If you’ve ever waited on a permit from the City of Napa and figured the planning counter was dragging its feet, the county’s civil grand jury has a surprise: the counter mostly wasn’t the problem.
In a report released June 8, the jury found that Napa’s Planning Division clears most applications inside the 30 days state law allows — and that it kept doing so even after losing its four most senior people in a single year and running the work on spreadsheets built by hand. The trouble the report flags isn’t the speed of any one permit. It’s how thin and how fragile the operation underneath has become.
Key takeaways
- The 2025-2026 Napa County Civil Grand Jury investigated the city Planning Division for six months and released its findings June 8.
- Within one year, the division lost two senior planners to retirement, its planning manager to a nearby city and its department director, who was gone for roughly six months.
- The city hired Tyler Technologies in 2022 to install EnerGov permitting software. Four years later, the report says, it still hasn’t gone live, and staff track projects on manual spreadsheets.
- The division recovers only about 60% of its operating costs from applicant fees; the city’s general fund covers the rest.
- Despite the perception of permit delays, the jury found discretionary applications averaged under 30 days. The downtown lots fenced off since the 2014 earthquake are stalled by their owners, not the city.
- The Napa City Council must respond within 90 days.
Four key people out the door in a year
The investigation started with a complaint about turnover at the top of the division and a public sense that building permits were taking too long. What the jury found on the staffing side was stark. In a single year, two longtime senior planners retired, the planning manager left for a nearby community, and the Community Resources and Development director — who oversees planning — sat vacant for about six months. An interim director was brought in from outside and has since been made permanent.
The bigger problem, the jury said, is that the city can’t get ahead of departures it can see coming. Under current hiring rules and budget constraints, Napa can’t recruit a replacement until the job is actually empty. So when the two senior planners retired at the end of 2025 — a date everyone knew — the search for their replacements didn’t start until they were already gone. One was kept on temporarily as a post-retirement annuitant to plug the hole. There was no succession plan to fall back on.
The report is blunt about who absorbed the strain: the people who stayed. Planning staff “did an excellent job keeping projects moving and minimizing the impact of these departures on city residents,” the jury wrote, and called every employee it interviewed “very professional and dedicated to the highest level of service.” The division is now recruiting to fill the open jobs.
Software bought in 2022, still not turned on
Napa’s planners don’t run on modern permitting software. They run on spreadsheets. Pulling a record or building a management report means going through files by hand, which eats staff time the report says the division can’t spare.
The city saw this coming. It hired Tyler Technologies back in 2022 to roll out a system called EnerGov, meant to move permits end to end and smooth out the customer experience. Four years later, the grand jury reports, the software still hasn’t been deployed. Much of what the jury recommends — better billing, an interdepartmental project tracker, faster handoffs between divisions — rides on finally getting that system live. One of its recommendations is simply that someone be put formally in charge of making it happen, with a September 30 deadline.
The permits aren’t the slow part
Here’s the finding that cuts against the complaint that launched the whole review. The jury pulled cycle times on every discretionary application decided over the past year — the judgment calls that can trigger hearings and environmental review — and found they averaged less than 30 days. The routine administrative permits, the bulk of the workload, clear inside the 30-day window the state requires, with few exceptions.
So where do the real delays live? In two places the planning counter doesn’t control. The first is legal. Turnover and long vacancies in the City Attorney’s office pushed Napa to outsource all of its legal work to an outside firm. That, the jury found, costs more and runs slower; interviewees described legal responses arriving late and so risk-averse they bred confusion and delay. The city is recruiting an in-house attorney. The second is coordination — planning has to hand work to Public Works, Fire, Building and Finance, and not every division shares the same sense of urgency.
The downtown lots aren’t the city’s fault
The review also took up a sore subject for anyone who walks downtown Napa: the prominent sites still fenced off 12 years after the 2014 earthquake. The old Main Post Office at Second and Franklin. The former Safeway at Clay and Jefferson — downtown’s only supermarket. The vacant First and Main lot across from Starbucks.
The jury’s verdict: don’t blame the Planning Division. The holdup “can be directly associated with the developer or landowner,” the report says. The city wants these parcels built and would gain tax revenue if they were, but it has few tools to push private owners to move. The jury did flag one policy that may be working against the city — developers can renew their entitlements up to three more times without showing any progress, which adds up to six years a property can sit approved but empty. It recommends the city revisit those rules and start regular reviews of the long-idle keystone sites.
What happens next
The grand jury made 14 recommendations, most due by the end of 2026: a real billing and time-tracking system, a department-wide project tracker updated at least twice a month, formal review timelines between divisions, and a written succession plan with cross-training so the next wave of retirements doesn’t hollow out the office again.
The Napa City Council is required to respond within 90 days under state law, with the city manager and the development director invited to weigh in. A city spokesperson, Jaina French, told the Napa Valley Register that Napa welcomed the grand jury’s “thoughtful review.”
Strip it down and the report reads less like an indictment than a warning. A small planning shop held the line on permits this year on the strength of a few dedicated people, hand-built spreadsheets and software that was supposed to be working by now. That worked. The grand jury’s point is that it might not work the next time the senior staff walks out the door — and it has handed the city a year to make sure it doesn’t have to find out.
Frequently asked questions
What did the Napa grand jury report find?
That the city Planning Division processes most permits on time but is strained by heavy senior-staff turnover, reliance on manual spreadsheets, permitting software that has never been deployed, outsourced legal services that slow decisions, and no succession plan. It made 14 recommendations.
Are Napa building permits actually delayed?
Not on the clock, according to the jury. Routine administrative permits clear within the state-required 30 days, and discretionary applications averaged under 30 days over the past year. The bigger drags on large projects were leadership turnover, outside legal counsel and coordination between city divisions.
Why are the earthquake-damaged downtown lots still empty?
The grand jury determined the delays trace to the developers and landowners, not the Planning Division. It noted that city entitlement rules let owners extend approvals up to six years without showing progress, which can leave keystone properties fenced off for years.
Does the city have to respond?
Yes. Under California Penal Code sections 933 and 933.05, the Napa City Council must respond to the report within 90 days. The city manager and the Community Resources and Development director have been invited to respond as well.
By Roger Coryell, Wine Country Gazette