The spill
On a recent clear summer afternoon, Ross J. Rankin wears a short-sleeved white button up and black slacks. He owns and operates a tasting room in Santa Ynez called Imagine Wine. The business, which was once a mechanic’s garage, is quiet and comfortable—a spacious room decorated in hardwood and flooded with natural light.
Rankin speaks slowly and carefully, with a steady, probing gaze and a neatly trimmed white moustache. He’s worried about proposed changes to Santa Barbara County’s wine ordinance and the effects they will have on the industry.
As of June 1, the draft environmental impact report (EIR) and proposed changes to the ordinance were available on the county’s website. They represent a couple of years of public input, data wrangling, and hard work by the county planning department. Those proposed changes—which under strict parameters will allow tasting rooms, chef’s dinners, and a limited number of events in agricultural areas—have spooked both those trying to make money in the wine industry and local residents worried about their quality of life.
As Rankin sees it, the local wine industry isn’t growing out of control. In 2000, there were some 20 landed (with land) wineries in the Santa Ynez Valley AVA. By 2015, that number had grown to 30 landed wineries. Nationally, the number of landed wineries had jumped from about 2,000 to about 8,000 during that period—a fourfold increase.
“This doesn’t appear to be an explosion,” Rankin said dryly. He thinks that fears of rapid wine industry growth disrupting quality of life are overblown, and sees winery operators and residents rowing in the same boat.
“They don’t want Disneyland with rock concerts every night,” he said.
Still, Rankin is afraid that measures taken to prevent that rock ’n’ roll Disneyland will choke out small wineries through overzealous regulation. He said the permitting process already takes too long and costs too much money, which blocks small winemakers from entering into the business.
“The net result is that they’re picking on small wineries or potential wineries,” he said.
By his figuring, those small wineries represent about half the industry. Most of the wine market, however, is locked up by titans such as Constellation and Gallo, which leaves the thousands of mom-and-pop operations in the United States—about half of the total number of wineries overall—jockeying with one another for a measly 10th of the market. The proposed updates to the ordinance, he figures, will raise the bar even higher for the amount of time and money needed to get a small operation permitted and off the ground.
Rankin is particularly worried that discouraging those small wineries in the Santa Ynez Valley will drive wine away, and that as wine leaves, subdivisions will replace it.
“When you make [land] into housing, you’ve destroyed that forever,” he lamented, pointing to his native Orange County as an example. “And you can’t protect that if the land isn’t economically viable.”
Trucks in Ballard Canyon
Ballard Canyon isn’t steep and dramatic. It’s low and rolling, with gently rounded hills spilling out against the crinkled backdrop of the Santa Ynez Mountains. The road that winds through it is faded and cracked, the asphalt more gray than black, with balding sections and bumpy potholes.
Ostensibly, it’s a two-lane affair, although the lane line, for the most part, has been ground away by car tires and faded through thousands of sunny days. It climbs and plunges; it twists this way and that. Blind corners abound, and on the straights cars creep out from long driveways with varying degrees of caution.
The residents along Ballard Canyon Road, like Rankin, are worried about subdivisions. They, too, think that the draft EIR put out by the county has serious flaws.
When it comes to their quiet neighborhood of ranchland parcels, however, they feel threatened—not because the ordinance will disrupt the wine industry, but because they feel it will spur wine tourism to run through their canyon unchecked. They fear tasting rooms will start to appear where they weren’t allowed before.
“We don’t feel it’s appropriate, compatible, feasible, or safe,” said resident Leigh Layman.
The basic fear is this: more trucks. Truckload after truckload. The 18 vineyards (with less than a handful of tasting rooms) in the canyon already truck raw materials in and grapes back out. With the event permitting structure the ordinance proposes, residents are wary that those trucks will multiply.
In that vision of the future: Trucks carrying grapes and farming equipment will be joined by vans for caterers and entertainers. Those trucks will be joined by carloads of tourists coming around blind corners and thumping over Ballard Canyon’s sizeable potholes. As the tourism increases, so will the number of heedless drivers—some of them, inevitably, with one too many glasses of wine in their system.
They, in turn, will be sharing the road with the newer residential arrivals to Ballard Canyon. Those folks live in places like Mesa Hills, a recently built subdivision that added 30 houses to the mix. Together, the thinking goes, the tourists, commercial trucks, and residents new and old bring noise, dust, and the danger of roadway accidents to a road already stressed and under-maintained.
“We’re fighting to maintain our quality of life out here,” said resident Jim Davis.
