Get ready for crowded beach parking lots, neck tan lines, salty post-nasal drip and unexcused absences from work and school-surf season is once again kissing the coastline of Santa Barbara. The all-too-short annual love affair between our beloved cobblestone points and northwest ground swells officially opened this month with a spattering of sublimely surfable days throughout the county, and the hungry hordes were on it.
Rincon Point’s septic-to-sewer conversion plan was approved last night.
Again revisiting the ongoing budget chaos plaguing the school district, the Santa Barbara School Board finally approved its unaudited figures for the 2006-07 school year at its meeting Tuesday night. Several questions remain as to how the board went from making more than $2 million in supposedly necessary cuts this past spring to having an apparent multimillion-dollar surplus just a few months later, in June.
There has been no such thing as easy progress at the Santa Barbara School Board in recent months. Last winter, it was a grueling and contentious salary negotiation process with district teachers that dragged on into the spring. That set the stage for an April decree from staff bean-counters that more than $2 million in immediate and heart-wrenching cuts would be the only way to get the district fiscally sound for the coming year.
In the ever un-sexy universe of land use policy, the transfer of development rights (TDR) concept is a never-before-seen though long-rumored aberration of beauty. Offering up the ability to “transfer” development out of sensitive, scenic areas into more urban landscapes without shortchanging the landowner or developer, TDRs have the potential to be the ultimate arrow in the Santa Barbara conservationist’s quiver. That is, of course, if an actual TDR protocol existed.
Like any self-respecting 25-year-old, Virgil Vasquez is looking forward to having his own place to live this winter in Santa Barbara, free from the daily presence of his parents. But unlike most folks his age, Vasquez can throw a baseball more than 90 miles per hour with pinpoint accuracy and, for most of this past summer, he was earning a paycheck doing just that as a pitcher for the defending American League Champions, the Detroit Tigers.
The debate returns to Transfer of Development Rights for project at Gaviota’s gateway.
After enjoying years of relatively hassle-free business, Santa Barbara’s medical marijuana scene is feeling the heat this week, with a distinctly ganja-scented cloud of uncertainty hanging over its future in the wake of a federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) letter-writing campaign.
After more than four hours of debate and repeated, strong-willed head-butting sessions among boardmembers, the spirit of compromise reigned at the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors this week. As a result, the long-overdue updates to the County’s Uniform Rules were finally approved.
Unseasonably wet and cold weather should hit this weekend.
