READ ‘EM AND WEEP: With so many famous people dying in recent weeks, it’s easy to see how Dustin Donica got lost in the shuffle. In the past 10 days alone, we’ve said goodbye to James-Mr. “Please, Please, Please”-Brown, former president (and the world’s most dangerous golfer) Gerald Ford, and Iraqi dictator and mass-murderer Saddam Hussein.
The fine print of a proposal designed to make it faster, easier, and cheaper for most Santa Barbara property owners to obtain the permits needed to install a home solar power system has come under attack from solar industry advocates. These opponents see the proposal as a Trojan horse that would undermine broader efforts-publicly embraced by City Hall-to encourage solar energy.
FIGHTING WORDS: I love the language of lawyers, and the more weirdly remote, the better. In a recent letter sent out to as many as seven local merchants, attorney Barry Cappello charged that the pro-union posters in their business establishments could generate “obloquy” toward News-Press owner and publisher Wendy P. McCaw-against whom the current Teamsters Union drive is directed.
UCSB professor David Siegel is the scientific equivalent of the seasick sailor: He’s a green-about-the-gills oceanographer. Twenty years after the fact, Siegel-now 47-still shudders to remember the horrors he suffered during a five-week scientific ocean-faring expedition with Scripps Institute back when he was a UC San Diego student.
FICUS FRACAS OR HOW LOWE CAN YOU GO? Recent events call to mind the ancient philosophical riddle: If a hedge is clipped in the wilds of Montecito without its celebrity owner’s consent and the News-Press isn’t there to report it, did it really happen? I can assure you I was not there last summer when, under the mistaken understanding that he had permission, Jim Neuman trespassed onto the property of actor Rob Lowe, his Padaro Lane neighbor, to trim the hedge that blocked Neuman’s million-dollar coastal view.
For developer Mark Lee, visits to the City Council chambers have been occasions for genuine dread. During his first visit, councilmembers pointedly told Lee to drastically redesign his controversial housing plans, proposed for the Las Positas Valley alongside Arroyo Burro Creek. The second time, the same councilmembers told Lee they liked his original plans for Veronica Meadows better. But this Tuesday, they gave Lee the five-vote supermajority he needed not only to annex his property into city limits, but to build 25 new houses.
Meeting behind closed doors last week, the Santa Barbara City Council voted 4-3 to simultaneously implement Measure P, the pot initiative approved by two-thirds of city voters in November, and to challenge its constitutionality in court. Because of this, Santa Barbara will be the first city in California to challenge the legality of a spate of statewide measures designed to undermine public and legal support for the war on drugs.
GILDING THE LILLY: It’s true I haven’t played baseball in a long time, but I still know a bean ball when I see one. And that’s exactly what Beanie Baby billionaire Ty Warner is throwing these days. But that’s to be expected, I suppose. I am referring to Warner’s latest and greatest public tantrum in which he threatened to sell Montecito’s abandoned and dilapidated Miramar Hotel rather than renovate it, as he recently promised.
For a carpenter, so the saying goes, there are few problems that can’t be fixed with a hammer and nail. Similarly, in Santa Barbara, where architectural review is practiced as civic fetish, there are precious few problems that can’t be solved by more intelligent design.
The bad blood between the Santa Barbara Police Officers Association (POA) and City Hall over contract negotiations-which are currently at a standstill-just got a whole lot worse. After a two-hour meeting at the DoubleTree Hotel, the union membership voted for the fourth time to reject City Hall’s “best, last, and final offer.”
