The Canary

Things got a little wild at Lompoc’s last City Council meeting—so wild that Mayor Jim Mosby asked police officers to forcibly remove a woman from the chambers.  “Can you please remove her?” Mosby asked about resident Shawna Stillwell, who continued speaking after he warned the chattering crowd that he’d “clear the chambers.” “We don’t want […]

Guadalupe’s in quite the fiscal pickle.  Facing a $1.6 million deficit, the city’s elected leaders made the prudent decision to cut their own stipends as way to help tackle budget woes—even though it only amounts to savings of $2,100 per month, every little bit counts!   It’s quite the opposite of what its neighbor to […]

Should we allow gun stores to set up shop close to schools and day care centers?  It seems like we’ve been doing it for a long time: Get R Gun in Santa Maria, for instance, is across the street from Santa Maria High School.  In Goleta, prior to recently opening next to Here We Grow […]

The Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office is getting a new payroll system! Hopefully one that will prevent the overtime cost overruns that have plagued the law enforcement agency for years.  How is it going to do that? Umm, that part isn’t exactly clear.  “We’re still working on exactly how the system is going to be […]

Since last December, Lompoc City Councilmember Jeremy Ball has been asking his colleagues on the dais to join him in doing something about fellow Councilmember Steve Bridge’s predicament.  No, not to help the guy. To slap him on the wrist.  Ball finally got his wish, kind of.  The council agreed 3-1, with Bridge abstaining and […]

Santa Barbara County gave unanimous approval for an oil-related thing.  I know. Pick those jaws up off the ground!  It was fairly routine—the county Planning Commission gave the go-ahead for an ownership transfer of an asphalt refinery near Santa Maria. But the last time an ownership transfer came before the county, it was denied! (Yes, […]

Lawsuits. Santa Maria thinks it can avoid them with a preemptive strike! But mobile home park owners around town are low-key threatening to sue over the city’s new mobile home park ordinance anyway.  The new rule impacts five senior parks in the city and ensures that those parks will continue to cater to the 55-plus […]

Guadalupe, Guadalupe, Guadalupe, what are we going to do with you?  After fits and starts, false starts, and no starts, the city’s calling it quits on the Royal Theater restoration project. I think anyone’s who’s been following my sarcastic commentary on the matter probably knows that should have happened a long time ago—maybe when the […]

Solvang lost some of its Danish charm in a battle over one partially developed lot with nine almost-built little cottages on it. A fight over what the developer calls whimsical and how closely it resembles the permit granted to him by the city landed the two sides in court.  The gloves came off, and the […]

The news this week almost made me want to set down my feather pen and bury my head in the sand, à la my long-legged cousins.  A Vandenberg Space Force Base airman died on base after the heavy equipment he was operating fell down an embankment. Airman 1st Class Cedric Eneluna was 23 years old.  […]

The city of Buellton no longer considers Pea Soup Andersen’s an official city landmark.  After hemming and hawing this spring over what exactly it was going to allow the current landowner to do to the building, the Buellton City Council came up with a solution to the problem it had inadvertently created: Pull the historic […]

Santa Maria’s mobile home park dwellers have been asking the city for rent control for years now, and recently, they again didn’t get what they asked for.  But senior mobile home park residents may breathe a little easier if the Santa Maria City Council does what the Planning Commission recommended: pass an ordinance that would […]