In many small business circles, you’ll hear that the city of Santa Maria has a pro-business stance. You’ll hear that there is less paperwork, fewer restrictions, and reasonable fees required to do business in Santa Maria.
Santa Maria is business friendly—if you’re a mega-department store with a name that would make your grandma blush.
The city recently started a push to attract more tourists. They want to do this with events and shopping opportunities.
They obviously don’t want to attract high-end tourists with their discretionary income and propensity for spending on award-winning wines, craft beers, or gourmet food. Nah, forget that stuff. They want to attract tourists who are searching for a good deal on hardware and supplies, or weary freeway travelers looking for a bucket of hot wings or a chicken pot pie.
Never mind that the wine industry took the Santa Ynez Valley from a sleepy little cowpoke stretch of yellow ranch land surrounding a Danish oasis, to a destination for celebrity and wealth, as well as moneyed culinary connoisseurs.
Forget about how Lompoc’s Wine Ghetto replaced that city’s dying seed and flower industry and revived its tourism, garnering it a reputation as THE place to grow pinot noir grapes.
Santa Maria will stick with its coupon-clutching, barbecue-wing eating, freeway travelers. Not that there’s anything wrong with couponing. Living off the bit of seed that is a journalist’s salary you learn to strategically use coupons. But my point is, why aren’t they pursuing the things that really bring tourists—and their dollars—in to the city?
At its June 7 meeting, the City Council shot down Libertine Brewery’s appeal to add a tasting room to its location on A Street, an industrial area on the western edge of the city.
Part of the reason hinged on parking issues. So Libertine owner Tyler Clark got agreements from tenants in the same complex allowing the proposed tasting room to use their allotted parking after hours. That didn’t suffice for the council. There were also concerns about adverse impacts on neighboring businesses.
City Councilwoman Etta Waterfield, who said she was unfamiliar with the brewery that focuses on sour beers in small quantities, asked why the proposed tasting room would have late afternoon/evening hours and why their product is so great that people would go after work to taste.
There were also general concerns that a beer tasting room was an inappropriate fit for an industrial area. Well someone should inform the city of Buellton, which has benefitted from the addition of wine tasting, gourmet restaurants, and spirits distilleries in its business industrial area.
Not only that, the city of Santa Maria already has four wine tasting rooms in industrial zones, one in a commercial zone, and one brewery in an industrial zone. The city’s director of community development, Larry Appel, said that “it does happen in other parts of the city” meaning tasting rooms in industrial areas, but that those locations didn’t have the same parking issues.
During its meeting City Councilman Jack Boysen emphasized that the city of Santa Maria is business friendly. I guess that perspective depends on which side of the approval process you’re on.
The Canary hates chicken wings. Send tips to [email protected].
