The four candidates vying for the 2nd District supervisor seat struggled to define their differences on slippery issues of growth control, congestion management, and maintaining the South Coast quality of life at a Monday night debate hosted by the League of Women Voters and the Citizens Planning Foundation.
When Roger Heroux walks down State Street these days, he doesn’t pay much attention to the $30 million new parking garage sprouting up by the Granada Theatre or the chichi boutiques selling $350 jeans. He’s too busy worrying about the clerks working in Santa Barbara’s many tourist shops. “How many T-shirts do you have to sell to afford State Street rents?” Heroux wonders. “And what kind of wages can the owners afford to pay their workers?” Heroux knows that this county’s growing legion of low-wage service workers live just one hard-luck story away from the streets. If and when the bad times come, Heroux fears these workers will join the 6,000 homeless men, women, and children who now call Santa Barbara County home. And when that happens, they’ll become his worry.
Angry boat owners crowded the City Council chambers Tuesday to protest a proposed five percent increase in harbor slip fees, managing to delay action by the Santa Barbara City Council’s Finance Committee. The slip fee controversy arose after Councilmembers Das Williams and Helene Schneider expressed concern that the City’s Parks and Recreation Department was subsidizing the ostensibly self-sufficient Waterfront Department.
ENOUGH ALREADY: Some of the recent rants appearing in the News-Press have demonstrated that it is, in fact, possible to have too much of a good thing. The good thing, at least in theory, is the daily newspaper as a fiercely independent and intensely individualistic expression of its owner’s moral and civic passions.
GOOD NEWS: Some people just don’t know how to throw a party. With the umpteenth annual Earth Day right around the corner, I am bracing for the inevitable tsunami of doom ‘n’ gloom factoids proving, yet again, how we’ve screwed up the planet beyond redemption. Okay, maybe we have, but is this really a reason to be so negative?
When otherwise sane elected officials throughout the South Coast eagerly announced a few months back that they were embarking on a “10-Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness,” we assumed the worst.
Despite strong objections from Goleta Mayor Jonni Wallis, the Santa Barbara City Council took one small step toward extending its sphere of influence to include Eastern Goleta Valley-commonly known as Noleta-and an even smaller step toward outright annexation of the unincorporated territory between the cities of Goleta and Santa Barbara.
Maybe it didn’t have the drama of Casablanca’s last scene, where Humphrey Bogart, ever the cynical softy, tells the effervescently corrupt Claude Rains, “Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” But the outcome of last Wednesday’s Santa Barbara County Association of Governments (SBCAG) meeting was just as moving. On the table for discussion was how that enormous pot of gold known as Measure D could be renewed and divvied up within the county.
Jury selection commenced this week in the discrimination suit brought by former Santa Barbara gay police officer Ruben Lino against the City of Santa Barbara and the S.B. Police Department. Lino quit the force in September 2003 after three years as a sworn peace officer-and eight more as a scout and reserve officer-charging he’d been frozen out by his fellow officers after complaining about repeated homophobic remarks by a sergeant, Lino’s superior officer.
If bureaucratic studies are the stuff of dreams, the Santa Barbara City Council approved a $90,000 dream on Tuesday, paving the way for the future construction of a massive recycling facility capable of sorting out glass, scrap metal, cardboard, plastics, and other marketable recyclable materials.
