Bed and breakfast proposal heads to Napa City Council on appeal | #citycouncil

The planned transformation of a 1,200-square-foot, three-bedroom Napa house into a bed-and-breakfast inn failed to win over a majority of the city planning commission last month, largely because of a belief the house would better serve residents as a home.

But the B&B may become a reality after all.

Applicant Robert Devlin on April 17 appealed the commission denial. As such, the Napa City Council will consider it Tuesday night and decide whether to overturn the planners’ decision.

Still, the city’s planning department continues to oppose the bed and breakfast. Staff have determined the project at 962 Jackson St. doesn’t fit the intent of the city’s decades-old B&B ordinance, which was first put in place to allow for the restoration and reuse of large, historic but costly-to-maintain Victorian-era homes, according to senior planner Michael Allen. Napa tourism has also grown significantly since the ordinance was adopted, and that’s put significant pressure on the local housing supply.

“One of the reasons staff was not supportive of this is we felt this is best suited as being a single-family home,” Allen said at the April meeting. “Not to mention the fact that we have an overabundance of hotels, vacation rentals, and quite a number of bed and breakfasts.”

The recommended City Council resolution to deny the appeal notes that the home doesn’t appear to need substantial renovation, and that maintenance costs aren’t any more onerous than what’s required to maintain a typical single-family home.

“Unlike the typical historic Victorian, which due to its larger floor plan with numerous bedrooms, formal dining room, drawing room and other ancillary rooms, is larger than a modern-day single family may need and would be costly to maintain, the size of the subject home is typical, and in fact ideal, for its continued use as a single family residence,” the staff report notes.

The resolution also notes that though the building “began life as a Queen Anne cottage,” it shouldn’t rise to being considered historically sensitive due to the many changes and renovations the home has gone through. And the resolution adds that a conversion would harm the character of its neighborhood because it would worsen traffic, and because transient uses are usually more disruptive “simply due to a vacationer’s attitude.”

Devlin generally argues the reason for denial were “contrived” in his April 17 letter; his main reason why his proposed B&B should be gain council approval is that language in Napa’s ordinance and city code don’t spell out that a home such as his shouldn’t become a B&B. That argument was previously made in April by commissioner Paul Kelley, who said he couldn’t make a finding to deny the project based on the ordinance, and subsequently opposed the denial. (Allen, at that meeting, noted that the decision was up to the commission’s discretion.)

Devlin goes on to write in the April 17 letter that the reasons for staff opposition to the project weren’t made clear to him prior to the planning commission hearings.

“If someone had just said to me at some point that I had no chance or if the ordinances or even the new General Plan simply said these are the obvious and objective criteria so that an applicant could clearly see there is no chance, then I could have saved a lot of time and effort and money,” Devlin wrote. “But Commissioner Kelley is right that the ordinances and the General Plan don’t just say that.”

Devlin continued that he thought a two-bedroom B&B would create less traffic and fewer incidents that upset the neighborhood “than your average house with two kids and a barky dog,” and said that no B&B applications — or short-term vacation rentals — should have been approved based on the city staff argument that they remove rental housing stock.

“Maybe Napa would be in better shape if some stately Victorians had been converted to apartments instead of B&Bs,” Devlin wrote.

Also on Tuesday, the City Council will review an update to city code related to water use and conservation, as well as receive an update on staffing, among other items.