Forest initiative spurred by fear, not facts Monday, June 17, 2002 Napa Valley Register
By STUART SMITH

Mr. Harold Kelly, et al, how do you define "alarming?"
The opening sentence of your June 4 Napa Valley Register letter states "Napa County's watersheds are being deforested at an alarming rate." Tell us the rate of deforestation if you and your group know it, and let us, the people, decide whether it is alarming or not.
Or is it that you don't know and this is yet another example of the standard fear mongering we've come to expect from the extremists and dissemblers who are the Napa County environmental activists? This reminds me of the old adage: "Don't ruin a good story with the facts."
In pursuit of the facts, I recently went through the records at the California Department of Forestry, and as of June 11, 2002, there is only one (1) application submitted so far this year for Napa County and that applicant seeks to convert 22 acres of forest to vineyard. You should know this, Mr. Kelly, since you authored the Forest and Water Protection Initiative and are asking people and our Board of Supervisors to support and sign this initiative.
Does this single application for conversion of 22 acres out of the county's 500,000 acres justify your claim that deforestation is occurring at an "alarming" rate?
Furthermore, if you go back to 1991 when the Conservation Ordinance was first passed and take a longer look at the facts, you'll find that from 1991 to present CDF received applications to convert a total of 493 acres. Several of these applications have yet to be approved; the final approved acreage may be lower.
So here are the facts from the last 12 years: 500 acres have or will be converted from forest to vineyard; this represents 0.1 percent of the county and averages out to just over 40 acres per year. To put some perspective on these facts during this same period of time, 1991 to present, vineyard acreage has increased in Napa County by 7,300 acres.
Maybe I just see things differently than you and your group, but these numbers don't justify the use of the word "alarming" to me, and they clearly don't justify going to the extreme measure of the "initiative process" and taking control away from the California Department of Forestry.
While I grant that the conversion of forest to vineyards is unsightly for the first years or so, there is no basis in fact for your other overly broad generalizations, namely, that vineyard conversions destabilize our watershed and rob our ground water.
My 31 years of farming on the hillsides of this county, all of which I converted from forest, leads me to exactly the opposite conclusions from you. Vineyard conversions do not necessarily destabilize our watershed, and further, the conversion of forest to dry farmed vineyards may actually increase the ground water availability.
Letters to the editors of newspapers are one thing, but when you're asking people to change the law via the "initiative process" you'd better provide more than inflamed and specious rhetoric.