The flood control project that has transformed downtown Napa is everything that’s out of favor in today’s spiteful political scene. It is complex and nuanced, forged by people from across the ideological spectrum working together. It combines old-school engineering with a far-sighted focus on environmental needs.

But here’s the crucial detail. It works, improving the local landscape and economy in ways no traditional solution could have achieved.

That success is relevant far beyond Napa’s boundaries, amid the attacks this year on California’s efforts to connect San Francisco to Los Angeles via high-speed rail, or the creed in Washington that environmental considerations are bad for business. For all the inevitable hurdles and sniping along the way, the projects that deliver the most benefits often are the ones that dare to imagine a future different than the past.

When this rainy season’s biggest storms hit the Bay Area in January, Napa’s year-old Oxbow bypass was put to the test. It passed with flying colors.

Waters from the Napa River surged over the willow-fringed bank of the bypass, spilling across young lawns and a plaza into recently restored wetlands, where they collided with the amplified rush of Napa Creek.

In other words, it performed exactly as predicted back in 1998, when Napa County voters approved a half-cent sales tax to fund their portion of a multifaceted flood control project through the city of 80,000.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had planned on doing business as usual — channeling the river deeper while fortifying its edges with rip-rap. The bypass, a 250-foot-wide by 800-foot-long path that relieves pressure on the river’s C-shaped bend through the aptly named Oxbow District, would have been a stark concrete culvert.

But groups ranging from the Sierra Club to the Napa Chamber of Commerce had a more ambitious vision: a 7-mile-long “living river” that would improve fish and wildlife habitat while adding trails and a downtown waterfront promenade. It also would protect 3,000 properties that were officially classified as vulnerable to flooding — a red flag that had dampened private investment as surely as waterways overflowed their banks in 2005. And 1997. And 1986, the worst flood of all in the decades since Napa had grown tight along its riverbanks.

“By the 1990s we had community leaders saying that the river was an important asset we had turned our back on,” recalled Dorothy Salmon, who led the fundraising effort for Measure A in 1998. “Not only that, the 100-year flood seemed to be coming every 10 years.”

The countywide tax measure passed with 67 percent of the vote.

Looking back, Salmon credits the success of the measure to the determination of proponents to build a community coalition. Environmentalists knew they wouldn’t gain the necessary two-thirds support from voters without the backing of local business. Business groups understood that a safe attractive river might make the long-moribund downtown more enticing.

“When I look at the angst and nastiness in Washington, D.C., I shake my head,” Salmon said. “The fact that we decided to sit down and listen to all sides really made this work.”

Since 2000, nine bridges have been rebuilt, including two entrances to downtown Napa from the east. They sit several feet above the bridges they replaced, so as not to impede the river when heavy storms and high tides converge.

New retaining walls downtown include elaborate walkways, replacing a haphazard collage of steep banks and blackberry thickets. At Veterans Memorial Park, the walkway widens to become a paved amphitheater — one the river can spill into when needed.

These elements are straightforward concrete and rebar, elements likely to be favored within the still-undefined $1 billion infrastructure package that President Trump has touted to spur job creation. Others have a green tinge. Nearly 900 acres of marsh habitat were restored. The clustered roots of redwood trees cut down to create the bypass now help provide refuge for fish in Napa Creek.

Make no mistake, the effort to remake the landscape wasn’t trouble-free.

Back to Gallery ‘Living river’ rejuvenates Napa, brings needed flood... 13 1 of 13 Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle 2 of 13 Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle 3 of 13 Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle 4 of 13 Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle 5 of 13 Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle 6 of 13 Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle 7 of 13 Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle 8 of 13 Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle 9 of 13 Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle 10 of 13 Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle 11 of 13 Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle 12 of 13 Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle 13 of 13 Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

























Oxbow bypass didn’t open until 2015, seven years after the project was supposed to be done. The budget soared past $500 million from an initial estimate of $220 million, due in part to the cost of purchasing 53 mobile homes and 44 structures along the river’s path.

Federal money slowed down after Republicans won a majority in the House of Representatives in 2010, causing pricey construction delays. Regulatory agencies took their time making sure the ecological and flood control aspects of the project, overseen by the Napa County Flood Control and Water Conservation District, were in sync.

“We knew there was going to be give and take, and there were going to be compromises,” said Robin Klingbeil of Napa’s Economic Development Division. “Every time, people worked through it.”

They also learned to endure potshots from Washington, where pieces of the project were portrayed as boondoggles. One example: In 2010, Republican critics spun $54 million for the project into a subsidy for, in the words of New York Times columnist David Brooks, “a Napa wine train that would have shepherded tipplers from one vineyard to another.”

When word spread on Jan. 8 that the river would top the bypass for the first time, Napa residents turned out to watch. They looked down from the new bridges above the bypass, or the back deck of popular Oxbow Public Market.

“Hundreds of people were there, from (campaign) veterans like me to parents with strollers. It was really exciting,” Salmon said. “Wet and rainy too, but we didn’t care.”

Don’t just measure the benefits by how well the bypass performed during Napa’s rainiest winter since 1983.

Take a walk downtown.

Restored older buildings house wine tasting rooms. Along the promenade, a faux-Tuscan complex stacks condominiums and offices above restaurants and shops. A boutique hotel opening later this year uses downtown’s “urban energy” as a selling point.

According to the city of Napa’s Klingbeil, there has been $550 million in private investment downtown since 1999, along with $248 million in public spending. Proceeds from the hotel tax have climbed four-fold, to $18 million.

A contrarian would say the rebirth is because of the proximity to gilded Napa Valley, and to some degree this is true. But it’s hard to imagine such a turnaround if large swatches of downtown were still in the flood plain, or if the city hadn’t added plazas and parks to the project.

“The river project gave everyone a sense of comfort with investment downtown,” Klingbeil said.

And while tourists spend money, the bypass is used by locals for such events as the city’s Earth Day festival last weekend. In the afternoon you’ll see teenagers on skateboards or families enjoying a picnic. Swallows shoot back and forth overhead, building muddy nests on the First Street bridge.

None of this would have happened without audacious goals. Or if the foes of the 1998 sales tax measure had carried the day with arguments like “you cannot trust our officials or their collaborators to do what they say they will do,” as one letter-writer proclaimed in the Napa Valley Register.

Big projects will always be attacked by cynics who say the endeavor costs too much and comes with too many unanswered questions. This was as true of BART and the Golden Gate Bridge as Napa’s “living river.”

California’s current target of scorn is high-speed rail. Look no further than our Republican congressional delegation lobbying the federal Department of Transportation to withhold $647 million for the project because “additional funding ... would be an irresponsible use of taxpayer dollars.”

In today’s America, there’s no shortage of partisan posturing that reduces our future to a political game. It’s easier to demonize opponents than to search for common ground.

But there’s no easy way to provide alternatives to airplanes and automobiles, the aim of high-speed rail. Or to prepare for other needs, like confronting the likelihood of sea level rise, a task the Bay Area responded to last year when voters approved a parcel tax to raise $500 million over 20 years for bay restoration and enhancement.

The flood control efforts along the Napa River didn’t just fix a specific problem. They have improved the larger quality of life along the way. That should be the goal of government whatever the political party — rather than to try and turn back the clock. Or do nothing.

John King is The San Francisco Chronicle’s urban design critic. Email: jking@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @johnkingsfchron