Start the Presses: In Napa County's Upvalley cities, temperament may matter more than policy

Dan Evans

Dan Evans

As of this writing, there is no permanent city manager in Napa County north of Oak Knoll Avenue. Yountville's Brad Raulston began his "administrative leave" last month, St. Helena ran Anil Comelo out of town in March, and Calistoga wished Laura Snideman "the best in her future endeavors" late last year.

Raulston may have gotten the rawest deal of the bunch here, as he's only receiving four months of pay for not working, while Snideman got closer to nine months in severance. The big winner, if you will, is Comelo, who is getting close to a half-million as a parting gift.

I'm being more circumspect about Raulston because that one is a bit more opaque. Instead of being asked to resign - as Comelo and Snideman were, triggering the severance clauses in their contracts - he is on paid leave, officially set to resign on Aug. 31. What that means for the final, full payout is still to be negotiated, I'd guess.

Across all three cases, though, the throughline isn't policy failure or even competence. It's temperament - and how quickly public trust erodes when people feel unheard or disrespected.

A lot of this is intentionally hidden behind the usual niceties and passive-aggressive language that make up most municipal HR announcements. Below is my best guess of what happened to Raulston, derived from conversations with folks familiar with the machinations in Yount-upon-Highway-29.

Four of the five members of the Town Council supported - maybe even strongly supported - the job he was doing. But then along came Yountville Commons, which stirred up the feels in the county's smallest berg, with the town manager becoming the primary target for local ire and frustration about the project.

As anyone paying even the slightest amount of attention knows, one of the easiest ways to get skewered in Napa County as a public official is to express support for an affordable housing development. Whatever is proposed, the comments tend to follow the same lines: You're an idiot, you didn't think things through, and unless completely changed, the project will crater housing prices, destroy the community and fail to solve the very problem it was built to address.

And those are the genteel ones. You should see what they say on Nextdoor!

To be clear: I'm not opining about the pros and cons of the Yountville Commons proposal, how the Town Council handled (or mishandled) things, or anything along those lines. That's just too much to unpack in the 1,000 or so words I get each week. Instead, I'm focusing on what the trio of Upvalley cities - both elected officials and residents alike - might consider in their next set of leaders.

As was stated in the announcement about Raulston, his wife is not well, and he is going to take time away from Town Hall to attend to her. This is less of an excuse than an explanation as for why he didn't feel the need to keep fighting. After all, there is more to life than getting pilloried on social media. But that's part of the story here.

So now what? As I wrote recently, I have a lot of empathy for the work that city managers do. It's a complicated, difficult job, made so by the odd - and sometimes toxic - mix of duties. You need to herd your quintet of bosses (aka the City Council) toward wise, rational and legal decisions without appearing to do so; serve as the public face of a municipality without outshining elected officials; and keep those electeds - some of whom may well despise one another - focused on solving their city's most pressing issues.

And, oh yeah, you also serve as chief executive of the entire city apparatus, dealing with the myriad issues that come across your desk each day.

The people who seem to be the most successful in this endeavor, then, are those who are almost Buddha-like in their equanimity. In Calistoga and St. Helena, at least, calmness and kindness did not appear to be the dominant personality traits of their most recent city managers.

We've rather exhaustively reported that Snideman had a reputation for belittling Calistoga city workers as well as residents. And Comelo, while liked inside St. Helena City Hall, suffered no fools outside its walls, and had his own rep of getting into heated discussions with all and sundry outside of them.

I don't know if Raulston had the same issues. And, in fact, in my brief interactions, he seemed pretty level headed.

Still, in each case, the breaking point wasn't a single policy decision. It was the accumulation of interactions that left residents - and in some cases council members - with the sense that they weren't being heard. In local government, that perception is often fatal, regardless of the underlying merits.

If you believe someone is, at their core, a kind person, you're more likely to forgive almost anything. If someone is seen as harsh or cruel, people are far more likely to assume corruption, malfeasance or simple stupidity - even when there's no evidence of anything beyond an honest mistake or a genuine disagreement.

Rarely are these executives fired for incompetence; instead, they are shown the door because they can't get along, sometimes with the council, sometimes with residents, sometimes with both. So, to the 15 elected members of the councils in Yountville, St. Helena and Calistoga, here's my plea: You need a competent, experienced leader. But you also need a kind one - someone willing to be nicer to people than they deserve.

If you're weighing between two roughly equal candidates, go with the nicer one. Skills can be developed over time. Temperament is harder to change - and often matters more in the long run.

I have another plea, this one to the 13,000-or-so residents of those cities: Start from a position of trust and openness - not because every decision is right, but because the alternative is a system where every disagreement becomes a character indictment. And that's a system that drives out the very people you're going to need to solve the next problem.

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This story was originally published May 14, 2026 at 7:23 AM.