(Wine-Searcher) - The gloves come off in the battle between pro- and anti-development factions in Napa.

Bedeviled by traffic jams and rising housing costs, Napa County lawmakers and activists spent much of 2015 trying to hammer out a plan to limit wine industry growth. In the last week of the year, the county attorney may have casually overturned an agreement that was months in the making.

Now the county may not emerge with anything more than a requirement that wineries file a little more paperwork.

"It feels like it's lawless here," Ginna Beharry, vice president of Napa Vision 2050, told Wine-Searcher. "We don't know what permits are. [The county] recognizes and forgives violations."

Beharry said activists are tired of what they call "nice people advocacy", and vow to challenge at least one member of the Board of Supervisors who is up for re-election.

The issue is whether or not caps on development should apply to existing wineries. The powerful Napa Valley Vintners organization supported the months-long process of discussing growth limitations only with the understanding that existing wineries would not be affected.

A key feature was limiting the total percentage of a property that could be developed into buildings or parking lots, so that newly developed parcels would have to stay mostly agriculture: i.e., vineyards. Long after the deal had been made, the county counsel said that, despite the agreement, the standard would also have to apply to existing wineries.

This could mean, theoretically, that wineries might have to tear down buildings if they seek any change to their existing permit. What it really means is that the lengthy negotiation may come to naught.

Napa Valley Vintners spokesman Rex Stults told Wine-Searcher: "Our position is that existing, vested permit entitlements are not negotiable. They're not in play, even under new rules."

A 17-member Agricultural Protection Advisory Committee (APAC) met for months to come up with recommendations. It eventually got a supermajority of 12 votes for a program that it passed along to the Planning Commission and then the Board of Supervisors.

"The trouble we're having with this is, APAC did not have the benefit of the county counsel's perspective until after the fact," Stults said. "Many people wouldn't have voted that way if they had known (new rules would apply to existing wineries.)"

One of the recommendations that APAC made was called Proposal X: a matrix that would give limits, based on a parcel's size, for everything from the size of buildings and amount of wine that could be made to the number of weddings and other parties it could hold. The size and frequency of winery events have become major issues in Napa (and neighboring Sonoma County) because they lead to traffic tieups on narrow rural roads.