“I want a 90-point wine,” said Peter Koehler. His namesake winery has been around since 1997 and has produced moderate wines so far. But he recently decided to raise the bar and break into the stratosphere. “I want to be one of the top 20 wineries in the world.” And Koehler is just the man to make that happen.
A proposal to cut down hundreds of trees in Los Padres National Forest in the name of forest fire prevention is up for public comment once again this week.
In an effort to protect the endangered California Tiger Salamander population while simultaneously improving the difficult permitting process for projects in the salamander’s 12,000 acres of local habitat, the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors voted this week to develop a regional conservation strategy.
Santa Barbara’s seas will soon be a little less wild due to a law which will regulate anchorages and moorings for the first time in local history; the proposed law was unanimously approved on Tuesday by the city’s Ordinance Committee and is expected to receive final approval by the Santa Barbara City Council in April.
Halos have long adorned the heads of saints, but in the case of the late Robert Randall – the compassionate angel anointed by bad luck and good timing to launch the modern medical marijuana movement – the halos hovered in his eyes. Due to a rare type of glaucoma that began in his youth, Bob couldn’t see very well, particularly at night, when streetlights would be surrounded by halos. Halos are the common symptom of severe though painless pressure on the optic nerve, which is what glaucoma – nicknamed the “sneak thief of sight” – victims experience until blindness sets in.
In honor of Cesar Ch¡vez Week, some 40 students from S.B. City College SLAP (Student Labor Action Project) marched on their campus Monday.
Peter Matthies of Santa Barbara believes that everyone in the western world should be happy with their jobs. Moreover, Matthies thinks it is possible.
Nighttime
visitors haunt UCSB
A new free daily newspaper is due to hit the streets of Santa Barbara this week. Publisher and editor Jeramy Gordon was formerly the managing editor for a chain of six free dailies in the Bay Area, with the 10-year-old Palo Alto Daily News being the flagship paper. Gordon started managing the Palo Alto paper in 2001 while still attending Menlo College in Atherton. In 2005, Knight-Ridder bought the independent chaincirculation 55,000and sold it to McClatchy News on Monday. Gordon said he is the principal owner of the forthcoming Santa Barbara Daily Sound with a few out-of-town investors who are “friends and family.” He has hired one reporter and an advertising sales staff.
Developer Mark Lee and members of the Santa Barbara City Council have been playing a game of high-stakes chicken regarding the fate of Lee’s fiercely fought Veronica Springs housing proposal-slated for the west side of Las Positas Creek-and late Tuesday afternoon, both sides blinked. Lee managed to avoid all but certain defeat by agreeing to reduce the number of homes proposed from 23 to about 15. In a major reversal, Lee also agreed to build his access road through Alan Road rather than construct the entrance bridge he originally proposed, which would have spanned Las Positas Creek directly across from Elings Park.
