cold.

“It was very hot, and then it was cool,” Nelle said. “So, it really affected the growing season.”

Lenor Fowler, the club’s vice president, said cool mornings had pushed the crop back by weeks.

“Not all of our tomatoes are ready like they were last year in August,” Fowler said. “September will be the big boom.”

Fowler won with Sun Sugar, an orange cherry hybrid, and placed third with Juliet, a grape-type hybrid named an All-America Selections winner in 1999. She said she bought both as starts rather than growing them from seed.

“It’s in the cherry family, and it’s very sweet,” she said. “And this is perfect weather for that.”

She credited an irrigation system installed at her home for the difference between this year’s fruit and last year’s, when the plants were watered by hand.

“My secret is my husband, Chris Ladd,” Fowler said. “He’s the one that makes it.”

Nelle placed second with Cherokee Purple. She won the first contest with San Marzano and the second with Copper River, a variety bred in Calistoga by Lynn Brown, who started an organic growing business here in 1979 that became Forni-Brown-Welsh Gardens after Peter Forni and Barney Welsh joined as partners. It grew for Napa Valley restaurants that named it on their menus, and its spring plant sale drew gardeners from across the valley, until it closed in 2018.

Brown said he named the tomato for the bright copper streak that runs through the flesh of a good one, inside skin the olive green of oxidized copper. He grew it out for several years from seed a Sacramento grower had given him, and only after he began selling it nationally did customers point out how close it was to Ananas Noir, a bicolor heirloom developed in Belgium.

“I’ve placed for three years in a row,” Nelle said. “Let’s just leave it at that.”

Sharing the Secret

Asked what accounted for the run, Nelle first declined, then noted she had already walked the club through her method at a meeting before planting season.

Her system: Buy strong starts or grow from seed, open the planting hole and add ash from a home wood fire along with calcium and a tomato fertilizer mix, plant and water. Refertilize around the Fourth of July. Keep the plants trimmed and the lower leaves off the soil.

Both women said consistent drip irrigation beats hand watering — five to 10 minutes in the morning, or the same total split between morning and evening — and that thick skins are a sign of too much water.

Both also said they buy starts from Forni Farm and Nursery at 4000 Barnes Road in Santa Rosa. The nursery is run by Miranda Forni, daughter of Forni-Brown-Welsh partner Peter Forni, who opened it in 2020 after the Calistoga gardens closed. It still grows the Copper River from saved seed.

“We’re helping each other be better gardeners, and tomatoes are very easy to grow in our area, 9b, but we still struggle,” Fowler said.

A Club Since 1938

The Calistoga Garden Club has operated since 1938 — the same year Napa County took title to the land that became the fairgrounds.

The club’s work shows up around town in plantings in front of the fire station and at Pioneer Park, where a plaque marks their work, members said. The club raised money at the citywide garage sale to buy plants and is working with the city to replant at the fairgrounds.

Frances Tedeschi said her mother belonged to the club decades earlier, decorating tables with flowers for club teas and entering flowers at the fair.

“She used to go to the fair at the fairgrounds and display her flowers and other items and win prizes, too,” Tedeschi said.

Tedeschi placed her mother’s involvement in the 1960s and 1970s and recalled a line from her father.

“Fair time’s fun time,” she said.

Tedeschi said she hopes contests and displays like her mother’s return as the city rebuilds the grounds it now owns. Her mother passed in 2001.

Leffler, a past president who took the office during the pandemic and served as a judge this year, said she began attending in 1978.

“I started here in like ‘78 going to the garden club,” Leffler said. “I loved it, especially all those older ladies.”

Growing Back From Six Members

Membership fell to six during the pandemic, by Fowler’s count, and stands at 32 today.

The club meets the third Wednesday of each month at 2 p.m. in the Tucker Building, one of the structures Calistoga acquired when it bought the fairgrounds from Napa County in a $2 million sale that closed July 22, 2024, ending more than eight decades of county ownership. No garden is required to join. Members range from property owners to residents of mobile homes, Fowler said.

Past programs have covered terrarium-building, tool-sharpening and pest management with master gardeners. Field trips took the group to the Luther Burbank Home and Gardens in Santa Rosa this year and to a lavender farm on Petaluma Hill Road last year. Next month’s program is on bees, and the club plans to take part in a holiday craft boutique.

A plant-swap table ran alongside the tasting, stocked with aloe vera and geranium cuttings brought by members for anyone to take home.

Asked why the club stages the contest at all, Nelle gave a short answer.

“Because we’re the Garden Club,” she said. “We want to share.”

She said she and her husband have grown tomatoes for about 10 years.

“I don’t know everything about tomatoes,” she said. “I’m still learning.”

The club is considering a dahlia contest next year.

—

Tim Carl is the editor and publisher of Calistoga Currents

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The views, opinions and data presented in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, position or perspective of Calistoga Currents or its editorial team. Any content provided by our authors is their own and is not intended to malign any group, organization, company or individual.

Our illustrations are produced through a multistep process of generative tools, digital sketching and photo editing, often starting from our own images or sketches.

CALISTOGA, Calif. — The Calistoga City Council voted 3-0 Wednesday morning to appoint three people to seats that would have been on the Nov. 3 ballot, canceling the council and mayoral races and saving the city an estimated $35,000 to $60,000.

The vote also ended something that never came up in the room. Under the city clerk’s certification, once the council makes the appointments, the clerk cannot accept a statement of write-in candidacy for any of the three seats. Holding the election would have left that option open. The cancellation closed the last path onto the ballot for anyone who had not already filed.

The meeting ran roughly six minutes.

The Vote

Councilmembers Kevin Eisenberg and Scott Cooper were recused, announced at roll call before anything else happened. Both were among the three people being appointed.

That left three members voting: Mayor Donald Williams, Vice Mayor Lisa Gift and Councilmember Irais Lopez-Ortega. Gift moved to adopt the resolution and Lopez-Ortega seconded. All three voted aye.

Williams said in an interview earlier Wednesday that he expected the recusals and that the remaining three members would be enough to act.

Eisenberg, a former Calistoga teacher and principal, will become mayor. Cooper, a Realtor and former Planning Commission chair, will keep his seat. Richardson takes the third. The terms begin in January.

What the Council Could Have Done Instead

Williams laid out the options from the dais. The council could appoint the nominees and cancel the election. It could appoint any eligible voter if no one had been nominated, which was not the case. Or it could hold the election as scheduled, uncontested.

No member moved to hold the election. The option was stated and not taken up.

There was no public comment on the item. Williams opened the comment period and closed it in a single breath.

The council had until Thursday, Aug. 20 — the 75th day before the election — to act. After that the election would have proceeded.

Calistoga voters will still receive a Nov. 3 ballot. The statewide general election proceeds; only the three city offices come off it.

How Three Seats Drew Three Candidates

The council called the general municipal election May 12. Notice was published July 2. The nomination period opened July 13 and was set to close Aug. 7. Williams did not file for reelection, which extended the filing window for non-incumbents, according to the staff report. It closed Aug. 12. Nobody came forward during the extension.

The city posted a Notice of No More Candidates on Aug. 13, and City Clerk Yudiana Galvan certified that there were no more candidates than seats to be filled.

Two residents took out papers and did not complete them, according to Richardson. One, she said, was a young Latina woman who found the volume of city material more than she had expected. Richardson said she sent her links to the city website and hopes she will run next time.

Williams said he had personally asked a number of residents to consider running. The answers were consistent, he said: full-time jobs, young children, aging parents and in some cases an unwillingness to take on the criticism that comes with the seat.

He said he emailed both residents who took out papers and did not file, inviting them to meet.

“Participation is crucial,” Williams said.

He said he had read that roughly two of every three races nationwide go uncontested, including school board, council and legislative seats.

What the Appointees Said

Gift, moving the resolution, called it the fiscally responsible action and said she was grateful Richardson had stepped forward. She said the role is not an easy one.

“I wish more members of the community who are vocal to us and wish things would change would step up,” she said.

Lopez-Ortega said there was no reason to hold an election when no one else had come forward and said she was glad Richardson was willing to serve.

Richardson, speaking after the meeting, said her priority is the Calistoga fairgrounds.

“I want to see the master plan that has been approved by the council previously to be followed, implemented and followed,” she said.

Richardson has lived in Calistoga for close to 30 years and ran a bed-and-breakfast and cooking school here for 20. She has served on the city’s housing advisory committee since 2021 and said that since retiring she has watched every council and planning commission meeting.

Where the Money Goes

The election funds — the city's share of the county-run November election — were allocated to the city clerk's department in the adopted budget, Williams said. Unspent, the money carries over and is reallocated next year unless the council moves it sooner.

The meeting was held at the Tucker Building, 2025 Grant St., at the Calistoga fairgrounds. It was in-person only with no stream.

Richardson volunteered with Calistoga Currents until her appointment.

—

Tim Carl is the editor and publisher of Calistoga Currents

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The views, opinions and data presented in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, position or perspective of Calistoga Currents or its editorial team. Any content provided by our authors is their own and is not intended to malign any group, organization, company or individual.

Our illustrations are produced through a multistep process of generative tools, digital sketching and photo editing, often starting from our own images or sketches.

CALISTOGA, Calif. — The highest-scoring wine at Calistoga’s first professional evaluation was a zinfandel.

About 130 people filled the Brannan Center, 1407 Third St., on Aug. 15 for the inaugural Calistoga Wine Festival, where 14 wineries poured, 10 restaurants served and the results of a July judging were announced. Twenty-six wineries had submitted 56 wines. All 56 took a medal, and the 11 Best of Class awards went almost entirely to varieties that have largely disappeared from the rest of Napa Valley.

Cabernet sauvignon accounted for 21 of the 56 entries and took two of the 11 top awards. The others went to a zinfandel, a charbono, a petite sirah, a merlot, a touriga nacional, a grenache blanc, a sauvignon blanc, a Bordeaux blend and a proprietary field blend.

“No one else in this whole entire area in Napa Valley will be able to do that,” said Christopher Sawyer, the sommelier who designed the evaluation and led the awards seminar.

He credited the growers who kept the old blocks in the ground rather than replanting to cabernet.

“These vines, they can outlive generations of people,” Sawyer said.

Sawyer put the appellation at roughly 90% red varieties, with cabernet near 56% of plantings and zinfandel around 20%, and said 46 of California’s 75 acres of charbono sit within it. Published figures run somewhat lower, at about 65 to 70 acres statewide with roughly 40 in Calistoga, but the concentration is not in dispute. Most of the charbono left in the United States grows within a few miles of downtown Calistoga.

What the Awards Showed

Wines were poured blind at Sterling Vineyards, 1111 Dunaweal Lane, on July 15, and judges were told only the appellation and the category. They scored on a 100-point scale, then each table’s head judge reconciled the scores. Wines from 85 to 89 points took silver, 90 to 94 gold and 95 to 100 double gold. Gold and double gold wines were tasted a second time by both panels, and where the panels agreed, a wine was named Best of Class.

The published results list every wine by winery, winemaker, vintage, variety and score: 15 silvers, 24 golds and 17 double golds, one medal for every wine entered.

The top score, 97 points, went to two wines — Joseph Cellars’ 2022 Tofanelli Vineyard Zinfandel, which also took Best of Class, and Work Vineyard’s 2021 Lamya’s Cabernet Sauvignon. Work Vineyard entered five wines and medaled with all of them, across cabernet, a Bordeaux blend, sauvignon blanc and rosé.

Nick Skinner, a manager at Joseph Cellars Winery at 4455 St. Helena Highway, described three awards that would be difficult to assemble anywhere else in the valley: gold for a Tofanelli charbono, double gold for the “247” Estate Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon and Best of Class for the Tofanelli zinfandel.

“We proudly display where we source our grapes from, especially when it comes to Calistoga,” Skinner said.

Whitney Fisher, wine grower at Fisher Vineyards, entered the RCF Vineyard Red Bordeaux Blend, which took Best of Class at 96 points, and the Coach Insignia Cabernet Sauvignon, also 96 and a double gold.

“The best thing to do is to taste the wines yourself,” Fisher said, referring to the awards.

She found the breadth on the tables more interesting than the results.

“The most surprising has been just the breadth of wines,” Fisher said. “Some varieties from the past showing up again.”

Fisher, whose family has farmed here since 1973, framed that as strategy rather than nostalgia.

“In the end, it’s going to be those of us that have the most open-minded approach to our business, and the most creativity, that will succeed in these times that are slightly more challenging,” she said.

The winery planted chenin blanc and sauvignon blanc within a fruit orchard and made its first vintages of both in 2025, dry farmed, in what Fisher described as an agroforestry planting.

The Varieties That Survived

The results sheet reads like an inventory of what Calistoga did not pull out.

Castello di Amorosa entered the 2024 D’Anneo Vineyard Centenary Vine Zinfandel, a gold at 94 points from a block Sawyer said carries 100-year-old vines, with the family that owns the property in the room. Hayfork Wine Co. took Best of Class twice, for a Shypoke charbono and a Kenefick Ranch grenache blanc, and also entered a marsanne. Tedeschi Family Winery submitted four wines including a valdiguié, once grown widely in California as Napa gamay and now nearly gone. Chase Cellars took Best of Class for a Barberis Vineyard petite sirah, and Girard took one for a field blend it calls Mixed Blacks.

Vermeil, GRO Wines and Girard all entered wines from the Frediani Vineyard, among the appellation’s oldest holdings. Beaulieu Vineyard’s Best of Class was a touriga nacional, a Portuguese variety almost unheard of in Napa Valley.

Sawyer used the awards seminar to argue that Calistoga’s history predates the one Napa Valley usually tells. Schramsberg was founded on Diamond Mountain in 1862 by Jacob Schram, a year after Charles Krug, and revived in 1965 by Jack and Jamie Davies, whose son Hugh now runs it. Sterling Vineyards was founded in 1964 by Peter Newton and Michael Stone. Both predate Robert Mondavi’s 1966 winery, though Sterling did not crush its first vintage until 1969 or complete its hilltop facility until 1973.

He also noted that the appellation system Calistoga joined in 2010 did not begin in California. The first American Viticultural Area was Augusta, Missouri, designated in June 1980 ahead of seven California petitions; Napa Valley became the second eight months later.

Davies and Dario Sattui of Castello di Amorosa joined Sawyer on the panel, along with Joel Aiken, winemaker emeritus at Beaulieu Vineyard.

The Room

The festival sold 131 tickets, above the 100 organizers had advertised. Eighteen volunteers and a six-member planning committee worked it, and organizers put total attendance above 150 counting winery and restaurant staff. A portion of proceeds went to UpValley Family Centers, a nonprofit serving northern Napa County.

Michelle DiPasquale, the volunteer day-of coordinator and an events manager for the University of California system, said the scale was substantial for a first attempt.

“That’s a big crew, big crew here in Calistoga for the weekend,” she said.

She said hotels offered discounts to draw visitors, and that the local framing was the point.

“There’s so many events in Napa for the whole valley, which is great,” DiPasquale said. “But this was Calistoga restaurants, Calistoga wine.”

Gerardo Capiel, who moved to Calistoga in 2020 and lives a block from the Brannan Center, came for the discovery.

“There’s always wineries I’d never heard of, even though we’ve been here for a while now,” he said.

He had a note for next year.

“I couldn’t hear very well what was going on [during the seminar], so that was kind of room for improvement,” Capiel said.

Gustavo Rios, executive chef at Solage, brought dishes from Solbar and Picobar and described the appellation the way the vintners did.

“We have a lot of wines that are underdogs, that are not because they’re very small,” Rios said. “People sometimes haven’t heard of them, but I think we have great juice and great potential.”

City Council member Kevin Eisenberg, who is running unopposed for mayor on Nov. 3, said the mix of locals and visitors was the notable part.

“It’s wonderful to support the great Calistoga wines as well as the delicious food that our Calistoga restaurants have here,” he said.

He said he intends to be a regular presence in the town’s restaurants over the next few years, calling it one of the more agreeable duties of the office. Asked to name a favorite wine, he declined.

The Anniversary It Didn’t Need

Organizers called the evaluation the Judgment of Calistoga, timed to the 50th anniversary of the 1976 Paris tasting. The borrowed name did less work than the wines did, and Tolstunov set the comparison aside when pressed on it at the festival.

“It’s a quality assessment of Calistoga wines,” he said. “You can say it’s evaluation or assessment of local wineries by the quality, with getting gradations, getting awards, different awards, but it’s not definitely an Olympic competition.”

The Paris tasting was the other thing. Nine French judges ranked 20 wines against one another, the scores were tallied and published, and the 1973 Chateau Montelena Chardonnay finished first among the whites with 132 points to the runner-up Meursault’s 126.5. Something won because other things lost.

The Calistoga evaluation was built to avoid a winner take all situation, and deliberately. Tolstunov said the ranked format was itself a barrier to getting wineries to participate.

“That’s why many wineries didn’t want to participate, because they thought that we’re going to be against each other,” he said. “[In our case] If you get a gold award and someone else gets an award, you both win.”

Tolstunov told the judges that roughly 60 to 65 wineries are associated with the appellation, meaning fewer than half took part in the first year.

