New mayor Donald Williams hopes to preserve Calistoga’s small-town charm

Williams, who owned a hardwood flooring business for three decades and taught mathematics at Napa Valley College in the 1980s and 1990s, served on Calistoga’s city Council from 2018 to 2022 before being elected in November to fill the mayoral position held by Chris Canning for the past decade.

His flooring and woodworking skills coexist with his love of literature in the custom-built home library he designed with his wife Charlotte. The room features intricately designed wood floors and built-in shelving lined with classic literature — including many collector’s edition books he calls his “good friends.”

A self-described “book snob,” Williams loves sinking his teeth into 19th-century fiction, analyzing the text for metaphors and archetypes that he can apply to his life. Some of Williams’ favorite authors are Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope and Thomas Hardy. He’s currently halfway through the British novelist Evelyn Waugh’s World War II trilogy “The Sword of Honour,” which he described as abounding in English colloquialisms and clever vernacular.

His library’s bottom shelves hold a 15th-edition Encyclopedia Britannica that he’s not been able to part with, despite admitting to having little use for the obsolete set.

Steps away from Williams’ encyclopedia is a desktop computer, the only digital screen he regularly uses. He doesn’t own a smartphone and he and his wife don’t own a television. They get the Calistoga Tribune and the San Francisco Chronicle delivered to their home, and refuse to read “single-perspective news publications.”

Last week, his latest letter to the editor, “How journalists can help stop partisan rancor in 2023,” was published in the Chronicle. In the letter, he urges journalists to stop identifying politicians by party affiliation so as not to prematurely skew readers’ perceptions of their actions.

When Williams isn’t settling into to his new mayoral position, reading and rereading classic literature or penning letters to the editor, he plays racquetball and tennis — tennis for the social aspect and racquetball for a high-impact workout.

He balances the intensity of racquetball with gardening —this winter his kale has been thriving — in the front yard of his home, located blocks from the Napa County Fairgrounds that Calistoga residents will vote to acquire in a special election on March 7.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Danielle Wilde: You’ve lived here almost 50 years. How has the city changed?

Donald Williams: When I moved here, the sign on the highway said there were about 1,800 residents. That was from the 1970 census. And now the population is almost three times the size. It was small and rather rural, and I’m going to say seemed maybe a little bit backward or unsophisticated, coming from the middle of San Francisco. But it was still very pretty and quiet.

Now Calistoga is on the radar. You know, we’re not an unknown town. We’re at the top of the Napa Valley. Napa Valley is world famous now, and so the tourism is a big part of that picture.

We have the fortune, or misfortune, to be a part of this famous place that resonates with people. So there’s a sense of change. And partly, that’s what propelled me into politics because a lot of people really sort of liked that small town.

I’m not exactly expressing my own personal feeling here, but I’m just reporting what I’ve heard or what I sense that there’s some disjunction between the influx of visitors and Calistogans.

There’s disconnect between locals and tourists?

I wouldn’t want to overemphasize it. And I don’t resent tourism at all; I mean, I’m a tourist sometimes, and tourists are wonderful. Our local economy depends — at least half — on the tourist dollars. But, you know, it’s like, you have too much of any good thing and that constant, persistent promotion of the town as a tourist destination, I think, could be overdone.

Calistoga has its own sense of community. People don’t like thinking of it as just a place to visit.

Outside of the valley, Calistoga is known largely for its hot springs. Do you go?

No. Well, of course I’ve been to the buildings many times, but actually doing the mud, I only did that one time. It was fine, there was nothing wrong with it. Some people really groove on that, but it doesn’t help me relax. But my friend is the owner of the hot springs. I say, ‘You ever go?’ He says ‘No.’ He says, ‘I don’t like the mud.’ (laughs)

Congratulations on your new position, mayor of Calistoga.

How will you keep the small-town character while also fostering Calistoga’s tourism industry?

So tourism is a great thing. I have no problem with it. It’s when there’s too much of it. Right now, because things are a little bit calmer than they were before the (coronavirus) came, I think we’re at a pretty good place. So I would let the businesses and residents develop the town in its natural way, a way that’s already permitted. Same with the hotel there, the big empty space in the middle of town (that) used to be the airfield and the owners proposed a hotel addition there. They met all the zoning requirements and they didn’t ask for any exceptions or variances, and so I voted to support it. If somebody comes in and has a project that’s not conforming to existing codes and regulations and zoning, then I’m not going to be too enthused about that. Because it’s stretching the limits.

