Kate Ford Replaces Laura Bridley on Santa Barbara County Planning Commission

With all the customary kind words that typically accompany a political push, County Supervisor Laura Capps removed Laura Bridley from her post as the county’s 2nd District planning commissioner this Tuesday and replaced her with Kate Ford, with whom Capps shared a political foxhole during their stormy tenure together on the Santa Barbara school board a few years ago. 

Bridley — a land-use planner with 40 years of professional experience who had been appointed to the position by Capps’s board predecessor, Gregg Hart — has one year left on her term. Capps thanked Bridley for her unstinting work on the commission especially in helping the county in crafting a new housing element at a time when new state laws severely restrict the ability of local governments to exert meaningful land-use control. 

For Bridley — who cut her teeth both professionally and politically when the local environmental movement fought hard for such controls — the political winds blowing out of Sacramento are not to her liking, and she has said as much in explaining her departure from the Planning Commission. 

But Bridley got seriously sideways with South Coast environmentalists last October when she voted in favor of Sable Offshore’s application to transfer title and permits from ExxonMobil, whose Santa Ynez Unit along the Gaviota Coast the start-up company purchased two years ago. With Bridley’s support, the Planning Commission voted 3-1 to approve that transfer, a highly charged administrative matter that still remains very much unresolved. 

Bridley argued at the time that Sable had satisfied all the pertinent requirements needed to approve the transfer. But since then, Supervisor Capps has led the charge to reverse the Planning Commission’s action over which the supervisors found themselves deadlocked 2-2.

Since then, the county and Sable have found themselves at legal loggerheads over just what a tie vote means. This Friday, the two parties will square off — yet again — in the courtroom of Judge Donna Geck to hash it out. Sable attorneys insists that the Planning Commission vote should legally prevail given the tie; the supervisors insist otherwise. 

While Kate Ford — Capps’s appointee — lacks Bridley’s years in the planning trenches, she has served on the Santa Barbara school board during COVID, also a time of intense ideological warfare over issues of race and sexual orientation. She has also served as school principal and a district superintendent and exudes a common-sense saltiness and comfort in her authority. 

Capps praised Ford for combining both the “microscopic” and the “telescopic” skillsets needed to excel in public service. Translated, Ford knew how to get seriously granular while also reading not just the room but the political moment. “Plus, she’s a heck of a lot of fun,” Capps said. 

Since Ford stepped down from the school board, she’s served on the City’s Harbor Commission, and her name is frequently mentioned when local Democrats find themselves eyeballing soon-to-be-vacant elected seats like those popping up on the Santa Barbara City Council. Ford herself has expressed a skeptical wariness about such entreaties. 

In the meantime, Bridley has landed a spot as a contract planner for the City of Santa Barbara and has been assigned the high-profile task of regulating the city’s largely underground universe of vacation rentals.