The Paris link is thin on its own terms. The Montelena Chardonnay was largely Sonoma County fruit, roughly 40% from Bacigalupi Vineyard in the Russian River Valley and 45% from Henry Dick Vineyard in Alexander Valley, with the balance from Napa vineyards in Oak Knoll at the valley’s southern end. Sawyer raised the point himself in the seminar, putting the Calistoga share at about 5% and arguing the tasting mattered anyway for what followed it — the federal appellation system, which arrived at the end of the decade.

That wine was made by Miljenko “Mike” Grgich, who left Montelena a year later to found Grgich Hills in Rutherford and died in 2023 at 100.

The event highlighted that Calistoga does not need the borrowed frame of the historic tasting. The appellation’s own founding document makes the case, and more precisely than the marketing does. Geologist Jonathan Swinchatt, whose report accompanied the 2003 petition filed by Bo Barrett of Chateau Montelena, found the area underlain by volcanic bedrock derived from the Sonoma Volcanics, with alluvial fans of cobbly and gravelly loam extending onto the valley floor — a uniformity he contrasted with the more varied ground beneath St. Helena, Rutherford and Oakville. Fisher described her entries as examples of that alluvial fan terroir.

Swinchatt was more careful about temperature than the promotional material has been. Addressing the judges in July, Tolstunov said Calistoga has the highest diurnal shift in Napa Valley; the 2009 rule does not say that. Swinchatt recorded nighttime minimums near 50 degrees against daytime peaks near 100 but attributed the significance of that swing to what vintners hold, not to a comparative finding. He also wrote that the assumption that Calistoga is the valley’s hottest place is disputed by the data, which points instead to a band running from the Stags Leap District north to Dutch Henry Canyon.

The appellation covers 12,713 acres with roughly 625 planted, a figure Tolstunov confirmed this month after earlier Calistoga Wine Society materials described about 2,500 planted acres.

Its obscurity has a documented history. When the appellation was proposed, opponents argued that Calistoga was known for tourism, hot springs and mineral water rather than wine. One commenter wrote that there was no clear connection between the name and wine produced in Napa Valley. The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau established it anyway, effective January 2010, and gave conflicting brands three years to change their labels.

That obscurity is what the judges noticed.

Gillian Ballance, a Master Sommelier and national education manager for Treasury Wine Estates, recalled that Calistoga had appeared on the Master Sommelier theory exam as the answer to a question about diurnal temperature range, and said that single answer is close to the whole of what many candidates know about it.

“It’s an indication that there’s not enough awareness about this AVA,” she said.

Meridith May, publisher and editor in chief of The SOMM Journal and The Tasting Panel, was direct about what her publications do with that.

“Our magazines are all about education, but also about branding,” she said, describing the target as the trade’s habit of defaulting to a handful of established Napa sub-appellations. “Getting the word out to the buyers that they shouldn’t just be buying Oakville fruit, for instance.”

Asked for an early impression of the Calistoga reds in front of her, May declined to generalize, describing them as vibrant and dense while adding that she had not tasted enough to form an opinion.

What It Is

Tolstunov, a San Francisco oral surgeon who founded the Calistoga Wine Society four years ago and spent eight months assembling the festival, said he had not expected it to come together. The society now has nearly 400 members.

“I did not expect that so many people would join me,” he said. “I didn’t think that I will pull it off.”

He wants 300 next year, and was clear about what the event is for.

“It’s called Calistoga Wine Festival, but it’s not just about wines,” Tolstunov said.

The name will keep causing trouble as long as it stays. A reader who sees Judgment of Calistoga is invited to think of a tasting where a result overturned an expectation, and this event was built so that no result could — by design, and for a reason its founder stated plainly.

What it did instead is harder to put on a poster and more useful to the appellation. It got nine working professionals to spend a day on Calistoga wine, several of whom said afterward they had not been paying it enough attention. It put more than 150 people in a room with charbono, old-vine zinfandel, valdiguié, marsanne and touriga nacional from a place the trade files under cabernet. And it produced an argument the appellation has not made well before: that the interesting thing about Calistoga is not that it can make another Napa cabernet, but that it kept the vines everyone else pulled out.

Most of the charbono left in the country grows here. No borrowed anniversary is doing more work than that.

—

Tim Carl is a Calistoga-based photojournalist.

Correction: An earlier version of this article misidentified Len Tolstunov's profession. He is an oral surgeon, not a neurosurgeon. Corrected Aug. 19, 2026.

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The views, opinions and data presented in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, position or perspective of Calistoga Currents or its editorial team. Any content provided by our authors is their own and is not intended to malign any group, organization, company or individual.

Our illustrations are produced through a multistep process of generative tools, digital sketching and photo editing, often starting from our own images or sketches.

CALISTOGA, Calif. — On the evening of Oct. 15, 1935, five men met in the council chambers at Calistoga City Hall, created the Calistoga Fair Association and voted to buy 30 acres on the west edge of town for $3,000.

They called it Silverado Park. Sixteen residents had put up the money — among them Chapin Tubbs, Andrew Rocca, Frank Piner, the Siemsen brothers and a dozen others whose names are on the association’s first minutes. Additional funds later bought the Lura McArthur home and property, bringing the total to $4,300.

What those men understood, and what the town has spent the past three years relearning, is that they were not really buying land. They were qualifying for something.

Two years earlier, on June 27, 1933, California voters had approved a constitutional amendment legalizing horse-racing and pari-mutuel wagering. It appeared on the ballot as Proposition 3 and passed with 63% of the vote. The measure allocated a portion of the proceeds to the state fair and to county fairs and expositions. It was the first legal gambling in California, approved the same year the state repealed Prohibition, and it created a fund that would pay for fairgrounds construction across the state for the next 78 years.

To reach that money, a fair needed to be an official county fair. A private park could not qualify.

The Association Goes After the Money

The Silverado Trail Festival ran over the Fourth of July — a parade, races, a bathing-beauty contest, a staged volcano eruption and a dance at the Silverado House. Horses ran on a track built the previous winter, and by Roy Schoepf’s later account, a few dollars changed hands under the grandstand before pari-mutuel wagering reached Calistoga.

At a board meeting following that festival, Tubbs reported that state aid looked promising but that the association’s rules would have to change.

They changed. On May 27, 1938, the Weekly Calistogian reported that Silverado Park had become the property of Napa County, the county having received state funds to purchase the 30 acres. The county paid $40,000. The Calistoga Fair Association was negotiating a lease back, and the paper noted the association was practically out of debt, owing slightly more than $4,000, which that year's fair was expected to clear. The deed is recorded in Book 130, Page 215.

The association had sold the land not for profit but so it would be eligible for state money as an official county fair site. From that point the county held title and the association ran the property, an arrangement that lasted for 80 years. The association itself lasted 83, from 1935 to 2018.

The state money arrived. By 1940 the association had $15,175.88 from Sacramento and was out of debt for the first time. In January 1947 the board was told the fair would begin receiving $65,000 a year — roughly $960,000 in today’s dollars.

What the Money Built

Almost everything still standing.

In October 1944, with the fair suspended for the war, Howard “Boots” Butler proposed a large auditorium built with state money, and the board formally asked the Division of Fairs and Expositions to construct it as a postwar project. The Exhibit Building was completed in 1948 — the first structure of any size on the grounds and, Schoepf wrote, the largest building in that end of Napa County. On Feb. 4, 1954, the board named it the Tubbs Exhibit Building for Chapin Tubbs.

The Home Economics Building followed in 1953, designed by Al Hunter and built by John Cavaglieri for not more than $40,000. Anson Weeks played the opening dance that June. In 1964 the board renamed it the Butler Pavilion for Boots Butler, who served 28 years and died on the last day of the 1965 fair, hours after riding as grand marshal of the Silverado Parade.

The Fiesta Center came from a state grant of $25,350 approved in November 1966. Fred Monhoff gave it the name.

The golf course was Schoepf’s idea, floated in December 1952. He asked the board to build it with in-house labor and grounds-improvement money. The directors agreed, most of them admitting they knew nothing about golf. The first green was seeded April 19, 1953, using 2,450 yards of dirt the county had excavated building Fisher Street. Al Carpy suggested the name Mount St. Helena Golf Course. Players used it free through late 1954, and green fees began in January 1955, collected in a box on the first tee.

The first pro shop was a wartime lookout building. Chester Yokom ran it into his 80s.

The Land That Had to Be Taken

The county kept buying.

In March 1957, the board negotiated with Louis and Tillie Rubbattino for 21 to 22 acres north of the property at $1,850 an acre. On June 18 the Board of Supervisors voted $39,672 for the purchase, and the Weekly Calistogan reported the funds derived from pari-mutuel reserves. The parcel is recorded at Book 548, Page 14. The golf course expanded onto it, opening the new holes May 26, 1963.

John Logvy was a different matter.

The board first approached him at the same 1957 meeting. It approached him again in 1958 and in 1960 and in 1962, when the county sold detached lots for $13,500 and earmarked the money to buy his land. In October 1962 the minutes record that all committees had failed to reach any satisfactory arrangement with him.

The county took the land instead. A triangular piece in the middle by condemnation in 1951 from various owners. A strip fronting Oak Street, 125 feet wide and 615 feet deep, from John and Valentina Logvy in 1966. The southernmost parcel from John Logvy in 1976.

That is how a property assembled with public money reached 70.6 acres.

The Town’s Backup

The pattern that shows up in the FM3 survey commissioned by the city last year — 86% of residents calling the fairgrounds’ emergency role extremely or very important, ranking it above every other use — runs back through the association’s minutes for 70 years.

When the high school gym burned in 1963, classes moved to the Tubbs Building. When a bond failed in 1966 and the elementary school was declared unsafe, six classrooms opened there. During the 1964 fire that burned the old Rubbattino home at the edge of the golf course, the Red Cross took the Tubbs Building and patients from Calistoga Hospital sheltered inside. In 1962, when Gov. Pat Brown declared a labor emergency over the grape harvest, the directors voted to let pickers sleep there.

The pattern held into this century. The Valley Fire, which started near Cobb in Lake County in September 2015, brought evacuees and animals onto the grounds and left damage to the sewer and water systems that was never reimbursed. After a second and separate round of fires two years later, in October 2017, Cal Fire, the Army Corps of Engineers and PG&E staged there for the better part of two years.

Graduation moved to the grandstand. Little League and high school football played under lights the association installed in 1949.

Two Fairs, One Carnival Season

The Calistoga fair was never the only one in the county. The 25th District Agricultural Association had been running a fair in Napa since 1930, five years before 16 Calistogans bought Silverado Park. Schoepf’s minutes place the two in the same orbit throughout his tenure — Calistoga directors attended the Napa fair, and the former manager of the 25th District Fair was a guest at their annual dinners.

For decades the arrangement held. Calistoga’s was the county fair, the one with the state designation and the state money. Napa’s was a district fair.

What changed was the balance. Dana Cole, a Calistoga resident since 1987 who joined the fair association board in 2015 and served until it dissolved, said the Napa fair grew into a direct competitor for the same audience in the early 2000s, and that Calistoga’s attendance began to decline around then.

The harder problem was the calendar.

Calistoga’s fair ran over the Fourth of July and had adopted the slogan “Always over the 4th of July.” That is the most expensive week of the year to book a carnival, and there are only so many carnivals. Schoepf’s minutes record the squeeze early: The board shifted dates in 1955 to avoid colliding with Vallejo, cycled through operators and in 1964 jumped at Ray Cox’s Great Western Shows because the larger carnivals in the past were always booked over its dates.

By the 2000s, Cole said, the fair could not be guaranteed a carnival every Fourth of July. In years without a carnival, the fair did not draw the way it had.

When the Money Stopped

The fund that built all of it did not survive.

Horse-racing revenue declined for decades. In 2009 the state redirected racing licensing fees to the general fund. In 2011, facing an $11.2 billion shortfall, Gov. Jerry Brown eliminated $32 million in General Fund support for California fairs on the recommendation of the Legislative Analyst’s Office.

Calistoga’s annual appropriation ended with it. Accounts of its size differ, ranging from about $220,000 to as much as $400,000 a year. Whatever the final figure, it was a fraction in real terms of what the fair had received in 1947.

From 2011 the fair paid for itself out of six operations: the RV park, the speedway, the fair, the events center, the golf course and disaster staging. The property lasted seven more years.

The golf course closed Oct. 8, 2017, after the windstorm that drove the Tubbs Fire. The fire began that night on private property off Bennett Lane north of town. It was named for the area near Tubbs Lane where it was first reported and carries the same family name as the Tubbs Exhibit Building on the grounds. It was separate from the Valley Fire two years earlier. On Jan. 1, 2019, the county took over as operator after the association said it could no longer run the property in a fiscally balanced manner. What remained of the operation closed in 2020 as the pandemic began.

The 2016-17 Napa County Grand Jury, prompted by residents complaining about the golf course, had already called the property the county’s orphan asset and told the Board of Supervisors to take responsibility for it and work with Calistoga.

At the fair board’s urging, the city and county formed a joint committee to consider a joint powers authority to share operations and management of the property. After two years of negotiation, those efforts were abandoned. The city turned to a purchase strategy.

Three Deals and a Sale

The first attempt nearly worked.

In November 2018, County Executive Officer Minh Tran sent City Manager Dylan Feik a counter-proposal: The city would buy a 34.3-acre portion — the RV park and the Butler, Tubbs and Cropp buildings — at $225,000 an acre, $7,717,500 all cash. The county would keep the golf course, the speedway and the Tucker Building. After more than two years of negotiation, both bodies signed the purchase and sale agreement in August 2019.

Then the pandemic. In May 2020 the city and county agreed the transaction should not move forward, and the county offered instead to lease the entire property to Calistoga for $1 a year for three years.

The second attempt was a $15.885 million agreement for the whole property reached in October 2022, contingent on voter approval. Measure E, structured as a community facilities district, asked for $27.5 million in March 2023 and drew about 32% support against a two-thirds requirement.

By May 2023 the county was ready to sell outright. On May 16, Public Works Director Steven Lederer presented the board with options and asked for direction. Eight people spoke.

Cole was one of them. He had spent months in the archives with the 1933 ballot pamphlet and the 1938 and 1957 newspaper accounts, and his argument was that the county had never paid for the land — the state had, with money approved by California voters for public benefit.

Mayor Donald Williams and Council member Scott Cooper also testified. The supervisors directed staff to begin a sale. Three days later the county moved to appoint two supervisors to negotiate with two Calistoga council members.

The third attempt was $2 million in cash. Cole had recommended the city offer no more than what the county originally paid using mostly state funds, roughly $100,000. He was not party to the negotiations that arrived at $2 million, but believes the figure represents the original purchase prices adjusted for inflation.

County supervisors approved it Jan. 23, 2024. The council approved it Feb. 6 on a 4-0 vote, Council member Lisa Gift recused because she lives near the site. Escrow closed July 22, 2024.

The agreement requires the city to operate the property consistent with historical uses, permits county emergency use and gives the county a right to repurchase if Calistoga rezones or sells.

Ninety Years On

The city budgeted $1,723,055 for the fairgrounds in the fiscal year that began July 1 — $506,400 to repair water leaks, $500,000 for sewer connections at the RV park and Butler Building, $450,000 for infrastructure at the northeast corner and the balance for a forklift and two new positions. Fairgrounds capital spending the previous year totaled $143,035.

The county had shut off roughly 80% of the water system in 2021 after bills exceeding $100,000 a year and leaks it could not locate. A single meter still serves every building on 70.6 acres.

Most of this year’s work will be underground — repairing and improving water and sewer lines.

The Fairgrounds Advisory Committee, created in 2025 and made permanent in January, has not yet hired the master plan consultant its adopted work plan called for in the first quarter of the year.

Schoepf closed his history in 1966 with a note about long-range planning. He imagined a dining room overlooking the ninth green, a coffee shop for golfers, tennis courts where the poultry building was falling down and space left for a swimming pool.

“One only has to look ahead a few years,” he wrote, “to know that Calistoga is bound to be THE recreational area.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the Tubbs Fire began on Tubbs Lane. The fire began on private property off Bennett Lane. It was named for the area near Tubbs Lane where it was first reported.

Sources

Primary documents

• Napa County Fair Association minutes, 1935 to 1966, recorded by secretary-manager Roy F. Schoepf. Not digitized. Consulted in the archive assembled by Dana Cole.

• Weekly Calistogan, June 27, 1957, Volume 80, Number 31, page 1, “Vote $39,672 For Fairgrounds Land.” California Digital Newspaper Collection.

• Weekly Calistogan, May 27, 1938, page 1, “Silverado Park Became Property of Napa County in Recent Deal.” Not digitized. The collection covers this paper for 1877 to 1922 and 1956 to 1959. Clip courtesy of Dana Cole.

• California ballot pamphlet, June 27, 1933, Proposition 3, Assembly Constitutional Amendment 119. California State Archives.

• Recorded deeds, Napa County Recorder: Book 130, Page 215 (1938); Book 357, Page 294 (1951); Book 548, Page 14 (1957); Book 746, Page 370 (1966); Book 985, Page 88 (1976).

Public records

• Napa County Grand Jury, 2016-2017 final report, “The Napa County Fairgrounds: The County’s Orphan Asset,” May 24, 2017.

• City of Calistoga adopted budget, fiscal year 2026-27.

• Napa County Board of Supervisors agenda letters and minutes, 2018 to 2024.

• Purchase and sale agreement, City of Calistoga and Napa County. Approved by the Board of Supervisors Jan. 23, 2024, and by the Calistoga City Council Feb. 6, 2024; escrow closed July 22, 2024. County records at napa.legistar.com; the conveyance is recorded with the Napa County Recorder.