Can you share any strategies to meet the housing needs through the Calistoga housing element project? It sounds like that project may not align with your views.

Yeah, there’s a tension there. And we’re not unique in thinking that way. There’s lots of pushback from a lot of cities against Sacramento on that. And I’m not happy about Sacramento coming down and telling us we have to do this and we have to do that.

There’s going to be this reality too that we can’t accommodate everybody who wants to be here, and I don’t think that’s too radical an idea.

So we will do some. Our housing element has been submitted again to the state. I think it’ll be accepted and in that case, we expect to meet our goal.

There’s the argument that the people who work in town can’t afford to live here and have to commute long hours to and from work.

If I was a business, I would think twice about setting up shop here. If you set up a business, you want to know, is there is a customer base? Are supplies available wherever I need to operate the business? Is there a labor force?

If some of those things aren’t there, then I’m not sure how smart it is to set up a business in a place there’s not, you know, a positive prospect. If businesses want to pursue that, they will have to face those expenses of high labor or high housing costs. Those are all considerations that that suggest maybe we need to respect limits that are a part of this part of this locale.

Do you think a lot of Calistogans share this viewpoint of not wanting businesses setting up shop here?

I wouldn’t say I don’t want business to come in, but they should come with their eyes open. That’s going to have to be the individual business person’s responsibility to know going in that there are these challenges, whatever they are, and to acknowledge them and not hope that the town is going to change its essential constitution, essential identity, to try to accommodate them.

A lot of people have concerns about is the identity of the town being lost.

Do you think that’s part of why you were elected?

Two big resorts were approved 10 years ago and there were a lot of people who said they really wrecked our town. That perception has sort of lingered for a long time, and it’s not strong, you know; people don’t talk about it all the time, but the perception is that these resorts got pushed through, and the place just isn’t the same. So I don’t say that’s the sole reason I got elected, but it was part of it. I was the only one over the last four years who tried to make some changes, some actual written changes in our goals that would reinforce the concept of a small town.

The special election for Calistogans to vote on the acquisition of the Napa County Fairgrounds is coming up. Do you support the purchase?

Yeah, that’s a big deal for Calistoga. The council was unanimous in our support of purchasing the fairgrounds. And all this time the property was owned by the county of Napa. And in recent years, the county didn’t pay as much attention to it and some of the buildings fell into disrepair. And for Calistoga, it’s been an integral part of our town. There’s a lot of interest in resurrecting the property and resurrecting the fairgrounds and the county was interested in selling it.

So it was Chris Canning, the mayor — former mayor — and I, we were the representatives for Calistoga and we came to a deal that we thought the town could live with so we proposed to buy it for almost $16 million. And that offer is contingent on it being approved by the voters of Calistoga.

If Calistoga does acquire the fairgrounds, how will you use your platform as mayor to inform the repairs and the use of the property?

It’s a huge project. It will overwhelm City Hall, and that’s why, on top of the $16 million, we are asking voters to approve an additional $9 million. So $25 million is what we’re asking the voters to approve and that would be a property tax.

In the short term, we probably would want that money to try to fix it up and start to generate some revenue. And the uses? It’s open to the public to decide. The council will be the agency that decides but it will be a public discussion. Do we want to bring the golf course back? The racetrack back? I expect that we will. But that’s not a sure thing. We could do whatever we wanted with it as the owners.

Presumably, to diminish the property tax, we want to start generating some income, so I anticipate that we want to get the RV Park to operate again because that generated income.

As the first new mayor in a decade, what else are you hoping to accomplish?

Calistoga is in a pretty good place, so keeping the town low-key, unpretentious, unassuming. “World-class” is not an adjective that I think is going to be useful for us. You know, people who tell you, ‘Oh, Napa Valley,’ ‘world-class this or that’  – that’s not what I’m about, speaking for myself, and so (a) community that is safe, small, where people know each other, those are important things.

The involvement of the public is important for me, and in my four years on the council I tried to involve the public as much as possible. I think that’s also one reason that I got a lot of votes; people felt that they were more engaged.

