Napa on track to double parking citations issued in 2025
Parking downtown Napa? You better start following the rules. The city is doubling down on penalties for parking in loading zones and overstaying two-hour limits.
In January, the city of Napa hired a third parking enforcement officer after employing two for years. This means parking enforcement has ramped up to include weekends.
According to Tony Valadez, Napa’s compliance programs manager, 4,500 citations were issued in 2025, and 1,694 have been issued between Feb. 15 and April 15 this year. If that pace keeps up, by the end of the year, citations issued in 2026 will be more than double 2025 numbers. Valadez said that parking turnover, not income, is the driver behind increased citations.
Valadez told the Napa County Times that “turnover is important to our downtown merchants. They rely on those spaces for deliveries, food pickup and drop off and general shopping and dining.” The most common tickets are for overtime parking and parking in loading zones, he said, which disrupts business activity.
But some say more citations won’t help.
“Parking here is the absolute worst,” said Brittany Yargas, owner of the downtown Napa shop Amy Day. “The garages are always full, and half the parking garage is permit parking,” she said.
Street parking? Forget it: Moving a car every two hours doesn’t work for Yargas or her employees, who are typically alone in the shop, and Yargas said she accrued a number of tickets in the years she used to drive. Now, she gets dropped off at work by her husband, who works flexible hours.
An uptick in penalties might hit downtown workers the hardest. “Employees struggle,” Mayor Scott Sedgley told the Napa County Times. “People want to park close to their work. I tell employers to get permit parking for their employees — instead they go out and move their cars every two hours.”
Sedgley added that a recent push for property owners to add accessory dwelling units (ADUs) to ease housing needs doesn’t include a parking requirement, which could mean trouble for residential areas.
A year ago, Yargas looked into getting permits for her employees to park in the several garages nearby — the cost of a garage permit is $360 a year per person, which could be written off as a business expense — but there weren’t any permits left.
“It’s one thing if there are spots available. But when I looked there were no spots,” she said. The massive hotel construction project across the street hasn’t helped — now local employees are competing with construction workers for parking spots.
Yargas said that when BottleRock comes around, the situation is even more dire: multiple parking garages are reserved only for concertgoers. She said what would help is an employees-only parking lot for downtown Napa.
“We’re the ones down here paying the high rent to be here — parking is all we need,” said Yargas.