• FM3 Research survey commissioned by the City of Calistoga, 2025.

Legislative record

• The elimination of the $32 million General Fund appropriation for the network of California fairs in the 2011-12 budget, and the earlier redirection of racing license fees, are described in the Assembly committee analysis of SB 1227, Aug. 7, 2012.

Interviews

• Dana Cole, Napa County Fair Association board member 2015 to 2018.

• Derek Rayner, Calistoga public works director and city engineer.

Related

• The Fairgrounds: A Working Record, an interactive timeline with sourcing for every entry, maintained and updated as documents arrive.

• Sharpsteen Museum of Calistoga History, 1311 Washington St., holds photographs of the period.

Notes on the Record

This account is assembled from the Napa County Fair Association minutes recorded by Roy F. Schoepf, contemporary newspaper pages, recorded deeds and county and city files. Several questions remain open. Readers with documents, photographs or firsthand knowledge are invited to write to editor@calistogacurrents.com. Anything that changes the account will be corrected in place and noted.

• Update, Aug. 25, 2026: The 1938 purchase price has been located. Napa County paid $40,000 for the 30 acres, per the recorded Deed of Conveyance, Napa County Recorder, Book 130, Page 215. Reader Dana Cole supplied the citation. The open question about the price has been removed from Notes on the Record.

• The first Silverado Trail Festival. Accounts place it in 1935, 1936 and 1937. This story gives no year for that reason. Who built the horse track the previous winter is also unsettled.

• The name of the paper. The masthead of the June 27, 1957 issue reads Weekly Calistogian, and the California Digital Newspaper Collection catalogs the title under that spelling from 1896 to 2003. The same issue twice calls itself The Calistogan in its own body copy. The 1938 masthead is cut off in the copy reproduced here, so which form the paper used that year is not settled. This account cites the 1957 paper as the Calistogian and the 1938 paper as the Calistogan, following the shorter form where the masthead is not legible.

• The right side of the May 27, 1938, masthead. The copy reproduced here is cut off at the frame edge. An uncropped scan or a microfilm frame of that page would settle the paper's name in 1938. The California Digital Newspaper Collection does not cover the year.

• Chester Yokom. The June 27, 1957 Calistogian spells the pro shop keeper’s name Yokom. Other records give Yokum.

• The size of Calistoga’s annual state appropriation before 2011. Accounts range from about $220,000 to $400,000 a year. A records request is pending with the California Department of Food and Agriculture for the year-by-year figures from 1938 to 2011.

• Photographs. Images of the Silverado Trail Festival, the fair, the golf course or the buildings under construction are sought and will be credited to their owners.

—

Tim Carl is a Calistoga-based photojournalist.

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The views, opinions and data presented in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, position or perspective of Calistoga Currents or its editorial team. Any content provided by our authors is their own and is not intended to malign any group, organization, company or individual.

Our illustrations are produced through a multistep process of generative tools, digital sketching and photo editing, often starting from our own images or sketches.

CALISTOGA, Calif. — The shirts gave it away before anyone spoke. Scattered through the gym on North Oak Street were T-shirts carrying four words Rose Beck said to every kid who stepped up to bat: “You got this, babe.”

Rose Marie Beck was born in Calistoga on June 24, 1947, and never lived anywhere else. She died at home May 17 at 78. Her husband of 49 years, Chuck, preceded her in death, as did her son Kelly. Several hundred people came to the Boys & Girls Club gym in Calistoga on Saturday, Aug. 1, to say goodbye.

“We had put chairs out for 200, and then there were folks standing,” her son Corey Beck said afterward. “I’d say 250 to 300. But what was important about it for me is that the number is great — it’s the cross-section of all the people.”

A Refrain From the Bleachers

For a generation of players in Calistoga and St. Helena, Beck was Grandma Rose, a name that started with her grandsons Sam and Nick and spread down the bench.

Monique Davies said she met Beck when their boys were in kindergarten and playing tee ball in St. Helena.

“Rose would be at every game in the front row and cheer on every single kid that came up to bat,” Davies said. “Her favorite saying was, ‘You got this, babe.’”

Sam Beck said the shirts date to his senior season, when the whole team wore them at his last home game.

“Just her spirit,” he said. “She was a lovely lady — always energetic, super nice, caring. Always had a smile on her face.”

Joe Herdell, head baseball coach at St. Helena High School, stopped that game in the second inning, brought Beck down from the stands and spoke about her while the players pulled the shirts on over their jerseys, according to her son.

Natalie Herdell said Beck’s reach ran across both towns.

“She cheered for every kid. She made sure she knew every kid’s name,” she said. “She was probably the most positive person I’ve ever been around.”

Herdell said the illness was brief and largely private.

“We didn’t know for very long that she was ill, but that’s Rose,” she said. “She didn’t want to bother anybody.”

The Mayor Who Never Ran

Chris Canning, who served on the City Council beginning in 2010 and as mayor from 2012 to 2022, delivered the day’s longest tribute. He said Beck’s volunteer record ran through the city’s boards and commissions, and he ticked off the rest: the church, the Sharpsteen Museum, the tractor parade, the Brannan Center, youth sports.

“While I may have been the official mayor of Calistoga for a period of time, Rose Beck was and always will be the mayor of Calistoga,” he said. “She never sought the title. She certainly would never have claimed it. She simply earned it.”

Canning described calling her during hard stretches for the city — wildfires, evacuations, the pandemic, council meetings where tempers ran short. He said she would listen without interrupting, then find something generous to say about whomever he had been complaining about.

“Sometimes it was infuriating,” he said. “She would remind me, ‘Chris, you don’t know what challenges they are experiencing in their own lives. Just be kind.’”

In a separate interview, Canning put it more simply.

“She is the epitome of Calistoga,” he said. “Never met a stranger.”

Beck joined the board of the Napa County Fair Association and helped shape Logvy Park. Her family asked that donations go to the Boys & Girls Clubs of St. Helena and Calistoga.

The Circuit Downtown

Tim Petersen, who ran Silverado Ace Hardware on Lincoln Avenue with his brother and wife for decades, said Beck made a regular round of downtown businesses.

“She’d ask me how business was, and then she’d ask how my wife and I were doing, how our kids were doing, how our grandkids were doing — and she remembered all their names,” he said. “I don’t know how she did it.”

Bill Gerhard, who taught wood and metal shop in Calistoga from 1963 to 1978, said he had known Beck since she was a student there, back when girls were not admitted to shop class.

“She was the queen,” he said.

Her sister Marge Fechter, five years younger, said the two talked nearly every day.

“She’s the most positive person that I’ve ever known,” Fechter said. “She was always the organizer, always the planner, always got people together. She loved this town. Only place she ever lived.”

Claudia Rouas Beck, her daughter-in-law, said Beck showed up without being asked — birthdays, sleepovers, walks, games.

“She defines unconditional love,” she said. “It was never about her. It was always about the person standing in front of her, no matter who that was.”

What She Left

Corey Beck, now chief operating officer at Trinchero Family Wine & Spirits and a 15-year member of the Boys & Girls Clubs board, said his mother’s example shaped his own volunteering.

He said she never used the internet, a detail he offered after a reporter asked why she kept dropping in on shop owners.

“In fairness to her, she wanted to get to know people’s name and not their username,” he said. “And I think there’s a lesson in that.”

He described a friend who coaches at a school in Cambodia and posted a set of her sayings in the gym there — show up with a good attitude, be a good teammate, respect everybody, no one is below you or above you — ending with her refrain. The players touch it before every game.

He closed with a line he attributed to Winston Churchill, about making a living by what you get and a life by what you give.

“Her glass wasn’t half empty, wasn’t half full,” he said. “It was overflowing.”

Her nephew, Ray Fechter, spoke directly to her grandsons.

“Out of everything she meant to everyone, and all the jobs she had in this life, the most important one — and the one she was proudest of — was being your grandmother,” he said.

Canning ended his remarks with a distinction.

“There are people whose names end up on parks, streets and monuments,” he said, “and then there are people whose spirit becomes part of the community itself.”

ROSE MARIE BECK, 1947–2026

Born in Calistoga June 24, 1947. Died at home May 17, 2026. Married 49 years to Chuck Beck, who preceded her in death, as did her son Kelly. Survived by her son Corey, daughter-in-law Claudia, grandsons Sam and Nick, her sister Marge Fechter and her nephew Ray Fechter. The family asks that donations go to the Boys & Girls Clubs of St. Helena and Calistoga.

—

Tim Carl is a Calistoga-based photojournalist.

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The views, opinions and data presented in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, position or perspective of Calistoga Currents or its editorial team. Any content provided by our authors is their own and is not intended to malign any group, organization, company or individual.

Our illustrations are produced through a multistep process of generative tools, digital sketching and photo editing, often starting from our own images or sketches.

CALISTOGA, Calif. — Hearts and Hands Preschool closed July 31, not because it ran out of money but because it ran out of places to go.

The nonprofit had told families in January that it expected to close. Donations and new enrollment reversed that. By late spring the board believed it could operate through the fall.

“The preschool itself is now sustainable,” board President MaryAnn Salinger told the City Council on June 3. “Unfortunately, our current facility is not available beyond Sept. 30.”

What the board could not find was a building. Three pressures converged over the same few months: enrollment falling for reasons that reach well beyond Calistoga, a parish that needed its hall back and a cost of care that kept rising and grew harder to predict.

“We felt confident we could find something that worked,” Salinger said in an interview. “It turned out not to be the case.”

A Shrinking Pool of 4-Year-Olds

Hearts and Hands was licensed for 30 children and for years enrolled about 27, Salinger said. It charged $950 a month for years, raising tuition roughly two years ago to $1,100 and adding 2-year-olds at $1,500 a month. Private programs in the area charge $1,500 to $2,000, she said.

The model depended on a mix of families paying full tuition and families on scholarship, funded through twice-yearly fundraisers and reserves built partly from a multiyear grant that predated Salinger’s tenure on the board.

Then the state changed where 4-year-olds go to school. Transitional kindergarten has existed in California since 2012, limited to children turning 5 in the fall. Assembly Bill 130, signed in July 2021, expanded it, phasing in wider eligibility beginning in 2022-23 and reaching all 4-year-olds by 2025-26. The program is free and runs through public school districts.

Four-year-olds had been the preschool’s oldest and largest group. Hearts and Hands responded by enrolling 2-year-olds, who cost more to care for because of stricter staffing ratios. The share of full-paying families fell at the same time.

“It was just the perfect storm,” Salinger said. “Our numbers went down, our funding went down.”

The pattern is not local. Erika Lubensky, executive director of Community Resources for Children in Napa, said the expansion left private providers — preschools like Hearts and Hands and home-based child-care sites — serving only younger children who are more expensive to care for. As of June, private businesses accounted for 79% of Napa County's 3,264 licensed child-care slots, with the remainder at publicly funded sites such as those run by the Napa County Office of Education and Head Start, according to the agency's database.

“The underlying issue is that the child-care and early education system is systematically flawed,” Lubensky said in an email. “It is a highly regulated system where parents pay too much and child-care providers are often paid poverty wages.”

Birth rates are part of it too, Salinger said. The preschool ran an after-school program for the school district’s transitional kindergartners, serving 15 children last year. Nine were signed up for the fall.

“Even this year in transitional kindergarten, their numbers are low,” she said. “The numbers are dropping.”

A Request for Rent Forgiveness and Two Conditions

The board determined in December 2025 that the preschool was no longer financially sustainable, according to a written timeline the board provided. It notified families in January. The response was substantial: Parents, donors and volunteers raised money and recruited students, and the school connected families with Community Resources for Children and with a scholarship program, both of which subsidize tuition. Some families had tuition covered in full.

The closure date moved twice as money came in — from Feb. 28 to April 30, then to June 30, the end of the fiscal year.

On Feb. 21, Salinger emailed St. Luke’s asking the church to forgive rent for the remaining months so the preschool could reach that June 30 goal, according to a written statement from the church quoting the request. The parish hall rented for $1,500 a month.

The Mission Committee, the seven-member body that governs St. Luke’s, met the next day and granted the request, forgiving $4,500 for April, May and June. It attached two conditions, citing uncertainty about continued funding: that Hearts and Hands would end the preschool at St. Luke’s on June 30 and that its furniture and goods would be removed from the parish hall in a timely manner. The conditions appear in a Feb. 22 email from the church to the preschool board, which Salinger provided.

The date had come from the board’s own request. The condition made it binding.

The board read that as the end of the arrangement. The lease had customarily been reviewed with the senior warden each May and signed by both boards in June, Salinger said. That review never happened.

The church says it never declined to renew.

“The MC never voted not to extend the lease,” senior warden Dave Stoneberg said. “Instead we voted twice to extend it, first to June 30 and then to Sept. 30. We did not decline a renewal request.”

Stoneberg is a retired journalist who formerly wrote for Napa Valley Features, a sister publication of Calistoga Currents.

In late spring the board asked to stay through December. The request was drafted with help from Diana Deen, who serves on the preschool board and is a deacon at St. Luke’s. Salinger met with Stoneberg and the Rev. William McIlmoyl, known as Father Mac, before it went to the committee. The two sides settled on September.

On May 31 the Mission Committee approved an extension to Sept. 30, conditioned on $9,000 in back and forward rent paid in advance, covering April through September. It was paid. The payment covered the three forgiven months as well as the three added ones, leaving the preschool with no net rent relief. The approval carried further conditions, according to the church’s June email to the board: The preschool would reset tables and chairs for the parish’s twice-monthly coffee, clear its belongings from the break room, use the conference room for board meetings only and remove everything by Sept. 30.

“We look forward to a smooth transition and wish Hearts and Hands only the best going forward,” Stoneberg wrote to the board.

By the time September was set, Salinger said, the board already knew its most viable option was slipping away.

Every Site and Why Each One Closed

The board began asking the city about property in late April. A city-owned house on Grant Street was in poor condition, Salinger said. Council member Irais Lopez-Ortega asked acting City Manager Mitchell Celaya to look into a house on Oak Street at the fairgrounds. It was small but workable, Salinger said, and needed extensive repair.

The board proposed leasing it June 3. City staff estimated code compliance upgrades and site improvements at $300,000 to $400,000, with an additional $35,000 for water utility improvements, according to a city staff report. The work would take about six months following permit approval, meaning the preschool would also need a temporary location in the interim. The board’s own architect and contractor estimated six to nine months just to obtain the permit, Salinger said.

On July 14 the City Council voted unanimously to continue the item rather than decide it after members said they wanted to see the nonprofit’s financial ability to pay for the upgrades and its plans for safety and emergencies.

Vice Mayor Lisa Gift said she supported exploring a lease, citing the need for affordable child care and noting the city has no plans for the building. Council member Kevin Eisenberg said he hoped a simpler, less expensive alternative could be found.

“The preschool is really important to Calistoga,” Eisenberg said. “It’s just there are too many things to be addressed.”

The nonprofit reported total net assets of about $69,000 at the close of its 2024 fiscal year, according to its most recent Form 990 filing with the Internal Revenue Service.

The funding path had its own clock. The board planned to apply to the Gasser Foundation, a Napa trust that funds education programs, but the application cycle opens once a year in August.

Other options closed one after another. The Napa County Office of Education has land beside its Sattui Preschool and plans a third portable classroom there, but the funding is not in place and the expansion will not happen this year. A house on Cedar Street was rented to someone else. A house near Archway sat in a residential zone the preschool’s state license did not permit, and rezoning would have taken months. A donated portable classroom had no city land to sit on. Another church in town, which has an existing preschool setup, declined after its board voted against hosting the program. All of the accounts in this paragraph are Salinger’s.

“One by one, each of our search options fell through for different reasons,” she said.

The board chose to close July 31 rather than reopen in mid-August for a few weeks. Teachers customarily take two weeks off before a new group arrives, and reopening would have meant asking families to move twice.

Gift raised the closure at the council’s Aug. 4 meeting, the first time it was mentioned at the council table after the announcement. It was not on the agenda, and she brought it up at the end of her own report during council reports.

“As we all know, a preschool is much more than a building,” she said. “It is where children really begin.”

Gift thanked the school’s board and staff for what she called countless hours poured into Calistoga’s youngest residents, and said she knew they had worked hard to keep the doors open. She also credited Celaya and city staff, saying they had explored every possible alternative and worked alongside the preschool, Napa County supervisors and the county board of education. That characterization is Gift’s; the city has not provided its own account of the hours spent or the alternatives considered.

She called the closure a loss for the whole community.

A Different Future for the Hall

St. Luke’s plans several months of work on the parish hall, beginning with bathroom renovations to meet accessibility standards, with kitchen work to follow, according to the church’s written statement. The hall is expected to serve as a fellowship space for the church and a venue for community gatherings. One possibility under discussion is hosting expanded programming from Rianda House, the St. Helena senior activity center, which already runs programs in Calistoga in partnership with UpValley Family Centers and the city’s Parks and Recreation department.

“It has been a difficult transition for both Hearts and Hands and St. Luke’s,” Stoneberg and McIlmoyl said in the joint statement. “We have been pleased to host the preschool.”

The two organizations overlapped well beyond landlord and tenant. Millie Pease serves on both the Mission Committee and the preschool board. Deen sits on the preschool board and serves as a deacon at the church.

