Land Use in Santa Barbara County Becomes Blood Sport
I have been a swingin’ and
a missin’ every mental curve ball thrown my way
as of late. I tend to believe I have been missing the pitches because what have
been thrown were actually spit balls!
Land use in Santa
Barbara County
is a blood sport. Typically, fatal wounds to a project are delivered by the call
for never-ending studies. Part of the mix includes lawsuits.
Lawsuits are used to call for a study or to challenge the results of a study. The
goal of studying things in Santa
Barbara County
is not usually motivated by a desire for information, but is simply a ruse to
kill the project overtime by encouraging the project proponent to lose heart or
the financial wherewithal to continue, death by arterial and fiscal atrophy, if
you will.
The Environmental
Defense Center
is just one organization that thrives on calling for studies. The grand dame of
studies is what is known as the Environmental Impact Report (EIR). Currently, over
one million dollars is being spent on an EIR to study the construction of a
relatively small number of homes in a place on the coast called Naples. Supervisor
Joe Centeno lived in Naples when he was a youngster! The Naples development was in
effect already studied to death a long time ago, when the Morehart
family sought to build a single house on the town site made official by a map
more than 100 years old. The case went all the way to the California Supreme
Court which recognized the legal validity of the town site to exist. This
means the County
of Santa Barbara can not
deny the rights of the property owner to build. Nonetheless, in deference to
the threat of litigation by the EDC and others, we are in the process of
studying the project to death.
Former Santa Ynez Valley Plan Committee Chairman Bob Fields
has become a leading proponent of studying things to death. He teamed up with
the former chief counsel of the EDC, Marc Chytilo, to
demand that the County’s Uniform Rules EIR, which was already completed,
go back for even more study. The County’s Uniform Rules govern what can
and can’t be built on Williamson Act Contract Lands. The Williamson
Act is a voluntary conservation program that serves to control non-agricultural
development on most all of the agriculture land in Santa Barbara County.
In exchange for modest tax breaks, farmers and ranchers must forego any non-agriculture
development on their property for a rolling ten year period. Even though
the county zoning laws would allow certain non-agriculture development, the
Williamson Act, which is interpreted by the County’s Uniform Rules,
prohibit such development. In other words, the Uniform Rules are more
restrictive than county land use policies. It is the best defense we have in
this county to control growth!
In reality, the Uniform Rules don’t create uses on agriculture
lands, they actually limit the uses as they are simply used to determine what
projects comport and qualify for the tax breaks allowed by the State. So
imagine my swing and miss when I tried to understand why Fields and Chytilo demanded that the Uniform Rules EIR be amended to
include an analysis of potential development projects proposed for lands that
are not even in the Williamson Act! For instance, they demanded the
proposed North County jail be studied as part of the
Uniform Rules Update. This project cannot and will not be built on lands
conserved by the State of California
solely for agricultural purposes. We are studying it nonetheless.
Picture my swing and miss when Buellton wanted to look at their end of the valley and ask the question, over
the next thirty to forty years, which direction is best for us to grow? To
which the community replied, we don’t need no stinkin’ study! The very same groups complaining
the loudest against the Buellton sphere of influence study of a few thousand
acres, are the same people who wanted the Santa Ynez Community Plan to
encompass a quarter of a million acres! That study would have included
lands half-way to Santa Barbara, Lompoc and Los Alamos!
Unfortunately, the Buellton City Council conceded on the
matter, so now we have lost the chance to have a comprehensive look at all of
our options, make the comparison of good and bad, and go from there. Thus,
our community will simply wait for the next installment to our piecemeal
approach to planning for our future; one project, one study, and one lawsuit at
a time.
Andy Caldwell is the Executive Director of COLAB. For
more information, visit the COLAB website at www.colabsbc.org.
