Sattui responds to boycott

Napa Valley winemaker Dario Sattui responded Monday to the outpouring of negative reaction to his criticism of firefighters’ pay and benefits.

In a letter posted on Facebook, Sattui said his criticism was aimed solely at the American Canyon City Council, which approved a new contract with the city’s firefighters on March 30. The contract allows existing firefighters to retire at age 50 with up to 90 percent of their salaries, according to a report published in the Napa Valley Register. New hires would be required to work until age 55 to receive the same benefits.

“My beef is not with firefighters or other safety personnel, I respect and deeply appreciate their hard work, the risks that they take for all our safety, and I honor them for doing so. My concern is strictly with budgets, not with the firefighters themselves,” Sattui said in his Facebook response. A copy of full his response is attached below.

North Bay firefighters, police officers and their supporters launched a boycott of Sattui’s wines over the weekend after the winery owner criticized firefighters’ pay and benefits in a letter to the editor published in the St. Helena Star. The winery’s official Facebook site and two Facebook pages promoting the boycott were flooded with angry comments from public safety workers and their supporters Sunday as word of the letter spread on social networking sites.

Sattui supporters rallied to his defense Monday, turning the winery’s Facebook page into a forum for a spirited discussion of pension benefits for public workers.

Meanwhile, the largest site promoting the boycott, titled Public Safety Boycott V Sattui Winery and Castello di Amoroso, was attracting new members at the rate of one every minute. By noon Monday, 1,685 people had joined the group, double the number from 8 p.m. Sunday.

A second Facebook site promoting the boycott titled, in all caps, V SATTUI WINE TASTES LIKE RECYCLED SEWAGE, had attracted 266 members.

- Ted Appel
Watch Sonoma County

DARIO SATTUI’S RESPONSE

1. Although it may not have been clear, my criticism was directed to the American Canyon City Council for they are the ones that have agreed to the salary and benefits for the firefighters that we clearly cannot afford. My beef is not with firefighters or other safety personnel, I respect and deeply appreciate their hard work, the risks that they take for all our safety, and I honor them for doing so. My concern is strictly with budgets, not with the firefighters themselves, as I indicated in my letter.

2 I was speaking strictly about American Canyon firefighters and their recent salary negotiations. American Canyon firefighters are represented by the same union that helped create the recent bankruptcy of Vallejo, the first time in California history that a city has filed for bankruptcy, and high pay/benefits for safety was a key problem that forced that bankruptcy.

3. In Vallejo many of the firefighters were making more than 200K a year, one made $357,000 annually, and the average compensation was more than $ 164,000 including incentive pay and overtime. These facts are a matter of public record. Check them out for yourselves.

This was a situation that got completely out of hand until the city went belly up. I fear that the county of Napa is heading in the same direction and that is why I felt I had to speak out as a concerned citizen. Napa cannot fix the roads, has chronically underfunded schools, has in some instances let sewage water that is not sufficiently treated spill out causing environmental damage because the county is so underfunded in its infrastructure needs that it cannot afford to fix it. Yet we have firefighters whose jobs are, according to them, identical in 90% of their duties to paramedics. But these Napa County paramedics make only about $50,000 a year with much lower benefits. The firefighters in Napa make about 140K on average and many make much more than that. The firefighters in American Canyon can retire at 55 with 35 years of service at 105 % of their maximum annual compensation for life. When are we going to achieve some kind of balance? Again these facts are a matter of public record.

4. I wrote as a citizen of Napa to my local paper about a local issue that I am concerned about, and it has nothing to do with my wineries. I care about what happens in my home town, and I care about the fact that we have schools that have overcrowded classrooms and homeless women giving birth under bridges downtown, and yet we have this local class of workers that are clearly overpaid and getting more all the time when we can’t even fund decent social services in this town. Let’s remember too that we have other professions that work hard, are very important to society and risk their lives for much less money: soldiers, police in the inner cities, nurses working the night shift saving lives, teachers making a difference in troubled areas. And don’t forget about the many thousands of volunteer firefighters that often get nothing or very little compensation for their selfless hard work and risking their lives. All I ask is that we have balance and don’t have civic expenditures we can’t pay for.

We need to bring things back into balance. I am sorry if some of you disagree with that, but I wonder how much you really know about what is going on with the extravagant budgets in Napa County, because that is what this is about, not any place else. These are the facts. You decide if you agree with my opinions.

Dario Sattui