Accounts of the beginning differ. The closure announcement and the church’s statement date the preschool’s opening to 2001. Salinger, citing Pease as the board’s historian, said it formally began May 6, 2004, growing out of informal child care organized by St. Luke’s families who could not otherwise afford it. It incorporated as a separate nonprofit in 2012.

What Is Left

Community Resources for Children case managers are working with the five affected families to find placements, Lubensky said.

Calistoga retains licensed child care at Sattui Preschool, run by the Napa County Office of Education, and at two home-based providers, with a combined licensed capacity of 70 children, she said. Licensed capacity is not the same as available openings.

Sattui Preschool is publicly funded and offers extended hours. The home-based providers can accept children from low-income families through the state-funded assistance program that Community Resources for Children administers, Lubensky said.

Salinger said she has spoken with Darrell Whitacre, director of early learning services at the Napa County Office of Education, about giving displaced Hearts and Hands children priority for placement and that he could not make promises. Whitacre did not respond to a request for comment on current openings at Sattui.

Staff members have been referred to programs that are hiring. Hearts and Hands employed three full-time and two part-time workers. The school district is arranging its own after-school care for transitional kindergartners and may hire one person, Salinger said.

As a nonprofit, Hearts and Hands cannot simply dispose of what it owns. Cubbies, tables, chairs, cots, computers, books, outdoor equipment and a changing table must be sold or donated to other nonprofits.

Salinger spent 32 years in education — as a teacher, as a high school dean and as principal of Snow Elementary School in Napa — before retiring in 2016. Her father-in-law, Herb Salinger, brought her onto the Hearts and Hands board.

“He had a mission,” she said. “He was going to make sure that I got in there before he got out.”

She said the loss lands hardest on the industries that employ most of the town.

“It leaves a real deficit for the community,” she said. “If you look at the service industry and the wine industry, it’s going to be hard to get people to work when they don’t have daycare for their kids.”

The board had planned to approach wineries about subsidizing tuition for employees with young children. That plan needed a building.

“If we don’t have a place to go, we can’t do any of that,” she said.

—

Tim Carl is a Calistoga-based photojournalist.

Reporting for this story drew on an interview with MaryAnn Salinger, a written timeline provided by the Hearts and Hands board, a written statement from St. Luke’s senior warden Dave Stoneberg and the Rev. William McIlmoyl, correspondence between the church and the preschool board provided by Salinger, written responses from Erika Lubensky of Community Resources for Children, city staff reports and council proceedings on June 3, July 14 and Aug. 4 as well as and the preschool’s most recent Form 990 filing.

—

Correction: An earlier version of this article reversed the shares of Napa County's licensed child-care slots. Private businesses account for 79% of the county's 3,264 slots; publicly funded sites account for 20.8%. Corrected Aug. 22, 2026.

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The views, opinions and data presented in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, position or perspective of Calistoga Currents or its editorial team. Any content provided by our authors is their own and is not intended to malign any group, organization, company or individual.

Our illustrations are produced through a multistep process of generative tools, digital sketching and photo editing, often starting from our own images or sketches.

CALISTOGA, Calif. — Like most corners of the world, the landmark that can be viewed from several counties, Mount St. Helena, holds numerous layers of history. The mountain was traversed by Wappo and Pomo people for thousands of years and is still today considered sacred. Clint McKay, an Indigenous educator at Pepperwood Preserve in Santa Rosa and a traditional Wappo spiritual leader, told hikers while recently viewing the landmark that Mount St. Helena is in his people’s creation story and remains a very powerful place.

Lake County historian Henry Mauldin also described Mount St. Helena as a place of significance to Indigenous people as both sacred land and a well-traveled connecting point. One Indigenous trail connected Knights Valley and Jericho Canyon, while a steeper trail ran from Jericho Canyon over to the Callayomi Valley in Lake County.

This 4,343-foot mountain extends into Napa, Lake and Sonoma counties. Although not a volcano, according to geologists, the double-peaked mountain is set within the volcanic-in-origin Mayacamas Mountains. Mount St. Helena is made up of volcanic breccia, interlayered tuff and other rock that is understood to have formed within a caldera, or large depression that formed when a nearby volcano caused the area to collapse because of erupted magma. After the caldera crumpled, a giant uplift occurred in the surrounding area along with erosion and tectonic faulting, which all combined to create the distinctive shape of the mountain that we love.

The mountain has changed names over time and, according to Ken Stanton’s information-packed third edition book “Great Day Hikes in and Around Napa Valley,” includes the Wappo name of Kana’mota or Human Mountain beginning around 12,000 years ago. Although the Indigenous people did not reside on the mountain, choosing to live instead in Knights Valley, eastern Sonoma County and southern Lake County, they often hunted and gathered medicines and foods on the mountain; and they also utilized trade routes over the mountain. Before pioneers arrived in the vicinity, the mountain provided the Wappo with deer, elk, salmon, grizzly bears and more.

Around 1823 the mountain was known as Serra de los Mallacomes by the Spanish. Rancho Caymus was the name given to the mountain by Napa Valley’s first white settler, George C. Yount, after he received the Rancho Caymus land grant in 1836. Next, in 1839, Ilya G. Voznesensky, a Russian explorer linked with the Russian Academy of Sciences and who was also a member of the Russian Geographical Society, voyaged to America through the Cape Horn route on a ship called Helena to gather botanical specimens. Voznesensky left Fort Ross in 1841 when he climbed our Mount St. Helena and left an inscribed copper plate. An added Russian group is believed to have scaled its peaks in 1841 too, naming the mountain in honor of Princess Helena de Gagarin, wife of Alexander G. Rotchev, coastal Fort Ross’ commanding officer. During the California Gold Rush in 1849 and beyond, the mountain came to be known as Devil’s Mount. Ken Stanton’s 2010 edition of “Mount St. Helena & R. L. Stevenson State Park: A History and Guide” gives many more details on the multi-named summit.

After the California Gold Rush of 1849 brought hordes of wealth-seekers west and Americans began settling the valleys, folks who enjoyed travel began seeking out places to journey. The nearby Geysers was touted as a travel destination for sightseers as they set foot at the port of San Francisco. New York Tribune writer Bayard Taylor visited California in 1859 for a whirlwind tour of the state’s many sites and wrote about Knights Valley and Mount St. Helena since a portion of the mountain peers west. Taylor’s writing encouraged ever more tourists to flock to the vicinity of the mountain.

The St. Helena Toll Road and Bull Trail is listed as California State Historic Landmark number 467 and is found at the northwest corner of State Highway 29 and Hill Avenue in Middletown.

“The old Bull Trail Road ran from Napa Valley to Middletown,” the marker reads. “It was built by volunteers in the 1850s. A number of the grades were 35 percent. It was an official road in 1861 and abandoned in 1868. St. Helena Toll Road also ran from same points, was completed in 1868. The grades ran to 12 percent. State of California purchased from John Lawley heirs in 1925.”

The Lawley Toll Road was named for John Lawley who hailed from Alabama and moved to California in 1852. He worked in numerous occupations such as teacher, speculator, gold miner, etc. before he leased the Kellogg Ranch near the Bale Grist Mill and became a trustee in Napa’s first bank. After learning that the Berryessa brothers could no longer hold onto their Mexican land grant, he bought 26,000 acres of Berryessa’s grant for around $4 per acre. Lawley took advantage of opportunities as they arose and became owner of the Phoenix quicksilver mine near Oat Hill. Later he united with Sam Brannan in the newly-formed Napa Valley Railroad Company. They planned to run tracks from the Napa Valley into Lake County, but this endeavor failed along with many other attempts to bring a railroad to Lake County. As they say, when one door closes, another opens, so Lawley decided to build a toll road from Calistoga to Middletown with his partners, Henry Boggs and William Patterson, in 1866.

A paper written by Cheyanne Parker called “Stage Stop Ladies” explained that it was quite common for stage stops to be run by ladies, as the men were often busy with business ventures, ranching and farming. It was Mary Francis Lawley Patten (Mollie) who ran the Lawley toll house. Known as “the soul of hospitality,” Mollie was both generous and stingy, charming but one who used profanity, but also fair to all who traveled the toll road. She was recognized for giving shelter and sustenance to cold, hungry travelers and was friends with folks from many walks of life. One of her friends was author Jack London, who came to the mountain for stories of Robert Louis Stevenson.

Lawley’s Toll House was a two-story home built in 1873 at the crest of Lawley Grade. Robert Louis Stevenson has described the beauty of this home as he stayed there a few times. It burned down in 1883 due to a chimney fire. Mollie and her husband survived with only the clothes they were wearing but did manage to construct a temporary toll booth about a mile away. Things picked up for the couple and by 1884 they were the owners of 500 acres on Mount St. Helena as well as the Silverado town site. Their new toll house included a dining room, bar, living room as well as rooms to let. Later, it included a saloon, livery stable and winemaking facilities. Mollie ran the toll house for about 50 years! In 1922, Lawley’s Toll Road was acquired by Lake and Napa Counties for $30,000; and later it was developed into state property.

The toll rates for the roads, determined by the Board of Supervisors, were considered exorbitant as a four-horse team cost $1.50, an eight-horse team cost $2.50, a one-horse buggy was 75 cents and a man and horse was charged 25 cents. Soon a public outcry helped reduce the high tolls. Since the initial tolls were so high and lots of folks couldn’t afford to pay, they began crossing the free Oat Hill Mine Road even though it was longer and bumpier. The Lawley toll rates gained an addition to the list of tolls on the well-maintained road in 1908 when the automobile tolls were added to the list. Autos with two seats or more paid $1.50.

In 1868 when the Calistoga railroad and Lawley Toll Road both finished construction, they were well-used since quicksilver, or mercury, gold and silver were all being mined in the vicinity. These operations brought more miners, resorts (including hot springs) and tourists to the area.

Ida Clayton Toll Road, a narrow, less-used road, was in operation on Mount St. Helena in 1860. This road began as an access road from Knights Valley to the Ida Clayton Mine on the mountain’s western slope. Named for Mrs. Ida Clayton who was the toll keeper, this road led to the town of Kellogg. Kellogg was founded in the mid-1870s and was located where today’s Highway 128 and Franz Valley Road join. Ida Clayton tended a school that was soon constructed there as well.

Some may recall the large white Victorian home as you leave Lake County going into Napa County. This was Mountain Mill House constructed by Felix and Delia McNulty in 1881. Felix delivered the mail in the vicinity of Oat Hill Mine while Delia took charge of the stage stop. Not too many years ago it was removed since it was in disrepair.

With the flurry of mining, hot springs tourism and resorts that were springing up to encourage people up the mountain, a wave of stagecoaches and hence, robbers, were also in evidence. Stagecoach entrepreneur Bill Spiers ran a freight wagon business, stagecoaches and eventually motor buses in the area for around 50 years. His business was in such demand that it became the largest in California. He became known for running dependable and well-trained drivers.

Clark Foss was renowned for giving thrilling rides to the Geysers Hot Springs Resorts between 1855 and 1875, while other reinsmen or stagecoach drivers included William Fisher who ran the Nathan Coombs Stage Line and later the Clear Lake and Calistoga Stage Line.

The stagecoach robbers, called highwaymen, loved to pick on rich cargo hauled by stagecoach drivers or Wells Fargo stage lines. Here is where payroll from mines such as the Great Western, Bradford, Sulfur Bank, Oat Hill, etc. could deliver thousands of dollars from the quicksilver mines. They hid out in the wild country to perform their crimes.

Charles Boles, known as Black Bart, robbed at least 28 stagecoaches including Wells Fargo. Born in England and raised in New York, he served in the American Civil War. He chose a dual existence as a gentleman in San Francisco as well as a gun-toting robber. Although the shotgun he operated with was unloaded and he never robbed passengers, he did indeed rob many a stage of their money boxes. He was a literary man and sometimes left his victims a poem in the strongbox. Here’s one:

25 July 1878:
 
     Here I lay me down to sleep
     To wait the coming morrow,
     Perhaps success, perhaps defeat,
     And everlasting sorrow.
     Let come what will, I'll try it on,
     My condition can't be worse;
     And if there's money in that box
     'Tis munny in my purse.

Buck English, born in 1855 in Oregon, was another notorious stagecoach robber. English robbed his first victims at age 22. Of his many crimes that read like Western fiction, he robbed a stage at the foot of Mount St. Helena near a San Francisco mayor’s summer home and did not hide his identity while holding up six passengers. He died in 1915 of natural causes after release from prison. Life was not always easy in the good ol’ days.

Fans of author Robert Louis Stevenson know that his namesake park is over 5,000 acres on Mount St. Helena and rewards hikers with breathtaking views of the surrounding counties at the summit. The famous author of “Treasure Island” and “Kidnapped” honeymooned there on the mountain in 1880. He was inspired to write his mountain experiences in “The Silverado Squatters.”

“Its naked peak stands nearly 4,500 feet above the sea; its sides are fringed with forest; and the soil, where it is bare, glows warm with cinnabar,” Stevenson wrote. “Life in its shadow goes rustically forward. Around the foot of that mountain the silence of nature reigns in a great measure unbroken, and the people of hill and valley go sauntering about their business as in the days before the flood.”

Stevenson died in Samoa at age 44 in 1894.

Today’s mountaineers and sojourners can walk in historic footsteps while the magic of the mountain’s flora and fauna draws them to the summit. The state park is open sunrise to sunset. There are no fees at Robert Louis Stevenson State Park. The parking lot is a dirt lot on Highway 29 marked with signs.

Maps and Park Notes: Google Map to trailhead, Park Information Sheet, Park trail map, Printable list of suggested trails

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Kathleen Scavone, M.A., retired educator, is a potter, freelance writer and author of “Anderson Marsh State Historic Park: A Walking History, Prehistory, Flora and Fauna Tour of a California State Park,” “People of the Water” and “Native Americans of Lake County.” She loves hiking, travel, photography and creating her single-panel cartoon, “Rupert.”

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The views, opinions and data presented in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, position or perspective of Calistoga Currents or its editorial team. Any content provided by our authors is their own and is not intended to malign any group, organization, company or individual.

Our illustrations are produced through a multistep process of generative tools, digital sketching and photo editing, often starting from our own images or sketches.

CALISTOGA — A PG&E power outage that began the evening of Saturday, July 25, knocked out the backup generator at the Calistoga Police Department, disrupting the city’s 911 and non-emergency phone lines into the following week, according to city emergency alerts and Deputy City Manager Rachel Stepp.

The city issued a series of alerts over four days. The first, timestamped 5:21 p.m. Saturday, reported the PG&E outage and said power was expected back by 9:45 p.m. By Monday evening the alerts were reporting trouble with police phone lines and directing non-emergency calls to a substitute line while the department's own were down. The lines were back in working order by midday Tuesday.

Stepp, who oversees the city’s information technology, said the police department’s server room and 911 room lose power whenever the building does, and that the generator meant to carry the building had failed.

“We had challenges over the weekend with the generator at the police department. It overheated, so it wasn’t powering the building,” Stepp said in an interview. “Typically the power goes out and there’s an automatic switch that turns the generator on, but since that wasn’t happening, we were losing power for an extended period of time, which impacted the 911 room and all of our IT stuff within the police department, because that’s where it’s housed.”

“The generator would be the backup. Unfortunately, it was totally down, so it was like a perfect storm,” she said.

Emergency calls were not left unanswered. Stepp said in a written response that when an interruption affects the Calistoga dispatch center’s ability to receive 911 calls, those calls can be rerouted to the Napa Police Department dispatch center, which relays calls and information back to Calistoga dispatchers through a dedicated Calistoga police cell phone line. That procedure was used during the outage.

Stepp said the overheated generator has been repaired, and that a longer-standing problem is also being fixed: the building was originally wired so the backup generator could not power the whole department.

“We do have a backup generator. However, when that building was set up, for some reason, the wiring wasn’t done to power the whole building,” Stepp said. “That is also getting repaired.”

The city plans to correct the wiring so a portable generator can power the entire police building if the primary unit fails again, Stepp said, and is evaluating further measures for its emergency communications and critical facilities.

The police department’s generator is separate from the Calistoga Resiliency Center, the hydrogen and battery microgrid serving downtown. Stepp said the microgrid activates during a Public Safety Power Shutoff and does not automatically supply power during an unplanned outage such as July 25.

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Readers with information or questions can reach the newsroom at news@calistogacurrents.com.

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Tim Carl is a Calistoga-based photojournalist.

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The views, opinions and data presented in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, position or perspective of Calistoga Currents or its editorial team. Any content provided by our authors is their own and is not intended to malign any group, organization, company or individual.

Our illustrations are produced through a multistep process of generative tools, digital sketching and photo editing, often starting from our own images or sketches.

CALISTOGA, Calif. — The limb came down the day after the children had played beneath it.

Michele Carrasco Murray and her husband, Bill Murray, were in San Francisco preparing to board a flight to Ireland when their daughter called, shaken. A huge branch from the towering valley oak behind their Fairway Vista Court home had broken free and crashed into the backyard — the same yard where, a day earlier, the couple’s grandchildren had run a slip-and-slide across the artificial turf and a three-month-old had lain in its center.

“When we left to go to San Francisco ... our son-in-law took the 3-year-old grandchild to go see his parents, or else they all would have been underneath the tree when it came down,” Bill Murray said. “Probably three or four of us wouldn’t be here to talk to you right now.”

