Over 60 spectators filled the Board Hearing Room and lined the hallways of the County’s Betteravia Government Center in Santa Maria to witness and speak the public meeting. After hours of discussion, the commission rejected a proposal to initiate a study on the possibility of a new community in the Orcutt Hills. In a 4-1 vote, commissioners cited existing oil fields, loss of agricultural land and high fire hazards as reasons for the rejection. 

 

North Hills is a conceptual project that would potentially include up to 7,500 new homes, grouped in five or six villages. Each village could also include an elementary school, parks, health facilities and retail shops. The plan also proposes 70 percent of the 4,125 acres included in the plan to permanently be used for open space. Up to 2 million square feet of commercial/retail space would also be included in the plan. The development site is nestled in the hills between Highway 101 and Route 135, just south of Old Town Orcutt and Santa Maria. The land is currently used for cattle grazing along with oil and gas production.

 

Many supporters could be found sporting green and yellow pins stating “North Hills = Jobs.” While others cited the possibility of affordable housing, green building and future jobs in the community as reasons to initiate a study on the development cite. Of the 50 public speakers, 35 were in support of the project initiation and 15 were opposed.

Fourth District Commissioner Joe Valencia was the only commissioner to cast a supporting vote to proceed with a study of the development project.

 

“My feeling is that the Planning Commission should have done what it felt was right and it did,” Valencia said. “I also feel that we should have recommended the study to the Board for further study. At his expense, the developer was going to bring us information.”

 

Though the land owner, Orcutt LLC, a subsidiary of BreitBurn Land Company, presented a slide show that exhibited other projects where BreitBurn included existing oil productions into urban development sites in Beverly Hills and other cities, some commissioners were unmoved.

 

Second District Commissioner Cecilia Brown, who was among the people who opposed the project, said she could not envision oil production occurring in people’s backyards.

“I think it’s the right project, but the wrong location,” she said, “not in the middle of an oil field where it would be incompatible with urban development. Urban Development doesn’t belong with oil fields.”

 

Brown also said that the developer did not represent the true potential of the ag land correctly. The ag land, which is used for grazing, was referred to as “non-prime ag land,” but “non-prime” can mean a lot of things, and since it did not rain much this year, the potential of this land is not fully represented.

 

First District Commissioner Michael Cooney was also perplexed by the location of the proposed development.

 

“I completely agree with those who say, ‘We need to study the concept of creating a village.’ I don’t have a problem with any of that. I do have a problem with this location. I wanted to state my opposition upfront,” he said. “I didn’t want the developer to spend millions of dollars on a study I couldn’t give my vote in support of.”

 

Many people who were in support of the proposal proclaimed that further study would determine if the site would be viable for the project and without the study the county would never know.

 

“I think that the county asked these people to come up with a concept about villages and new communities,” Valencia said. “We weren’t there to debate or go over details; we were there to review the possibility for a study to go out for analytical review.

 

“We have no data whatsoever or no analysis about the project,” he added. “What we have is an emotional outcry. Emotional positions are important too, but when you’re trying to do an analysis on something, you have to go beyond that. The equation is solved when you put all the variables in there.”

 

Some long-standing community members of the Santa Maria and Orcutt areas also spoke out in favor of the proposed study.

 

Tim Bennett, fourth-generation resident, expressed his support for the study. “I watched my whole life, the interior valley and all the prime farm land go away and that still concerns me,” Bennett said. “The fact that we can build something slightly out of town in a more rural area is a major plus, both for the city and the occupants of that city and this general area.

 

“I am very much in favor of this study on this property. There’s no reason to not look at it. It’s the best thing in the interest of the community to find out if it’s feasible or not,” he added.

 

Commissioner Brown, however, not only opposed the project, but the idea of a study as well, explaining it would be a waste of time and resources.

 

“If we have ‘ifs’ right now, why should I signal to the developer to go ahead and study and see if the oil production structures are a problem? They are a problem. There’s no question about that,” Brown said.

 

North Hills LLC Partner Randy Wheeler expressed his disappointment over the commissioner’s vote.

 

“We thought that it was a very innovative project and we hoped the commissioners would at least want to study the project,” Wheeler said. “We strongly believe that this is a good place for the project and just because there has and continues to be some oil production at the location, we should have been given the chance to study those issues.”

 

North Hills’ location was not the only issue that was scrutinized. John Fuhring, an Orcutt community member called the project a “Leap Frog” development and said he wasn’t impressed with the various presentations by Peter Calthorpe and other people representing the supporting side.

 

“They even had a guy who flew all the way in from Washington D.C. to give a high-powered presentation,” Fuhring said. “And you know I think that’s really kind of wrong to get outsiders involved when this really should, at this point anyway, be a local issue. I don’t think this is really worth the Board’s time to consider this at this point. I think what they need to do is step back and try to do a smaller scale version contiguous with the community of Orcutt and see if it would be a viable project. But this thing is too grandiose to plop down all of a sudden in this area,” he said.

 

Regardless of the Planning Commission vote on the North Hills study proposal, Santa Barbara County still faces housing issues, Valencia said.

 

“The Board has a problem on its hands at this point,” Valencia said. “Because years ago the state mandated the County to have built 17,500 units by 2008, and it hasn’t done it.”

Though the Planning Commission is not going to recommend further study of the North Hills project and requested for its concerns to be sent to the Board of Supervisors, the Board is scheduled to decide on the issue July 10. The meeting could yield a number of outcomes ranging from approval to initiate a study of the North Hills development, dismissal of the entire concept and project, or a decision not to take any action.

If the Board approves the project for study, the process may take up to three years and could cost up to $10-15 million to complete, Wheeler said.

 

“We were so focused on the Planning Commission that we had not made any determination about our next step at all,” he said. “Assuming that our next step is to address the Board on July 10 or sometime in the future, and the Board agrees to a study, it would take years to complete.”