Speaking of engagement, your predecessor Chris Canning, at his last council meeting, was thanked by a resident who applauded his engagement with Calistoga’s Hispanic community — roughly half the population. How do you plan to engage with the Hispanic community?

Well, socially there’s lots of people of Hispanic descent that I connect with; we play tennis with the guys and we’ll see people around the church. I’m at the Catholic Church, there are a lot of Hispanics there. It’s not a political thing.

I’m comfortable reading in Spanish, but I don’t claim fluency. Ahead if the election, when I went door to door, I would start off in English. Then I would speak Spanish, and people would indulge me. I know enough to converse.

I think that there’s — I’ll call it a shyness or maybe an uncertainty — among many, if they’re first-generation here, about how this democracy thing works, but going door to door I think helps them understand, to an extent. There are many Hispanics who are involved in the whole process. I encourage that.

It’s a wonderful population we have here. A really sweet, hardworking and compassionate population.

Have your opinions generally aligned with past councils? And do you anticipate them aligning with this new council?

Yes, they generally have aligned. Somebody counted and my votes, something like 95% of the time, were the same as the rest of the council’s. But all things are relative. And so I dissented from the previous council around 20 times or so, which is not that much percentage-wise, but compared to the previous decade, it was a big change.

We don’t all think the same after all. So my relations with the council have been very cordial, very respectful. So that’s been good.

Did your dissents resonate with your constituents?

You know, even though I’ll say approximately 5% of the votes were dissenting, that was enough to shake the boat apparently, because I got criticized for it and I didn’t get a single endorsement from the established politicians. Nobody.

Gary Kraus was also was running and he got endorsements from a lot of those people. But I was paying attention mostly to the people in town who cast the ballots and that seemed to make a difference.

Were you surprised you won the election?

No. I’ve been here for a long time. And yeah, I just have a sense of the community. I think I have, as they say, my finger on the pulse. And so I wasn’t surprised. There were some folks who really didn’t want me there. That was interesting. It was all legitimate. It was all fair. But I had made some votes that some people, some interests, really did not appreciate.

I’ll say broadly development interests. Business was concerned that I was going to be anti-business which is of course highly ironic, because I’m, like, a business person. I had my own business for many years and it was successful. But some of my votes were perceived to be threatening to business. And so there was, I think, a certain element there in town, they got nervous about that, you know, ‘Don’s going to be anti-business’ or ‘anti-tourism.’

Is there reason for them to be nervous?

I am very much a business guy. So I know about this, at least small business, which is mostly what we have here, and what it takes to make a profit, but I wasn’t just going to roll along with regular programs.

For example, I wasn’t going to be happy for the city to be spending money on advertising. The city this year allocated half a million dollars for advertising marketing.

I analyzed the data. For the last decade, the city has been spending various amounts of money on advertising and (transient occupancy tax) revenue fluctuated without regard to the advertising expenditure. So I said to counsel, ‘I don’t think we should spend so much on advertising.’ Some business people interpreted that as being anti-business.

I also proposed cutting a business license tax, which would save businesses generally over $100,000. But the council didn’t want to go with that. I proposed that we make grant money available to businesses that wanted to come in if they offered something that was different or unavailable here in town, and the council agreed with me on that one. And so we set aside a small amount of $25,000 to subsidize new diverse businesses.

So there were some pro-business things I did, but that didn’t get the traction so much as the as the vote against advertising.

What does your day-to-day as mayor look like?

I’ve only been mayor for a couple of weeks — I’m continuing what I did on the council, being in contact with people, which is part of my goal is connecting the city council with the people.

I spend an inordinate amount of time on the computer communicating with either staff at City Hall or with the public. The public will send questions, ‘What about 5G? I don’t want it.’ ‘How come the fairgrounds are going to cost this much?’ I’ll respond to those. Traffic speeding is an issue. I’ll be communicating with different departments.

I feel honored to be chosen by the folks to represent them this way. And humbled. You know, I don’t say that just as a cliché, but I really mean it. I will try to do my best to try to represent or address or speak to hopes and concerns.

It works for me because I don’t want to retire and say, ‘Well, what am I going to do when I get up this morning?’ Now I never have that problem. I wouldn’t mind doing some more reading but I still make time for it.