Their daughter was outside when she heard the crack, though not beneath the limb that fell.

“She just heard this crack, and she didn’t know,” Carrasco Murray said. “And then all of a sudden, it just came down.”

A Tree Called the General

The oak was old enough, and large enough, to have a name. Previous owners called it “the General.” Where the name came from, though, no one seems to remember — not even a longtime neighbor the family asked to help trace the property’s history. When the Murrays looked at the property in 2019, Carrasco Murray said, the tree is what sold her.

“This General was what attracted me to this property, and it’s been dear to my heart,” she said. “Over the years ... every time they had to take a branch off, I just wanted to cry.”

Just how old the tree is remains an open question. Carrasco Murray believes it is more than 400 years old; Jake Schneider of Pacific Tree Care, the company removing it, put it at somewhere between 300 and 400 years, with a ring count after removal to tell for sure. Either way, it is one of the largest oaks in Calistoga.

The Weight of a Limb

The scale of what fell is hard to picture until it is set against something familiar. Asked to estimate the weight of the fallen limb, Schneider said the comparison to a small car “would not necessarily be an exaggeration.”

He put the limb at easily 5,000 pounds and possibly as much as 8,000 — roughly the weight of a full-size pickup truck. He could refine the figure, he said, by measuring the base of the limb. Valley oaks are especially heavy in midsummer, he said, “because of the amount of water that they’re moving on a hot day.”

A Beetle Working From the Inside

The General did not fail by accident. Like a growing number of oaks across the North Bay, it was infested with the Mediterranean oak borer, an invasive ambrosia beetle barely an eighth of an inch long that has been spreading through Napa Valley. The beetle was first detected in North America near Calistoga in 2019.

“It’s probably been in this tree ... 10 years, maybe longer,” Schneider said. The beetle does not eat the wood, he explained. It farms a fungus, and the fungus is what kills the tree. “By the time we see very obvious signs, chances are good it’s been in the tree for maybe five-plus years,” he said. “That fungus has effectively plugged a portion of the vascular system, which then it begins to digest, and it rots. And that’s why we’re here.”

The borer principally attacks valley oaks and blue oaks, Schneider said, and there is no cure once it is established — only preventive chemical treatments that work early and do nothing to reverse damage already done. He likened the fight to the region’s long struggle with Sudden Oak Death: “This cat’s well out of the bag.”

Curtis Ewing, a senior environmental scientist in Cal Fire’s Forest Entomology and Pathology Program and one of only two researchers tracking the borer in California, said the insect kills indirectly, carrying a fungus that clogs the tree’s water-conducting tissue.

“They start at the top,” where water stress is greatest, “and then they work their way down,” he said.

Detection is hard because the beetles strike high in the canopy, and most early attacks fail until the fungus takes hold.

Ewing has monitored 300 to 400 oaks around Calistoga and northern Napa County for six years. Many have been infested that whole time and are still standing.

“We know the trees have already survived infestations for eight years or more, but we don’t know if they’re doomed,” he said.

It could be 10 to 20 years before the borer’s full reach is clear. The trees hit hardest, he said, are the already-stressed ones — along the flood-prone stretch of the Vine Trail near the water treatment plant, and among the big oaks south of St. Helena.

Pacific Tree Care will take the tree apart from the top down and chip nearly all of it on site, leaving the chips in place, then cut the lower trunk into slabs, cover them for two summers to exhaust the beetle’s life cycle and donate them to the fairgrounds.

Who Owns the Tree, and Who Answers

The General stands on the former Napa County Fairgrounds — a 70.6-acre property the city of Calistoga bought from the county for $2 million in a sale that closed in July 2024. Since then, according to the city, its Public Works and Fairgrounds departments have jointly managed tree care with the City Manager’s Office involved when needed and removals decided on a certified arborist’s recommendation.

The tree’s trouble was documented years before it fell. In February 2023, while the county still owned the property, a Britton Tree Services arborist examined the oak — nearly 6 feet across at the trunk — and found it healthy but structurally flawed, with a tight, weak branch union and decay from an old limb failure. He recommended crown cleaning, thinning to reduce weight and up to eight cables to brace the weak structure, at a cost of $10,400. Whether the county ever did that work is unknown, according to a timeline prepared by Fairgrounds Director Sheli Wright, and no cabling was visible on the tree or its fallen limb. Deputy City Manager Rachel Stepp said the city has no record confirming the bracing was installed, noting it did not take ownership of the property until July 2024.

When the city inventoried the fairgrounds’ trees during its 2024 purchase, the General was not flagged as a hazard, Wright wrote. The Murrays — who had asked the county, and then the city, to trim the limbs overhanging their yard, though they did not want the tree taken down — kept raising it. The city had the oak inspected in January 2025 and, as its canopy thinned, pruned again on Aug. 5, 2025, records show.

The limb fell on June 30, after the family told the mayor a smaller branch had crashed into their yard and damaged their fence. The emergency response was quick: Public Works employees Brandon Gray and Charlie Sakai secured the site that same day, Wright wrote, and the next morning Pacific Tree Care cleared the debris and set a temporary fence. What frustrated the Murrays came afterward. With the family away in Ireland, Carrasco Murray said, weeks passed with no word from the city — about 17 days, by her count — until she sat down and sent a formal letter. Only then, she said, did the city re-engage. Stepp said she had no additional details about any communication with the family during those roughly 17 days. She also said she was not in receipt of the Murrays’ letter, and that copies — along with records of the family’s earlier contacts, in 2024 — would have to be sought through the City Clerk under a Public Records Act request.

Pacific Tree Care’s new assessment found that the tree should come down, but the removal has since paused: Crews discovered a woodpecker nest, and under federal wildlife law the rest of the work waits until the birds leave. The city says that as the borer spreads, it expects to inspect susceptible trees more often, documenting problems and prioritizing removals by risk. The episode left the family assessing damage to their fence and landscaping and asking who was accountable for the hazardous tree.

What the Valley Can Do

The borer travels in firewood. Beetles spend the winter packed inside cut oak — “hundreds, if not thousands,” Ewing said — and emerge when the wood warms in spring, so hauling infested logs to a new place seeds a new outbreak. For a tree that may be infested, his guidance is to chip it, burn it, bury it or leave it where it falls, and keep the chips on site. Smaller is better — 3 inches at most, closer to 1 inch if possible — though “a few will always survive.”

Homeowners can watch for the early signs — a thinning, off-color canopy, small holes in the bark and sawdust-like frass piling at the base — and report a suspected infestation to the Napa County Agricultural Commissioner’s Office or the state pest hotline, 800-491-1899.

The beetle is already established across Marin, Sonoma, southern Mendocino, Lake and Napa counties, Ewing said, and has reached the Sacramento area, where hotter weather makes it more active. There is no proven cure; Cal Fire began its first trials of chemical treatments only last year, and their effectiveness is unknown. Asked whether the dying oaks raise wildfire danger, Ewing was measured: Oaks tend to hollow with age regardless of the borer, and because they grow scattered rather than in dense stands, they do not die in the sweeping clumps that beetle-killed pines do, so the added fire risk is real but modest.

Schneider, a 1997 Calistoga High graduate whose father, Joe Schneider, founded Pacific Tree Care in 1983 and died last year, has spent his career tending the area’s trees — which is what makes removals like this one hard.

“I hate cutting down trees I’ve taken care of for 30 years,” he said. “We all have a lifespan, but it’s still really unfortunate.”

He urged owners of valley, Oregon and blue oaks to have them inspected by a certified arborist, and soon. Symptoms tend to surface in July and August, he said, months after the springtime window when preventive treatment can still help.

“People forget; they’ve got short memories,” he said. “It’s important to have somebody who knows what they’re doing look at your trees.”

—

Tim Carl is a Calistoga-based photojournalist.

—

Read more about Mediterranean oak borer at Napa Valley Features

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The views, opinions and data presented in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, position or perspective of Calistoga Currents or its editorial team. Any content provided by our authors is their own and is not intended to malign any group, organization, company or individual.

Our illustrations are produced through a multistep process of generative tools, digital sketching and photo editing, often starting from our own images or sketches.

CALISTOGA, Calif. — Downtown Calistoga’s hospitality scene is shifting on several fronts at once. What follows is what the public record, city officials and firsthand observation confirm about the latest changes, and where the open questions remain, as of late July.

Theorem’s Restaurants Pause as a Parcel Merger Continues

Theorem Vineyards owns two Lincoln Avenue properties for a pair of planned restaurants: the 1888 building at 1364 Lincoln Ave., next to Eight North Restaurant, slated to become the tasting-menu restaurant Ilora, and the historic brick Odd Fellows building at 1343 Lincoln Ave., across the avenue, slated for the more casual TR Bar. In 2025 the winery also bought the fenced empty lot next door to the Odd Fellows building, at 1339 Lincoln Ave.

Greg Desmond, Calistoga’s planning and building director, said Theorem is seeking to merge the Odd Fellows building and that adjacent lot into a single parcel, and that the merger continues to move through the planning process. The restaurant plans themselves have paused. Desmond did not say when the city expects further direction from the owners.

The pause coincides with a change involving the restaurants’ chef. Erik Anderson, reported by the San Francisco Chronicle as the culinary partner on both projects, is now identified by Roseacre’s website and multiple San Diego outlets as culinary director of that La Jolla project, which is preparing to open. Anderson no longer appears on Theorem’s team page, though Napa Valley tourism listings updated in May still name him on both Calistoga restaurants, with Ilora slated for fall 2026. Whether he remains involved, and whether the restaurants are proceeding, delayed or canceled, is not established.

A Sparkling-Wine Lounge Targets September

As two restaurant plans stall, another is moving quickly. Bubbles Calistoga, a sparkling-wine tasting lounge, is planned for 1120 Washington St., with founder Gregg Lamer, the LLC’s managing member, aiming to open in mid-September. State Alcoholic Beverage Control records list Bubbles Calistoga LLC as the applicant for a Type 41 on-sale beer and wine eating-place license, No. 680360, which permits beer and wine but not spirits and requires a working kitchen. The application went pending July 9 and is under review at ABC’s Santa Rosa district office.

Lamer, who has more than 30 years in wine hospitality and has held roles at Roederer Estate and Scharffenberger and run a multi-winery tasting room in Sacramento, describes a concept built on quarterly rotating flights of about 20 sparkling wines by the glass — organized around domestic, Champagne and global themes — with small plates, a bottle club and an online marketplace. He said a fuller announcement is coming in the next few weeks. The storefront’s building-permit status was not available.

Now Open: Eight North and Five Senses

Two downtown restaurants that opened within the past year now appear fully up and running. Eight North, a wine-focused restaurant, bar and event space at 1374 Lincoln Ave., opened in November 2025 in the former Brannan’s Grill space, which had sat vacant for nearly a decade. It is owned by the mother-daughter team of Betsy and Sarah Lawer of Lawer Estates, whose Calistoga and Knights Valley vineyards supply much of the wine list, alongside a rotating selection of local wineries that lack their own storefronts. Executive chef Abby Burk, most recently executive chef at Sam’s Social Club at Indian Springs Resort in Calistoga and before that at Lucia at Bernardus Lodge & Spa in Carmel Valley, centers the menu on a wood-fired grill, with nods to the Lawers’ Alaska roots such as fresh Alaskan seafood. Since a soft opening, the restaurant has repainted its exterior, brought on a new general manager — Neil Robinson, previously the opening general manager of Fleetwood at the Calistoga Motor Lodge — and settled into regular service.

Five Senses, the modern Japanese restaurant at 1227 Lincoln Ave. from owner and head sushi chef Spencer Conaty, profiled by Calistoga Currents as it prepared to open, is now open, serving Wednesday through Sunday from 3 to 8:30 p.m. Conaty built the space around a 25-foot sushi bar and has said he priced the menu with residents in mind, though checks can climb toward the high end for items like bigeye tuna flown in from Japan. A 3 to 5 p.m. happy hour has become a favorite window for locals.

Calistoga Fit on the Move

Calistoga Fit, the gym and studio operation led by owners Donavan and Jacqi Almond, is relocating. In a press release provided to Calistoga Currents, the studio said it will open a temporary Calistoga Fit Training Center at 2025 Grant St. on Aug. 1, with more than 4,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor space for strength and functional training, personal training and group classes. The building is the former golf pro shop — known locally as the Pro Shop — for a course that remains closed. The release said the move is temporary, with a permanent downtown location planned to open in early 2027.

The studio has also partnered with Dr. Wilkinson’s Backyard Resort & Mineral Springs, at 1507 Lincoln Ave., on an expanded premium membership beginning Aug. 1. Premium members will get access to the resort’s geothermal mineral pools, wellness programming, discounted spa services and food and beverage offerings at the resort’s restaurant, House of Better. The arrangement replaces the setup at Calistoga Spa Hot Springs at 1006 Washington St., where the gym has operated with access to that resort’s pools; the release did not say why that arrangement ended.

The Almonds framed the change as unexpected but positive.

“While this transition came unexpectedly, it has created an opportunity to build something even stronger for our members,” they said in the release.

The Depot Reopens, in Part

The Calistoga Depot, the restored 1868 train station at 1458 Lincoln Ave., has reopened with a partial mix of tenants. The property is owned by Boisset Collection, the wine and hospitality company led by Jean-Charles Boisset, which runs the Calistoga Depot Distillery brand there; Michael Madden operates the site day to day and reopened it in April 2024 after an extensive renovation. On a visit Sunday, it was running as a bar, distillery and music venue, with wine tastings offered at times.

Earth & Sky Chocolates, run by Robbie Schmidt, appeared consistently open, and the site also houses the Sarmentine bakery, which Calistoga Currents has profiled. Several of the renovated railcars sat unfilled or open only intermittently. Built in 1868, the Depot is one of California’s oldest surviving railroad depots and a longtime downtown landmark, and which of the remaining railcars will fill, and when, is not yet clear.

A $40 Million Default Passes Its Deadline

The Calistoga Motor Lodge and Spa at 1880 Lincoln Ave. defaulted on a $40 million loan this spring. A notice of default recorded March 23 in the Napa County Recorder’s Office lists $40,983,711 owed, with RREF IV – D DLI Calistoga as lender. Calistoga Hotel Group LP, an entity of Eagle Point Hotel Partners, bought the property in 2015.

Weeks after the filing, the owners announced a multimillion-dollar expansion adding 50 rooms and an adults-only pool, and Eagle Point principal Stephen Chan called it a milestone. A representative declined to comment on the default when reached by the Napa Valley Register.

A notice of default opens California’s non-judicial foreclosure process and generally allows at least 90 days to cure before a trustee’s sale can be scheduled. That window closed in late June. Whether the loan was cured, the property changed hands or the case advanced has not been publicly reported, and the hotel continues to operate. Mayor Donald Williams has said roughly half the city’s general fund comes from transient-occupancy tax on hotel stays.

What Comes Next

Each of these is a story in progress. Calistoga Currents is checking state and county records for license, permit and foreclosure filings, and will report what it learns.

Readers with information about any of these projects can reach the newsroom at news@calistogacurrents.com.

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In the Calistoga Currents article “Under the Hood: Council Tables Fairgrounds Preschool Plan, Picks Grant Street for Repaving,” the Calistoga City Council considers the future of a community preschool, selects Grant Street for the next major repaving project, debates bike lanes and parking on Washington Street and agrees to revisit the city’s formula business ordinance. Three reader polls measure support for prioritizing Grant Street, preferences for balancing bike lanes with parking and views on updating restrictions on chain and formula businesses. The results favor repaving Grant Street first, redesigning Washington Street to preserve both bike lanes and parking and loosening the ordinance for small chains.

Question: The council chose to repave Grant Street next summer, delaying Washington Street. Do you agree?

Summary: Grant Street repaving decision. A majority of respondents (57%) support repaving Grant Street first because it is in worse condition and ready for work. Another 19% favor funding and fixing both streets together while 16% prefer Washington Street because it carries more use. Eight percent selected another option and no respondents supported fixing neither street. Total responses: 37.

Question: Adding bike lanes to Washington Street could eliminate at least nine parking spaces unless the street is redesigned at added cost. What should the city do?

Summary: Washington Street bike lanes and parking. The largest share of respondents (47%) favor paying to redesign the street so bike lanes and parking can both be accommodated. Keeping parking and skipping bike lanes and routing bikes to quieter streets each received 18% while 16% accept losing parking to add bike lanes. No respondents were unsure. Total responses: 38.

Question: Mayor Williams asked the council to revisit the 1996 ordinance restricting chain and formula businesses in Calistoga. What is your stance?

Summary: Formula business ordinance. The largest group of respondents (39%) favor loosening the ordinance for small chains. Another 29% want to strengthen it and close loopholes while 26% support clearer language. Only 5% prefer leaving it alone and no respondents selected another option. Total responses: 38.

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The views, opinions and data presented in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, position or perspective of Calistoga Currents or its editorial team. Any content provided by our authors is their own and is not intended to malign any group, organization, company or individual.

Our illustrations are produced through a multistep process of generative tools, digital sketching and photo editing, often starting from our own images or sketches.

CALISTOGA, Calif. — Kevin Eisenberg set up a folding table at the farmers market mid-morning on July 25, collected endorsement signatures and explained why his campaign signs still carry a strip of tape over the word “council.”

