@SisterGloomy If you disable NPC Voting for NAPs in your game options then only your Sims can vote for which NAPs are active in your neighborhood. If you do this first thing in a game save then no other neighborhood in any world will have NAPs. You can vote to repeal any NAPs that are currently active in your neighborhood (or Shift + Click on the Voting Board and instantly repeal them). After that if your Sims do not vote for any NAPs then none will ever be active in your neighborhood (you'll still see a message for which NAP won at the end of the voting period but the NAP won't actually be active if you didn't choose it). With this setting selected in your game options your Sims can still vote and enact the Green Initiatives or Modern Development in Evergreen Harbor, as well as still being able to vote on the different sub-types for your local Community Space.
About the bugs, I'm pretty sure they're still working on fixing some of the gardening bugs from the game patch just before the EL release, so not all of them have been fixed yet.