Napa County appoints new agricultural commissioner

A. Humberto Izquierdo has been hired as Agricultural Commissioner/Sealer of Weights and Measures for Napa County. He’s set to start next month.

Since 2016, Izquierdo has been agriculture commissioner and sealer or weights and measures for Alameda County in the East Bay.

He previously worked for Napa County, according to the Board of Supervisors’ report Tuesday. He worked in the agricultural commissioner’s office there from 2002 and became assistant agricultural commissioner there in 2014, the county report stated.

In Napa County, he will be replacing Gary Clark. The county declined to renew his contract.

Izquierdo has a bachelor of science degree in biology from the University of California at Davis and a master of science in management from Argosy University. His contract with Napa County is for four years. .

County agriculture – dominated by the wine industry which last year produced a crop valued at $750 million - has received attention both for a grand jury report earlier this year which stated a decades-old program giving property tax breaks to agriculture land owners suffers from a lax of oversight and puts the county in the role of “subsidizing a lifestyle” and the narrow defeat of Measure C, a voter initiative which would have placed additional watershed and oak tree protections on agriculture projects, like vineyards.