“I’m not going to waste those signs,” he said. “With a few pieces of tape and a marker, I can update them for mayor. And I feel the same way about city finances. We have real expenses. We don’t have to confuse that with wasteful spending.”

Eisenberg, who is finishing his first term on the City Council, said he decided several months ago to run for mayor after talking with colleagues.

“I really didn’t want to run against a lot of people on council that I really respect, and we came to a very amicable and positive decision,” he said.

An Open Seat and a Filing Window

Williams announced in a July 1 update to his email list that he would not run again, and confirmed the decision to Calistoga Currents. He is in his eighth year on the council and his fourth as mayor.

“I think term limits are a good idea, so I won’t be a candidate for another term,” Williams wrote.

He said he was honored to have served and framed the decision in personal terms, writing that he has only so many lives to lead and must move on to the next one. He also said he hopes his encouragement has drawn residents into local government who might not otherwise have participated.

That leaves an open contest for a seat Williams has held since 2022, when he won it by 27 votes over Gary Kraus, a 16-year council veteran and retired Calistoga fire chief, after trailing on election night. He was first elected to the council in 2018.

The nomination period for the Nov. 3 general election opened at 8 a.m. July 13 and closes at 5 p.m. Aug. 7. Napa County’s candidate guide provides that if an eligible incumbent does not file for an office by that deadline, other qualified candidates for that office have until 5 p.m. Aug. 12 — a provision that now applies to the mayor’s race.

Three Calistoga offices are on the ballot: the two-year mayor’s seat and the four-year council seats held by Scott Cooper and Eisenberg, whose terms expire Dec. 31.

Eisenberg said he was, as of the interview, the only person who had submitted papers for mayor. He said Cooper and Lana Richardson had taken out papers for City Council.

Vice Mayor Lisa Gift did not respond to questions about whether she intends to run for mayor. Her council seat is not on this year’s ballot.

From Los Angeles Classrooms to Calistoga Schools

Eisenberg grew up in Los Angeles and studied theater arts at UC Santa Cruz. He earned a teaching credential at UCLA and a master’s degree from Cal State Dominguez Hills. He said he began teaching elementary school in Los Angeles Unified around 1980, later serving as a mentor teacher, math coordinator and bilingual coordinator.

He said he became an assistant principal and then acting principal at 29th Street School near USC, where the campus ran a joint teacher-training program with USC’s education department.

He and his wife, Mary, also a teacher, decided to leave Los Angeles when their children were 3 and 6. Eisenberg took the principal's job at Calistoga Elementary School in 1992 and stayed 13 years before moving to Calistoga Junior/Senior High School. He has lived in Calistoga 34 years. His campaign literature says he was instrumental in creating the Family Center. He said his last year as a principal was 2012 and that he closed out his career with a year and a half back in the classroom.

The classroom return changed how he thinks about management, he said.

“If I were in charge of the world, I would require all principals to take a year of teaching every 10 years,” he said. “You can’t just say, ‘Do this.’ You really have to involve the teachers. They have to buy into your vision.”

The best part of the high school job, he said, was lunch duty, where he talked with students about their classes and their plans. The lesson he drew was that instruction works better when students have some say in it.

After retiring, Eisenberg served as Rotary district governor for Northwestern California, District 5130, in 2014-15. He later held Rotary Foundation posts, which he described as a coordinator role for the Western United States. Rotary club materials identify him as an assistant regional Rotary Foundation coordinator for Zones 26 and 27 and as District 5130 foundation chair. He received the Gary Barrett Lifetime Achievement Award for service to Calistoga in 2015.

Four Years on the Council

Eisenberg said the biggest surprises of his council term were the pace of local government and the disconnect between Sacramento and the cities expected to carry out state law.

“They pass laws without regard to how they would be implemented,” he said. “Especially in areas like housing, there are contradictory laws that are really impossible to fully implement because they are at odds with each other.”

He said learning the city budget took sustained study and called that knowledge essential for a mayor working with staff and colleagues.

Calistoga has no term limits, and the two men leaving and seeking the mayor’s office land in different places on the question. Williams cited his support for term limits as his reason for stepping aside. Eisenberg said he opposes mandatory limits but would hold himself to two terms as a personal commitment.

“I don’t believe you should be in office forever,” Eisenberg said. “I’m not going to say it should be enacted in ordinance because I think ultimately the voters should get to decide.”

His campaign handout credits his council term with improved infrastructure, the fairgrounds community survey, better city management, approval of the Calistoga Resiliency Center to supply power during PG&E planned shutoffs, completion of the Vine Trail bike and pedestrian path, local control of downtown sidewalks and approval of mobile food trucks. The Vine Trail’s 8.2-mile St. Helena-to-Calistoga section, which runs from Pratt Avenue to the Calistoga Depot, opened in August 2024. Roughly 33 of the planned 47 miles are open, and the full route is intended to reach the Vallejo ferry terminal.

Housing and the Missing Middle

Eisenberg said the state’s housing mandates leave developers wide latitude and that a mayor’s influence should be aimed at what Calistoga workers can actually afford.

“The missing piece is the middle income,” he said. “You could have two parents working good jobs and they still can’t afford it.”

The arithmetic behind that gap has been the subject of prior Calistoga Currents and Napa Valley Features reporting. Countywide, the median home price sits near $937,500, while median household income is roughly $109,000. Qualifying for the median home under conventional underwriting at current rates takes about $230,000.

His campaign handout frames workforce housing as a priority “within the limits of water and space” and argues that cutting out-of-town commuting by 10% or 15% would produce noticeable reductions in traffic and pollution. He points to his own neighborhood, the Palisades subdivision, as a working example of market-rate and subsidized family homes built together.

He said Calistoga has met its low-income housing obligations. The city’s certified 2023-2031 housing element reports that Calistoga met all of its regional housing needs allocation targets during the 2015-2023 cycle, crediting local financing programs, zoning changes and a comparatively small allocation.

He pointed to the school district’s plans for the Gallis property, along with city-owned land, as opportunities to steer construction toward teachers and municipal employees. Calistoga Joint Unified School District bought the 16.4-acre parcel off Highway 29 in 2003 for a campus that was never built.

Superintendent Audra Pittman said the school board is committed to setting aside 20% to 40% of the homes for district employees, with the final share to be determined in work with the city and the developer. The homes are planned for ownership rather than rental.

“The idea is that the homes would go to district employees followed by city employees, followed by other employees of businesses in Calistoga,” Pittman said.

Pittman said the district is working with Rivercrest to submit its application to the city for entitlements, after which it would sell the property to a developer that meets the district’s requirements to build and sell the homes. The city’s Planning and Building Department did not respond to questions about the project’s application record before publication.

Asked about second homes absorbing middle-market inventory, Eisenberg said the city has almost no legal authority to restrict who buys a house.

He named the Yellow Rose project, which predated his council service, as the community’s largest missed opportunity of the past decade. The Yellow Rose Ranch application, filed by The True Life Cos. for 46.3 acres at 2650 Foothill Blvd., originally proposed 175 homes in 2018, including 54 affordable apartments. The current application before the city would subdivide the site into 46 single-family lots, and the city’s project page says no public hearing has been scheduled.

Infrastructure and the Cost of Full Service

Eisenberg called infrastructure the city’s biggest coming challenge, arguing that spending on roads, water and sewer now avoids larger bills later. His platform makes the same point in operational terms: Repaving is the moment to replace the pipe underneath it.

The scale is documented. City staff told the council in January that Calistoga expects to spend more than $73 million on water and wastewater upgrades over the next decade, covering two treatment plants, a dam and reservoir, about 20 miles of sewer collection lines and more than 40 miles of water mains. More than 10% of the city’s water pipes and 14% of its wastewater pipes will be more than 75 years old by 2027, and about 70% of Calistoga’s water travels more than 65 miles to reach the city.

That work is carried by roughly 1,600 water customers and 1,300 sewer customers.

“We’re a full-service city, but we don’t necessarily have the population that easily supports the full array of services that we provide,” he said.

He said residents nonetheless want local police, fire and recreation services and are willing to pay for the control that comes with them.

On the economy, Eisenberg said Calistoga is tourism-dependent and that denying it would mean denying facts. With the wine industry under strain, he said the city’s wellness businesses and its recreational assets give it room to broaden its appeal. He cited the Vine Trail, the Oat Hill Mine Trail — the 8.3-mile former mine wagon road that climbs from the Lincoln Avenue and Silverado Trail junction toward Pope Valley — and Mount Saint Helena.

He said he does not expect additional resorts or lodging capacity.

“I think we are saturated on resorts,” he said.

Rewriting the Formula Business Ordinance

Eisenberg said his goal for the city’s formula business ordinance is a rule that applies uniformly and can be defended.

“My goal with our formula business ordinance is to make it enforceable with the rule of law and also to make sure that we don’t need exceptions — that we can make it applicable to all, enforceable, with no exceptions,” he said.

Pressed on whether the current ordinance is unenforceable, he said on the record that legal advice indicates it needs fixing to be fully enforceable.

The ordinance, Calistoga Municipal Code 17.04.132, dates to 1996 and bars chain businesses from the city. It has been enforced against major operators, including Four Seasons. It came back into public view this month after Sarmentine, a French bakery with three Sonoma County locations, opened July 8 at the Calistoga Depot at 1458 Lincoln Ave. The city told Calistoga Currents the opening was handled administratively, based on the applicant’s representations, with no use permit, no conditions and no Planning Commission or council review. At the council’s July 14 meeting, Williams called the ordinance “wanting” and directed staff to bring it back. Vice Mayor Lisa Gift has said the amendments under discussion would address small family-owned businesses with more than one location.

Eisenberg said the revision is not an opening for national chains.

“There is no feeling on council that we are going to bring in national chains,” he said. “You’re not going to see a Burger King in Calistoga. There will be no golden arches.”

The Job and the Pay

Eisenberg estimated he spends about 20 hours a week on council work. The city’s posted stipend schedule, adopted as Ordinance No. 765 on Jan. 19, 2024, sets council pay at $950 a month, with the mayor receiving an additional $550. Eisenberg cited lower figures in the interview.

“Nobody is doing these jobs for the money,” he said.

His council committee assignments, as listed by the city, are the Active Transportation Advisory Committee, the Green Committee, the Napa County Climate Action Committee and the Napa Valley Transportation Authority board. He said he chairs the county climate committee and that a mayor should expect to add assignments rather than shed them.

Eisenberg said he exercises a couple of hours most mornings, riding a recumbent bicycle because a car accident at 16 left his neck fused from C1 through C6.

The Fairgrounds and What He Tells Voters

On the fairgrounds, Eisenberg said he would support a comprehensive plan reflecting the priorities identified in the community survey, to the extent they are physically and fiscally feasible and would protect the grandstands and the three major buildings.

That position arrives as the property’s future is actively in play. Williams said the council recently authorized the fairgrounds revitalization director to invite proposals from developers and operators interested in returning golf to the site, and that some of those proposals may reach beyond the former course to include the race track, the Great Lawn and the two houses on the property. He said the invitation does not commit the city to golf and that nothing has been decided.

His platform closes on what Eisenberg calls Calistoga’s small-town character: a place where families can thrive, where civic organizations carry part of the community’s health and where the police and fire departments are funded locally.

Asked what he would say to voters who oppose him, he answered in five words.

“May the best person win.”

Asked what he would say to Calistoga’s Latino residents, Eisenberg answered in Spanish, saying he is with them, that Calistoga is one community with different needs in different parts of it, that his years in the schools left him knowing many Spanish-speaking families and that he believes he is a candidate who can unify the city.

“I love Calistoga,” he said. “I feel I have the experience and the background to be a good mayor, and I am absolutely willing to put the time necessary into doing a good job.”

Eisenberg can be reached at calistogakevin@gmail.com. His campaign website is calistogakevin.org.

Editor’s note: Lana Richardson, named in this story as having taken out nomination papers for City Council, is a volunteer with Calistoga Currents.

--

Tim Carl is a Calistoga-based photojournalist.

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The views, opinions and data presented in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, position or perspective of Calistoga Currents or its editorial team. Any content provided by our authors is their own and is not intended to malign any group, organization, company or individual.

Our illustrations are produced through a multistep process of generative tools, digital sketching and photo editing, often starting from our own images or sketches.

CALISTOGA, Calif. — “What’s a Soroptimist?”

That’s exactly what Reggie Wilford wanted to know when her friend Suzan Shaw asked her to be one. And now, a year after joining and taking part in all the group does for the Calistoga community, she says most people still couldn’t tell you who they are or what they do. In her new role of public affairs officer, she hopes to change that.

For starters, she said, they’re the ones who hold the annual Crab Feed the first weekend in March. They buy the crab, make the baked goods and staff the event with volunteers from within their membership. Donations pay for the wine and prizes. It sells out every year, but then what?

“Our mission is to develop and mentor women and make a difference in the lives of girls and women in the community,” Wilford said, “so a large portion of the proceeds after paying for everything goes toward scholarships.”

Each year interested students fill out applications that include personal questions such as what they have done to help their community and what they would do to help an unhappy roommate. Carla Surber, the college and career counselor for Calistoga High School, receives the scholarship applications from the students. She redacts all the names and passes them on to Monica Garibay, a member of the Soroptimist education committee who coincidentally works at the school. Garibay then meets with that committee, and they read the applications as a group against a rubric before deciding which ones best meet Soroptimist criteria.

“It’s very hard!” said Garibay, who takes part only as a resource to answer judges’ questions. “We have some amazing young students, and working at the school and having relationships with the students, I don’t want to be biased.”

This year’s CHS winners were Liliana Hernandez, Carolina Cuaxilo and Jasmin Robles. Winners from Palisades High School were Ella Marron, Mariana Sofia Martinez, Ytzel Cruz Cisneros and Jesse Vazquez Gonzalez.

The winners are then honored at a special ceremony for them and their families. Students can use their scholarships at either a college or trade school. The group also awards a “Live Your Dream” scholarship to a woman who has been out of school for a while and wants to continue her education. This year’s winner was Gabriela Garibay (no relation to Monica), a paraprofessional whose three years of helping in the classroom have inspired her to want to teach.

A few years back one of the high school winners was Monce Perez, who wanted to be an architect. During her first year at Sacramento State, she worked at an ice cream shop, but her schedule changed in her second year, making that impossible. When she explained to the Soroptimists what had happened, they gave her additional support. Now a college graduate, she is working as a designer to gather experience before she begins her studies for a master’s degree in architecture.

“The women from Soroptimist have kept in touch even now,” she said, “and my scholarship opened doors I didn’t know I could have.”

One of those was being able to enter a design competition in San Francisco that she won. This allowed her to go to Chicago for NeoCon, the “Super Bowl” of design competitions. While she didn’t win, she said the prize led her to see new products and make contacts and friends.

Soroptimist International Calistoga — this year celebrating its 70th anniversary — works with girls at Calistoga High School to help them develop and expose them to opportunities available to them beyond high school by way of membership in the S Club. A similar program at Palisades High School is called Pals. They recently held a session there where students learned how to conduct themselves in an interview and put together a resume. They also took a field trip to a roastery so they could roast coffee and make their own blend. The point, Wilford said, was to show them different types of jobs and help them grow as independent people.

“A lot of the females are brought up to marry, have children and stay home,” Wilford said. “That’s one of the reasons we try to mentor them on a regular basis to help them understand what they can do and give them the tools of independent thinking, leadership and career paths that are beyond just graduating from high school. It’s one of the reasons the scholarships we have been handing out for years is to help them financially to get to college.”

To that end, on Oct. 3 they will be collaborating with LatinaVIDA to host a daylong “Dream It, Be It” event at Napa Valley College. They will have speakers, moderators and a panel to help participants with brainstorming ideas, project planning and leadership essentials so they get excited about further education and know they can do it. While the day is targeted to young women, any student in the Napa Valley can come.

And there is so much more. Through their Read Aloud Partners Program they visit elementary school classrooms to read a book the teacher has approved and then provide a copy for each student to take home and share with siblings. Currently they read in 22 classrooms and purchase 500 books three times a year. They have given donations to Hearts and Hands Preschool, Napa Emergency Women’s Services, Collective Impact Program and UpValley Family Centers. During monthly meetings they invite speakers to help them learn, often about how they can further support community endeavors. They march in the Fourth of July and winter holiday parades alongside the young women they mentor.

For several years Wilford and her husband lived in Dallas and had a vacation home in Calistoga. Then three years ago, when they both retired, they moved here full time.

“I had a career in human resources in corporate America,” she said, “so for me getting involved in the community was super-important, and to be able to be around people and make a difference was important.”

She joined the Calistoga Cares Food Bank right away, and that’s where she met Shaw. You know the rest.

“We’re trying to stay present in the community so that people understand the good work we are doing,” Wilford said.

Adds Perez: “They aren’t just ordinary people. They have become my family. Anyone that’s lucky enough to have them in their life is really lucky, and if you have a chance to join them, do it — 100%!”.

—

Glenda Winders is a novelist, freelance writer and copyeditor for Napa Valley Features.

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The views, opinions and data presented in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, position or perspective of Calistoga Currents or its editorial team. Any content provided by our authors is their own and is not intended to malign any group, organization, company or individual.

Our illustrations are produced through a multistep process of generative tools, digital sketching and photo editing, often starting from our own images or sketches.

