The Canary

This little bird ruffled some feathers last week. Sweet! Write to us. Tell us how you really feel, so we can share it with our readers!  The Sun also received some angry responses to the first installment in a two-part series on the Solvang City Council’s decision on a proposal to put Pride flag banners […]

Solvang is so far up its own ass about what “Danish” means that it can’t understand the evolution of the European country that it spends marketing money to emulate. I guess Solvang likes to live in the past—like almost 100 years ago, past: pre-1933 Denmark.  You know? Back before it was legal to be a […]

Are residents right to be worried about a plan to update the valves on an oil pipeline that was so badly corroded it burst in 2015, spilling more than 120,000 gallons of crude oil along the Gaviota coastline? If you ask the company that proposed the project, it’s just a matter of bringing the coastal […]

California’s No. 1 inland oil polluter—aka Greka Oil & Gas, aka HVI Cat Canyon, aka owned by Randeep Grewal—is now on the hook for $65 million for more than 12 oil spills between 2005 and 2010.  Oil spills, as in plural, as in multiple spills taking place over and over and over again on the […]

Are you sick of hearing about snow yet? I hope not, because I’m not sick of talking about it yet. It snowed in Santa Barbara County!  And not just on the peaks either. Highway 154 closed and Caltrans had to break out the snow plows. New Cuyama was blanketed in the white stuff. This February […]

Modernity isn’t a word anyone would associate with Solvang, and the city’s Design Review Committee would like to keep it that way.  The committee, which was revamped a few years ago to allow for more wiggle room when it comes to new building design concepts in the city, was nonplussed with the audacity of a […]

Equilibrium. Balance. Equity.  These are the things that 2nd District Santa Barbara County Supervisor Laura Capps is very concerned about when it comes to housing.  “How do we achieve an equilibrium of balance for these impacts?” Capps asked county Planning and Development Director Lisa Plowman during her Feb. 14 presentation on the 2023-31 Housing Element. […]

Nobody likes housing development.  Except for possibly Santa Maria, which doesn’t seem to have very much opposition to building homes or apartments. That city is all-in. And its residents are too—unless, of course, the housing aims to provide shelter for folks who don’t have it. Then there’s a problem.  But I digress. The point is […]

Do you know how to put your political career at risk in Santa Maria? All you have to do is support a homeless housing program, apparently. At least, that’s according to the two members of Santa Barbara County’s Board of Supervisors who spoke at a recent community meeting about a new project slated for an […]

The Jan. 23 Solvang City Council meeting was awkward. Awkward with a capital AWKWARD.  Newly elected City Councilmember Elizabeth Orona had to share the dais with the person she beat out to claim her seat on the city’s governing body. Why? Because her fellow council peeps voted to appoint that loser to fill a seat […]

Guadalupe residents know the meaning of community. After the recent storms that sent floodwaters over the Santa Maria River levee and into town, its residents and officials banded together to take care of their own.  The city contracted with a local H-2A housing owner to provide shelter for displaced residents. The 20 families that evacuated […]

Our community got hit hard, some say harder than expected. Meteorologists say harder than we’ve been hit in decades. All we have to do is look around. It seems folks in South County got more government resources to take the sting out of the crisis, while some in our community got hit with less help.  […]