Napa Valley's Most Intriguing 2025: Meet the Residents Shaping the Community's Story Page 1 of 5
The following pages contain Napa Valley Life’s 24th annual list of Napa Valley’s most Intriguing People—residents whose interesting backgrounds and stories have made them stand out in the community and who are worth getting to know.
Photo courtesy of Chief Matt Ryan
A lifelong resident of Wine Country, Chief Matt Ryan’s connection to the region runs deep. As Napa County Fire Chief within CAL FIRE’s Sonoma-Lake-Napa Unit (LNU), he oversees the state’s largest unit—a landscape of rugged terrain, agriculture, and heavy tourism. “Preparedness in Napa Valley is a shared responsibility. Our firefighters, partners, and residents all play a role in keeping this community safe—because readiness isn’t seasonal, it’s year-round.”
He began his 24-year CAL FIRE career in 2001 as a Firefighter I in Napa’s eastern hills before transferring to Boggs Mountain Helitack. In 2007, he became a Fire Apparatus Engineer in Yountville, joining the Napa County Technical Rescue Team and mentoring through the Napa Fire Explorer Program. He rose through the ranks—Fire Captain, Battalion Chief of Training and EMS, Assistant Chief of Central Division Operations, and Deputy Chief of State Operations—before assuming command of the unit in July 2024. He also serves as Fire Chief for the Napa County Fire Department and the South Lake County Fire Protection District.
Forged by the 2017 North Bay wildfires and the 2020 Glass Fire, Ryan’s leadership reshaped readiness across LNU: enhanced Red Flag messaging, tighter evacuation coordination with law enforcement and public works, and expanded use of wildfire cameras and advanced modeling. He places equal emphasis on long-term prevention—defensible space, home hardening, and fuels treatments around at-risk communities and agricultural lands. He’s also leveraging AI-assisted detection and high-resolution forecasting for earlier warnings and sharper situational awareness.
Candid about wildfire complexities, Ryan stresses tight coordination between aviation assets and the ground power of dozers, hand crews, and engines, along with balancing readiness in a county where public safety and a thriving visitor economy go hand in hand.
“It is an incredible honor to serve as Fire Chief in the communities I grew up in and have dedicated my career to. Every step of my journey with CAL FIRE has been rooted in the North Bay, and I’m committed to protecting the people, property, and resources that make this home,” Ryan said. From rookie firefighter to leading California’s largest CAL FIRE unit, his career reflects steady commitment to lives, communities, and resilience amid unprecedented wildfire risk.
Photo courtesy of Terri Lynne Ricetti
The role encompasses aligning services for students from early intervention through transition to adulthood. Ricetti coordinates a complex ecosystem—teachers, paraprofessionals, psychologists, and speech and occupational therapists—while ensuring IEP quality, compliance, and family communication. Post-pandemic learning regression, staffing shortages in high-cost regions, and the need for inclusive culture are daily realities. Ricetti’s approach stresses coaching, evidence-based practice, and community partnerships.
Her story humanizes special education—how the district scales individualized supports, integrates students in general classrooms, and measures progress beyond test scores—while also addressing funding constraints, credential pipelines, and why allied health collaboration (OT, PT, behavioral) is central to success.
In 2022, Ricetti was named the Association of California School Administrators’ Special Education Administrator of the Year for California. The peer recognition was especially meaningful as education was reimagined post-COVID.
Ricetti, a Napa High School graduate, has spent most of her career in Napa Valley Unified, serving as special education teacher, supervisor, and coordinator before becoming executive director. In this role, she has reconnected with teachers who inspired her—now colleagues—to help the children of her classmates access their education, and worked alongside her niece and nephews as teachers. “The joy and trust in the relationships that you build is amazing,” Ricetti shared.