CALISTOGA, Calif. — With a flash of steel and a spray of foam, Hugh Davies and his crew sabered open bottles of sparkling wine Thursday morning and poured them over bins of pinot noir, opening Schramsberg’s 2026 harvest.

The ceremony happens where the work happens: on the concrete slab above the winery where fruit is tipped down into the press and beneath which Jacob Schram's 1870s caves run back into the mountain. Roughly 60 to 80 people filled the pad at 11 a.m. — cellar and vineyard crews, family, guests — standing three deep as bottle necks flew and corks skittered across the asphalt.

Davies said the winery is now in its 62nd harvest, counting from the 1965 revival of the property by his parents, Jack and Jamie Davies.

A Winery Above the Valley Floor

Schramsberg carries a Calistoga address, 1400 Schramsberg Road, but it sits outside the appellation that bears the town’s name: The winery lies southwest of town, up off Highway 29 on the eastern flank of the Mayacamas range, inside the Diamond Mountain District.

Schram planted the first vines here in 1868 and dug the winery's caves in the years that followed. The estate sat idle for decades until the Davies family bought it in 1965.

The drive to the winery still shows the scars of the 2020 Glass Fire. The blaze started in Deer Park on the far side of the valley, crossed the valley floor and burned through the Schramsberg property, opening views of estate vineyards that the forest had largely hidden. Davies told Napa Valley Features last year that the winery ran on a generator for 77 days off the electrical grid before the fire closed in around them.

Davies addressed the gathering in English and then in Spanish, without notes or staging — closer to a family speaking to the people it works with than to a promotional event.

Vice President of Winemaking Sean Thompson, who joined the sabering line in a red hooded sweatshirt, is working his 21st harvest at Schramsberg and his 35th in the industry.

A Blessing With Roots

Sabering, or sabrage, traces to the Napoleonic era, when French cavalry officers opened Champagne bottles with their swords. At Schramsberg the practice has been folded into a blessing of the grapes: A bottle is struck open, then its foam poured over the fruit on the pad, a gesture meant to bring good fortune for the season.

The fruit under the foam was 10 tons of pinot noir from Casa del Sol, Chris Dearden’s vineyard off Las Amigas Road in Carneros, Davies said. The Richburg Vineyard in Carneros, which served as the winery’s first pick for years, comes in Monday.

The ceremony was not the winery’s first fruit of 2026. Davies said Schramsberg picked Dutton Jewel and Dutton Perry on July 16 and 17 in the Green Valley pocket of the Russian River Valley in Sonoma County. The winery picked more Dutton Perry this week along with its Keefer Ranch block in Green Valley and its Horseshoe Bend Vineyard in Occidental.

Acid Running High

The fruit is arriving with more acid than usual. Davies said acidities have run 1 to 3 grams per liter above normal so far. The Casa del Sol pinot noir on the pad Thursday measured 18.5 Brix and 11.2 grams per liter of titratable acidity. A Dutton Perry lot recorded 18.8 Brix and 14.1 grams per liter, and a Dutton Jewel lot came in at 20.2 Brix and 12.8.

High acid at low sugar is the profile sparkling producers chase because it gives the finished wine its lift and its ability to age.

Davies said the vintage is unlike anything the winery has seen since 2015 in timing and in low yields, though he cautioned there is a long way to go. The mechanisms differ: 2015 was the fourth consecutive drought year and the vines put on very little growth, while 2026 was pulled forward by a warm March and early bud break followed by considerable shatter during bloom in pinot noir, especially in western Sonoma County. What the two years share, he said, is fruit depth and elevated acidity.

“I love the 2015s. They are bright and vibrant,” Davies said.

Chardonnay yields look light as well, Davies said, though closer to normal than pinot noir. Clusters are light and berries are small across the board, with more to learn as picking continues.

Steve Matthiasson, owner of Matthiasson Wines, described the same pattern from the valley floor, where bloom stretched across roughly six weeks.

“Very light crop, small clusters and surprisingly small berries, healthy vines, quality could be really good,” Matthiasson said, adding that he expected to start with whites in early August and sparkling fruit before that.

A Short Crop in a Soft Market

The ritual is celebratory. The economics around it are not. Napa’s 2026 crop is shaping up as one of the lightest in memory, a swing that eases years of wine oversupply while cutting income for growers who sell fruit by the ton. Vineyard consultants and growers interviewed by Napa Valley Features this month described wineries ending automatic contract renewals, walking away from signed agreements and pressing for lower prices — pressure a light crop does not relieve.

Family, Foam and the First Press

Monique Davies and two of the couple’s three sons, Nelson and Hughie, joined Hugh for a toast beside the bins, glasses of rosé raised over fruit still wet with sparkling wine. A third son, Emrys, is working in Idaho this summer.

Then the forklift moved in, the bins tipped and the juice ran toward the press. The pageantry lasted a few minutes. Davies said cabernet could finish as early as late September or early October at the current pace.

--

Tim Carl is a Calistoga-based photojournalist.

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The views, opinions and data presented in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, position or perspective of Calistoga Currents or its editorial team. Any content provided by our authors is their own and is not intended to malign any group, organization, company or individual.

Our illustrations are produced through a multistep process of generative tools, digital sketching and photo editing, often starting from our own images or sketches.

CALISTOGA, Calif. — Ever since she arrived in Calistoga, owning her own business was something Martha Torres thought of as the American dream.

Now, thanks to son Bryan Villa Torres, that dream has come true. Together they co-own Mis Raíces, an ice cream shop on Lincoln Avenue that she runs with the help of her daughters, Jacqueline and Jessica, and her granddaughter, Itxel Robles.

The rest of the Villa Torres family had never thought of starting a business.

“It was really my mom’s dream,” Bryan said.

Martha immigrated to California from Veracruz in 1990 and decided to raise her children in Calistoga. She began Martha’s Cleaning Services, working in Calistoga, St. Helena and Santa Rosa. But the ice cream shop beckoned.

The Mis Raíces property had passed through several owners over the years and was most recently known as Café San Marco. Bryan was in high school when his mom first learned the property was available. She was unable to purchase it then, but in 2020 she received another opportunity to purchase it, and he decided to help her finally become the owner. They have been running Mis Raíces for the past four years.

The family kept the same menu from the previous owner, continuing to have the same ice cream and espresso and the same vendors while removing pastries and adding their own recipes. Bryan invented the Mazapan Shake, Gansito Shake and Maria's Galleta Shake, which are customer favorites. Other popular flavors include banana with chocolate chips, pineapple coconut and pistachio.

Mis Raíces offers 10 ice cream flavors that they switch up occasionally. The source for their ice cream is Fruta in Sonoma County.

Martha said one of the surprising things about becoming a business owner was getting unexpected support from others, especially her children.

“Overall, the support of my children was crucial,” she said. “Sometimes I want to give up, but they tell me to keep going.”

Since this is a family business, everyone pitches in wherever help is needed. Bryan deals with finances and keeping equipment up to date. Martha restocks items, picks up the ice cream and helps out on weekends. Jessica deals with payroll. Jaqueline runs the shop full time and helps with marketing, and Itxel works at the shop, as well.

Bryan also works as a warehouse manager at Wine Service Co-Op, and Martha continues to run her cleaning service.

For an ice cream shop, the off-season can be a challenging time for business.

“There could be good days, and there could be bad days,” Martha said. “We have to communicate to get through the hard days.”

Bryan agrees.

“We all have to do our part and help promote each other so that we’re all around for many years.”

Martha and her family would like to give a huge thank you to the local businesses and residents as well as those from out of town who show support. This includes a Yelp recognition for top three coffee shops in Calistoga and a Best of the North Bay award from the North Bay Bohemian for Best Smoothie.

“We didn’t enter or anything,” Jacqueline said. “We just got a call and got the plate.”

In the future they hope to find a bigger space with more seating room and to expand their menu.

“I want this to be a place that’s like a family for people to be comfortable to come and eat their ice cream or coffee and for it to taste like a place they want to come back to,” Martha said.

Mis Raíces, at 1408 Lincoln Ave. in Calistoga, is open Sunday through Thursday from noon to 8 p.m. and Friday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. For more information, visit their Instagram @mis_raicescafe or call 707-403-5077.

—

Vanessa Herrera Ortega is studying journalism at Santa Rosa Junior College. She is a graduate of Palisades High School in Calistoga.

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CALISTOGA, Calif. — Desde que llegó a Calistoga, tener su propio negocio era algo que Martha Torres consideraba como “el sueño americano.”

Ahora, gracias a su hijo Bryan Villa Torres, ese sueño se ha hecho realidad. Juntos son copropietarios de Mis Raíces, una nevería en Lincoln Avenue que ella opera con la ayuda de sus hijas, Jacqueline y Jessica, y su nieta, Itxel Robles.

El resto de la familia Villa Torres nunca había pensado en iniciar un negocio.

“Realmente era el sueño de mi mamá,” dijo Bryan.

Martha emigró a California desde Veracruz en 1990 y decidió criar a sus hijos en Calistoga. Inició Martha ‘s Cleaning Services, trabajando en Calistoga, St. Helena y Santa Rosa. Pero la nevería la llamaba.

La propiedad de Mis Raíces había pasado por varios dueños a lo largo de los años y era conocida más recientemente como Café San Marco. Bryan estaba en la preparatoria cuando su mamá supo por primera vez que el local estaba disponible. Ella no pudo comprarlo en ese entonces, pero en 2020 recibió otra oportunidad de adquirirlo, y él decidió ayudarla a convertirse finalmente en la dueña. Han estado operando Mis Raíces durante los últimos cuatro años.

La familia mantuvo el mismo menú del dueño anterior, sirviendo los mismos helados y espresso y usando a los mismos proveedores, mientras eliminaron la repostería y agregaron sus propias recetas. Bryan inventó el Mazapán Shake, el Gansito Shake y el María’s Galleta Shake, que son los favoritos de los clientes. Otros sabores populares incluyen plátano con chispas de chocolate, piña coco y pistachio.

Mis Raíces ofrece 10 sabores de helado que cambian de vez en cuando. Su proveedor de helados es Fruta, en el condado de Sonoma.

Martha dijo que una de las cosas sorprendentes de convertirse en dueña de un negocio fue recibir apoyo inesperado de los demás, especialmente de sus hijos.

“En general, el apoyo de mis hijos fue fundamental,” dijo. “A veces quiero rendirme, pero ellos me dicen que siga adelante.”

Como es un negocio familiar, todos ayudan donde se necesite. Bryan se encarga de las finanzas y de mantener el equipo actualizado. Martha reabastece los productos, recoge el helado y ayuda los fines de semana. Jessica maneja la nómina. Jacqueline opera la nevería a tiempo completo y ayuda con el marketing, y Itxel también trabaja en el local.

Bryan también trabaja como gerente de almacén en Wine Service Co-Op, y Martha continúa con su servicio de limpieza.

Para una nevería, la temporada baja puede ser un momento difícil para el negocio.

“Puede haber días buenos y puede haber días malos,” dijo Martha. “Tenemos que comunicarnos para superar los días difíciles.”

Bryan está de acuerdo.

“Todos tenemos que hacer nuestra parte y ayudarnos a promocionarse mutuamente para que todos estemos aquí por muchos años.”

Martha y su familia quieren dar un enorme agradecimiento a los negocios locales y residentes, así como a los que vienen de fuera de la ciudad y muestran su apoyo. Esto incluye un reconocimiento de Yelp como uno de los tres mejores cafés en Calistoga y un premio Best of the North Bay de la revista North Bay Bohemian al Mejor Smoothie.

“Nosotros no escribimos ni nada,” dijo Jacqueline. “Simplemente recibimos una llamada y nos dieron la placa.”

En el futuro esperan encontrar un espacio más grande con más asientos y expandir su menú.

“Quiero que este sea un lugar que sea como una familia, donde la gente se sienta cómoda para venir a comer su helado o café y que sepa a un lugar al que quieran regresar,” dijo Martha.

Mis Raíces, en 1408 Lincoln Ave. en Calistoga, abre de domingo a jueves de 12 a 8 p.m. y viernes y sábado de 11 a.m. a 9 p.m. Para más información, visita su Instagram . —

Vanessa Herrera Ortega estudia periodismo en Santa Rosa Junior College. Es egresada de la preparatoria Palisades High School en Calistoga.

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The views, opinions and data presented in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, position or perspective of Calistoga Currents or its editorial team. Any content provided by our authors is their own and is not intended to malign any group, organization, company or individual.

Our illustrations are produced through a multistep process of generative tools, digital sketching and photo editing, often starting from our own images or sketches.

CALISTOGA, Calif. — Journalism has been a part of my life for over a decade, beginning during my time at Sonoma State University and continuing through hundreds of published stories covering sports, community events and the people who make local communities special. As I join Calistoga Currents as a sportswriter, I’m excited for the opportunity to introduce myself and reconnect with readers throughout the area.

I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in communications from Sonoma State University, where I spent three years writing for the Sonoma State STAR, the university’s student newspaper. My time at the STAR provided valuable newsroom experience and helped establish the foundation for my career in journalism. Covering athletics, campus news and feature stories taught me the importance of accuracy, thorough reporting and meeting deadlines while telling stories that resonate with readers.

Beyond journalism, I gained experience in communications and public relations through an internship with Taun’Toro Salsa, where I assisted with social media content, marketing initiatives and community engagement efforts — culminating in a capstone PR campaign for my senior project. The experience provided a broader understanding of strategic communications and audience development while reinforcing the importance of effective storytelling across multiple platforms.

Since graduating, I have authored more than 400 published articles covering a wide variety of topics, with much of my work focused on local sports and community-centered reporting. Throughout that time, I’ve had the privilege of covering championship teams, profiling local leaders and highlighting the stories that often go untold but help define a community. Pat Hampton gave me my initial chance at the Calistoga Tribune, and I am so grateful for her seeing me all the way through from “Jacob Turner, Intern” in my first published byline to “Jacob Tucker’s View From the Bleachers” becoming a recurring series around the San Francisco Giants, Golden State Warriors and other local professional sporting events.

In addition to contributing to the Mud City Times, my freelance work has expanded beyond traditional community journalism in recent years. I have written feature stories for Stockton Cargo SC, a pre-professional soccer club competing in the United Soccer League W League. Those assignments have included an initial season preview as well as in-depth profiles on players, coaches and club leadership, offering readers a closer look at the personal journeys and experiences that shape organizations both on and off the field.

While my professional experience has continued to grow, the principles that first drew me to journalism remain unchanged. The most meaningful stories are often found closest to home. Whether covering local government, community events, business developments or the accomplishments of local residents, I believe strong community journalism plays an essential role in preserving the stories, history and identity of a town.

I am grateful for the opportunity to join Calistoga Currents and contribute to its mission of serving the community through thoughtful, accurate and engaging reporting. I look forward to meeting new people, sharing important stories and helping readers stay connected to the issues, events and individuals that make Calistoga such a special place. Thank you for reading along.

—

Jacob Tucker covers sports for Calistoga Currents.

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The views, opinions and data presented in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, position or perspective of Calistoga Currents or its editorial team. Any content provided by our authors is their own and is not intended to malign any group, organization, company or individual.

Our illustrations are produced through a multistep process of generative tools, digital sketching and photo editing, often starting from our own images or sketches.

CALISTOGA, Calif. — A preschool searching for a home, two battered streets competing for one paving budget and a modular office building dominated a roughly two-and-a-half-hour Calistoga City Council meeting July 14 at the Community Center — before Mayor Donald Williams closed the evening by asking his colleagues to reexamine the ordinance that has kept chain businesses out of town for three decades.

All five council members participated, with Councilmember Irais Lopez-Ortega attending remotely from Los Angeles, where she was attending the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials conference.

Preschool Proposal Tabled Without a Decision

The council spent more than an hour on a proposal from Hearts and Hands Preschool to convert a roughly 580-square-foot house adjacent to the RV park at the city-owned fairgrounds, then voted 5-0 to table the item to a future meeting without giving staff direction.

The nonprofit, described by council members as the city’s last community preschool, is licensed for 30 children and currently serves about 15 to 17 between the ages of 2 and 4. It must vacate its current location by Sept. 30, and board president MaryAnn Salinger told the council the fairgrounds house is the only confirmed option left after months of searching, though two other possibilities are being explored.

“Our only option right now, in all honesty, is trying to get this facility and then looking for another temporary facility that we could be in between September 30th to whenever the house would be ready — otherwise we just shut our doors down on the 30th,” Salinger said.

Deputy City Manager Rachel Stepp told the council that converting the residence to an institutional day care occupancy would trigger commercial fire sprinklers, ADA improvements, new water service and other upgrades that staff roughly estimated at $300,000 to $400,000, plus about $35,000 in water infrastructure — costs the preschool, not the city, would bear. The house and its garage offer about 830 usable square feet; the preschool’s current license would require roughly 1,225 square feet indoors and about 2,250 square feet of fenced outdoor play space. Planning and Building Director Greg Desmond estimated permitting alone would take six to nine months before an approximately six-month construction period.

Salinger said the numbers did not surprise the board.

“We do have some funders that are ready to cut their checks as soon as we get an agreement,” she said.

City Manager Mitch Celaya recounted months of work with the preschool’s board, the county, the school district, nonprofits and local churches that produced no viable alternative. Both public speakers on the item opposed the fairgrounds site, citing cost, safety and the property’s emergency-staging role during wildfires.