What the concerned residents of Ballard Canyon propose, in short, is “discretionary privilege,” which basically means stick the tasting rooms in Los Olivos. Having them in Ballard Canyon, in the words of neighbor Alan Davenport, is “not realistic or consistent with the use of the land.”
“At least [in Los Olivos], you can park your car and stumble from one tasting room to another,” he pointed out. “[Ballard Canyon] is where you can grow the grapes.”
They’re not “neo-Nazi wine haters,” he stressed, and for their part the residents of Ballard Canyon underline their pro-agriculture bona fides: Some of them raise horses, some grow grapes for themselves, and all profess a deep love of the rolling agricultural landscape in which they live. When asked about the concern that regulations will choke out the small guy in the wine industry, however, Davenport was blunt.
“If your business plan calls for the destruction of a neighborhood, then you need a new business plan,” he said.
What goes into an EIR?
Both Rankin and the Ballard Canyon crew expressed serious doubts about the content of the proposed ordinance. Both sides questioned the accuracy of the traffic data used in the environmental impact report. Rankin, in particular, wondered why the draft ordinance and EIR didn’t include an economic assessment.
David Lackie, a planner at the county’s long-range department, spoke to some of these concerns.
Roadway volume data, Lackie said, is collected by the Department of Public Works. They count average daily trips by car. Two electronic cables, laid parallel across specific places along road, can record how many cars drive past and how fast they’re going.
When an EIR is generated for a large-scale ordinance such as this—one which affects large geographic swaths of the county and several different roadways—public works doesn’t necessarily go out and collect roadway volume information for every road anew. Lackie said some of the roadway volume data in the EIR is older.
Another key piece of traffic data in the EIR is winery driveway counts to determine the number of people visiting wineries. Lackie said the county contracted a data firm to have counters monitor parking lots at specific wineries.
“They did a similar thing,” Lackie said, “a weekday and a weekend count, where they had their person out there for the entire period counting the number of vehicles, the number of passengers, and the time frame.” That study was done in October of 2013.
He also clarified why the report doesn’t have an economic analysis in it. The EIR doesn’t include an economic component, Lackie said, because that’s not what an EIR is for. Environmental impact reports are just that, environmental. It considers economic impacts only insofar as they have physical effects on the environment.
“Economic impacts are not, in and of themselves, physical impacts,” Lackie explained. “From our perspective, it’s a land use issue. We provide the environmental information through the EIR.”
Time and money
Michael Larner is the owner and operator of Larner Vineyard and Winery. He owns an estate of 134 acres on Ballard Canyon road.
He planted the vineyard in 1999 and, for a decade sold grapes to almost two dozen wineries in Santa Barbara County. In 2009, he planted the seed of an in-house winery operation, keeping about 20 percent of the fruit to sell through a winery cooperative in Buellton. He began the county permitting process for operating a winery on his estate with the hope that he could get the permits “within a year or two.”
Five years later, he’s still trying. “I think it’s surprising to anyone who wants to get into business that after five years and close to half a million dollars you still don’t have a product and have a permit in hand,” Larner said. “It’s tough.” His business is family-run, and their income is from grape sales.
“We don’t have deep pockets,” Larner said. “The county’s permitting structure is such that they don’t reward mom-and-pop operations.”
Larner is pointedly critical of the draft, which he called “completely useless.” He takes issue with the projected numbers for carbon dioxide emissions, calling them “grossly exaggerated,” and claimed that the county’s estimates would only be appropriate for “a winery that’s so enormous that it doesn’t fit the model.”
He also took issue with the number of people the county projected would be visiting his winery: way more than his own estimation, leading him to think he might be in violation of the ordinance the moment his winery is finally permitted and opened.
“The assumptions they make are so egregious that the ordinance itself doesn’t work,” he said.
A separate event permitting structure, he suggests, might be better: one apart from the winery ordinance that covers events for any kind of agriculture in the county, not just wineries but lavender farms and horse ranches as well. That, Larner thinks, would streamline the process for opening wineries while allowing for reasonable limitations to satisfy local residents.
He proposed shuttling to deal with traffic concerns—a solution that Ballard Canyon residents are skeptical would work effectively. Furthermore, Larner doesn’t see much merit in a solution that concentrates events and winery visitors in local communities.
“I already have my tasting room in Los Olivos, and here’s the problem with that,” he said, “I’m paying rent, and my profitability is squashed. The other side of this is that there are 43 tasting rooms in Los Olivos. Why do I have to be 44?”
Contact Staff Writer Sean McNulty at smcnulty@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jul 23-30, 2015.