Vice Mayor Lisa Gift argued for keeping the option alive, noting the house has sat unused since the city bought the 70.6-acre fairgrounds from Napa County in 2024.

“While we haven’t used that building in two years, we also have no immediate future plans to use that building,” Gift said.

Williams opposed the location, citing safety concerns near RV park traffic and a desire to preserve flexibility as the city develops a long-term vision for the property.

“We can’t be supportive of every organization in every way,” he said.

Councilmember Scott Cooper said he could not decide without input from the Fairgrounds Advisory Committee, which staff confirmed had not weighed in. Gift then amended her motion to table the item, which passed unanimously.

Grant Street Wins the Paving Contest — and a Move to Waive Old Debts

With Gift recused because she lives near Washington Street, the remaining four council members voted unanimously to direct staff to bid the Grant Street repaving project this winter for construction next summer, choosing it over a competing Washington Street project.

Public Works Director and City Engineer Derek Rayner told the council the city’s budget can support only one of the two collector roads this cycle. Grant Street, rated 22 on the 100-point pavement condition index — “very poor” — would cost about $1.8 million to rebuild along roughly a half mile from Garnett Court to the city limits, including a multi-use pathway required by a prior city ordinance. Washington Street, rated 33, would cost about $2.2 million for a quarter mile from Berry Street to North Oak Street and includes new water and recycled-water lines.

Washington Street carried a complication: a 2022 Safe Routes to School walk audit recommended Class II bike lanes along the corridor, but fitting them would eliminate at least nine parking spaces along a block and a half between Lake and Berry streets. Redesigning the street with “pocket parking” to preserve both could add $400,000 or more, Rayner said.

The Grant Street project carried its own baggage: deferral agreements dating to the 1970s that obligate several property owners — roughly four, by staff’s count — to help pay for pathway improvements along their frontages, a combined cost staff estimated at roughly $150,000 in 2022. The city attorney has advised that enforcing the aging documents would be time-consuming and uncertain.

Grant Street residents Emilio and Francis Tedeschi urged the council to choose their street and formally retire the agreements, saying former Mayor Chris Canning had told property owners years ago that the city would sunset them.

“We’ve been waiting 20 years for this project to get started,” Emilio Tedeschi said.

The city’s Active Transportation Advisory Committee also recommended Grant Street, with member Aaron Heth telling the council the multi-use pathway would be “quintessential to connecting the edge of town” with the fairgrounds, while Carlotta Sainato, program manager of the Napa County Bicycle Coalition, and several parents pressed for the Washington Street bike lanes. Other neighbors, including Jeffrey Stambor of Fourth Street, opposed any loss of parking.

Council members landed on a two-track approach: build Grant Street now and take the added time to design a Washington Street project that accommodates both bike lanes and parking.

“Both Grant and Washington have to be done. There’s just no question about it,” Councilmember Kevin Eisenberg said. “Let’s get two projects done in two years and get them done right.”

Williams said losing parking would be unfair to Washington Street residents after the city approved apartment projects along the corridor, and he noted that while a mayor’s verbal promise cannot waive the Grant Street agreements, the council can.

“We will bring back an item to your council about waiving the deferral agreements,” Rayner said.

Modular Office Approved Over Vice Mayor’s Objection

The council voted 4-1, with Gift dissenting, to take the first step in a roughly $503,000 project to place a modular office building behind City Hall, authorizing a $358,317.74 purchase order with Mobile Modular for the roughly 1,000-square-foot structure that would house Planning and Building Department staff. The remainder covers utility and site work; because the single utility quote exceeded the city’s $75,000 bidding threshold, staff will return with competitive bids for that portion. The project would be funded first from an administrative impact fund holding $409,978, with the balance from $225,299 in one-time California Intergovernmental Risk Authority Flex funds, money the city's risk-sharing pool provides for any use except personnel costs.

Stepp said the move would consolidate planning and building staff in one location, free space for finance staff and a small meeting room inside City Hall and address space constraints councils have debated for years. The building would displace six or seven parking spaces; the city’s 1915 jail, now used for storage, stays put.

Gift said she preferred converting existing space at the fairgrounds’ Tubbs Building.

“I have a really hard time just putting a Band-Aid on an issue and spending money right now today for what will have to be solved 30 years down the road,” she said.

Eisenberg voted yes but pressed staff on the building’s appearance, noting it would sit “in a prominent space next to City Hall” and saying he hoped it “fits in better with that environment.”

Mayor Calls for a Second Look at the Formula Business Ordinance

In the meeting’s final minutes, Williams asked the council to take up the city’s formula business ordinance, adopted in 1996 to keep chain and formula retail out of Calistoga — a review with potentially significant implications for the character of the city’s commercial core.

“The ordinance is wanting. It’s not serving us altogether. I’m learning this from the lawyers and from some elements,” Williams said, asking colleagues to authorize staff to “revisit it and see if it can be improved or updated so that it does what we want it to do.”

Council members voiced immediate agreement, and the item is expected to return at a future meeting. Williams did not tie the request to any specific business.

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Elsewhere on the Agenda

The council approved a consent calendar that included a not-to-exceed $725,000 contract award to CATS4U Inc. for the 20-million-gallon pond relining project, the Senate Bill 1 road maintenance project list for fiscal year 2026-27 and a canopy contract for the police department range. Celaya’s report noted upcoming Lincoln Avenue water main work between Cedar and Washington streets in August, a 48-inch drain installation on Grant Street tied to a subdivision project, the Flynn Creek Circus returning to the fairgrounds July 17-19, the promotion of Cpl. Mike Maselli to sergeant and the promotions of Justin Davis, Dario Martinez and William Lenhart to full-time firefighter. During open public comment, resident Charlotte Williams urged the council to pair any “missing middle” housing push with middle-income jobs, saying a Silverado Terraces salesperson had told her most of the development’s first 12 units — priced at $600,000 to $800,000 — sold as second homes. “There’s no guarantee it’s going to be built for working families,” she said. A 14-year-old Fairfield student also urged the council to create a Calistoga youth commission.

—

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The views, opinions and data presented in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, position or perspective of Calistoga Currents or its editorial team. Any content provided by our authors is their own and is not intended to malign any group, organization, company or individual.

CALISTOGA, Calif. — Since his move to Calistoga a year ago, George Weissenberger has been on a mission to discover the hidden beauty of Napa Valley — not the obvious grapevine vistas that everyone loves but the small treasures people fail to notice.

“I’ve never liked the old ‘stop and smell the roses’ expression because roses are already beautiful and smell nice,” he said. “People need to go past the roses – look at the leaves on the roses, look at the ivy behind the roses. It’s just as pretty if you look at it in the right way.”

In addition to overlooked items and elusive landscapes, he also looks for the unusual shot that will capture a given moment.

“Everyone else takes pictures of the sea,” he said. “I take pictures of the machinery in front of the sea. It may not be beautiful, but it’s the uniqueness of the situation. That’s what I want to remember: What was unique about that event or that place?”

Now he has collected his photos of these quirky items and offbeat moments into a website where others who appreciate beautiful things can peruse them and purchase prints if they see something they like. The song lyrics he writes — “little books of poetry that read like pages from someone’s diary” — are also available there. Some of them have been performed publicly.

Weissenberger’s love of taking photos goes back to his childhood, but he said that story had a sad ending. He grew up when slides were the common format, and over the years they have gradually disappeared and never made it to his adulthood. He doesn’t even have pictures of his mother from that period in his life.

Then as a teenager he went with a friend on a church scavenger hunt through San Francisco.

“The clues often referred to something you wouldn’t notice,” he said. “I remember one of the questions was, ‘What was the square footage of the 23rd floor of the Transamerica Pyramid building?’ The information was tucked away in a garden where people didn’t really go very much. Another was ‘What color was the tail of the flying fish?’ on the art painted on the side of a building near O’Farrell Street. That was another thing that got me interested in things people don’t ordinarily notice and how fascinating they are.”

On that same day he spotted a young woman wearing a metallic wig that reflected myriad colors. On a wire above her someone had tossed a pair of pink tennis shoes. While most people would have driven on, Weissenberger saw the vignette as a perfect photographic moment that he couldn’t resist.

After that he became occupied with work and family, so he did little photography except for taking pictures of his son, Harrison.

“Typical parent, I have a million pictures of my son growing up,” he said, laughing. “That was my photo interest then.”

Now 30 and a graphic designer living in Washington, D.C., Harrison credits his father with fostering his own creativity.

“I pride myself on my instincts and creativity, something I’ve come to realize my father has in abundance,” he said. “He always supported my creative journey, even before I decided art and design were what I wanted to pursue. He sent me to a summer camp that introduced me to digital art, he’d listen to and applaud my terrible 12-year-old viola recitals, and he gifted me my first professional camera, which I now use at work every day. I feel sheer joy to see his artistic talents really flourish in his retirement.”

When he moved to Calistoga, Weissenberger began looking at everything in a new way. He spent days out with his camera looking for good photographic angles and things that caught his eye but might not attract the attention of anyone else. One day he discovered a row of rusted mailboxes, and that led to seeking out many others.

“I have a style that is high-contrast with vibrant colors, and mailboxes lend themselves to that very well,” he said. “I look for light and shadows. I can shoot the same image six times a day in different lights, and it’s completely different.”

He doesn’t completely ignore “typical” Napa Valley pictures, but he takes them in ways he hasn’t seen them captured before. One, a red barn with vineyards and a tree, was shot at the Barrett vineyards. Weissenberger said the picture represents Napa’s agricultural past and everything that is beautiful about the area in one simple shot.

“When I go out just before harvest time, when all of the grapes are on the vines, I try not to get the shot of the row of vines with some grapes in there,” he said. “I took one shot in late fall when the leaves were red but the berries were still very blue. It’s an extreme closeup. I heightened the blue contrast so the berries stand out in a field of red.”

While he has used Canon, Minolta and Nikon SLR cameras in the past, he said most of what he does now is with his iPhone, which he said has an excellent camera. Then he manipulates the images with PaintShop Pro to make them clean and vibrant while always staying true to what was actually there. He adds contrast to draw the viewer’s eye to what is attractive about that particular shot, but he does not use artificial intelligence.

Weissenberger grew up in Walnut Creek and graduated from San Francisco State with a degree in broadcasting. For eight years he worked as a disc jockey for various radio stations, which he said was fun but didn’t pay much. “Serious” jobs in banking and working as a government contractor led him to work with the Federal Aviation Administration and U.S. Customs and Border Protection and took him to other parts of the country. He was in Virginia when he retired, and he knew he wanted to spend the rest of his life in Napa Valley.

“He sees things differently,” said Lisa Carey, an old friend who was glad to see him come back. “An artistic twist of a branch, an old medallion on a building downtown, an old, tattered barn and my favorite, the mailbox rows on the roadside. He sees a story with those boxes and a symbol of an era that’s trying to hang on. George has been able to capture the beauty here that goes beyond the vineyards.”

The house where he lives overlooks the Larkmead Vineyards.

“I put a couple of Adirondak chairs on my porch and have my coffee every morning looking at that view,” he said. “I feel very lucky.”

—

Glenda Winders is a novelist, freelance writer and copyeditor for Napa Valley Features.

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The views, opinions and data presented in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, position or perspective of Calistoga Currents or its editorial team. Any content provided by our authors is their own and is not intended to malign any group, organization, company or individual.

CALISTOGA, Calif. — Crime in Calistoga fell in 2025 by nearly every measure the state tracks, a local counterpoint to a year in which assaults rose across much of Napa County.

Calistoga police recorded 12 violent crimes and 37 property crimes last year, according to the California Department of Justice’s Crimes & Clearances data, which Calistoga Currents reviewed back to 2016. The property total was the lowest in that decade. The violent total, 12, was down from its 2023 peak of 16. And for at least the 10th year running, the state series records no homicide in the city.

The local decline tracks a statewide one. California’s violent crime rate fell 10.2% in 2025 and its property crime rate fell 14.3%, with every major category declining. The state cautions that not every agency submitted a full year of data, though Calistoga is not among those flagged for gaps.

A Decade Without a Homicide

Calistoga police recorded 12 violent crimes in 2025 — 10 aggravated assaults, one robbery, one rape and no homicides — down from 15 in 2024 and a decade high of 16 in 2023. None of the 10 assaults involved a firearm; in seven the weapon was hands, fists or feet.

The city’s aggravated-assault count has eased each year since 2023, from 12 to 11 to 10 — running against a county where assaults climbed.

Property Crime at a Decade Low

Property crime tells the stronger story. The 37 property crimes recorded in 2025 — 30 thefts, four burglaries and three vehicle thefts — are the lowest annual total in the 10 years reviewed, down from 53 in 2024 and roughly a third of the 2021 peak of 101. Theft from vehicles, which reached 21 incidents in 2021, fell to two. Burglaries, which ran 20 to 25 a year a decade ago, have totaled nine over the past three years combined. And shoplifting — which sister publications Lake County Features and Sonoma County Features have tracked rising in their counties — did not climb here: six incidents in 2025, unchanged from 2024 and down from a local peak of 12 in 2021. The one stubborn holdout is bicycles: Seven were stolen in 2025, about the same as most years in the series.

How It Compares, and What Got Solved

Measured against population, Calistoga’s 2025 violent crime rate works out to roughly 230 per 100,000 residents — about half the statewide rate of 431 — and its property crime rate to roughly 715 per 100,000, about 40% of the state’s 1,786. The rates use the state Department of Finance estimate of about 5,200 residents.

One figure stands out. The state credits Calistoga police with 12 violent crime clearances in 2025, matching the number of violent crimes reported — the department’s strongest clearance figure in the series. Clearances can include cases carried over from prior years, so the match is not literally a perfect solve rate, but it is unusual. Property crime clearance ran about one in nine, in line with the state.

Chief Matthew McCaffrey, who took over the department in March 2025, confirmed the counts square with the department’s own records and credited the clearance figures to his staff.

“Our staff look at every case as an opportunity to make a victim whole again and take an offender off the street and hold them accountable,” he said. “Crimes just don’t solve themselves; it takes a police employee who takes pride in their work, has a vested interest in the community they serve and the resolve to do everything they can legally do to solve a crime.”

The County Ran the Other Way

The county picture is more mixed. A Napa Valley Features analysis, “Rising Assaults, Revised Numbers in Napa County’s 2025 Crime Report,” found that while most property crime fell across the county, mirroring the state, assaults moved the other way — rising about 19% in the unincorporated county, from 127 to 151, and about 39% in American Canyon, from 94 to 131, with robberies up in both. Countywide homicides held near a recent high, 11 in 2025 against 10 in 2024 and three in 2023. Calistoga ran counter to that current.

Where the Lines Cross

The divergence is specific. Property crime eased on both sides of the city limits. Calistoga’s fell to a decade low; in the unincorporated county, larceny and theft dropped from 164 reports to 142 and stolen vehicles from six to four, though burglaries ticked up from 31 to 35. American Canyon saw larceny and auto theft decline as well.

Assaults are where the lines cross. Calistoga’s eased each year since 2023. In the two jurisdictions the Sheriff’s Office patrols, they rose — and in American Canyon, where deputies have policed under contract since 1992, arrests jumped from 516 to 704. Indexed against 2023, the Napa Valley Features analysis found a clean divergence in the county: assaults rising while property offenses fall. Calistoga’s numbers fell on both.

What the Numbers Don’t Say

In a town of about 5,200 people, percentages can mislead. Three incidents can swing a category 20% or 30% in either direction, so the multiyear direction deserves more weight than any single year’s move.

McCaffrey made a related point.

“Statistics only paint part of the picture, and the same statistic can tell two different stories,” he said. “If arrests are up, does that mean there is more crime, or are less experienced officers becoming more experienced officers who are becoming better investigators?”

He offered the sharpest example himself.

“I hope we go another decade without a homicide, but if we have one and our homicide rate jumps 100%, does that mean violent crime is running rampant? Of course not.”

There is a deeper limit worth stating plainly. The state series counts crimes reported to police, not crimes that occurred. A lower count can mean fewer crimes, fewer people or fewer reports — and the data cannot separate a real decline from a quieter one.

Bottom Line

By the state’s count, 2025 gave Calistoga its lowest property-crime total in the decade reviewed, a violent-crime total down sharply from its 2023 peak and a 10th straight year without a homicide. Against a county where assaults rose, the city ran the other way. The direction is unmistakable.

What We’re Following

This analysis counts what the state counts, but the data leave important questions unanswered. Does the decline in reported crime reflect fewer crimes, fewer reports or both? Amid heightened concern about federal immigration enforcement, are members of Calistoga’s immigrant community less likely to contact police? Do the state’s flat shoplifting numbers match what downtown merchants are experiencing? And which city outreach efforts have been effective in building trust — and which have not? We have put these questions to city officials and local business owners and will report what we learn.

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Tim Carl is a Calistoga-based photojournalist.

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Note: Crime figures come from the California Department of Justice’s Crimes & Clearances dataset and Crime in California 2025, population from the state Department of Finance. The city’s own 2025 figures are posted on the Calistoga Police Department transparency page. McCaffrey confirmed the department’s counts and answered questions in writing.

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The views, opinions and data presented in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, position or perspective of Calistoga Currents or its editorial team. Any content provided by our authors is their own and is not intended to malign any group, organization, company or individual.

Our illustrations are produced through a multi-step process of generative tools, digital sketching and photo editing, often starting from our own images or sketches.