The Canary

This year feels like a rerun in some parts of Northern Santa Barbara County. In Santa Maria, Will Smith is again running to unseat longtime incumbent Mayor Alice Patino.  It’s his third time running for the spot against Patino.  With his checkered past, I’m not sure in what world enough people exist to help him […]

I’m not sure what happened at the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors meeting on Sept. 10. Maybe it’s just been so long since I’ve seen a productive policy discussion about a contentious issue end in compromise and unanimous agreement—but that’s what happened.  What started out as a tense conversation about whether to form an […]

If you Google “Harmony Communities California,” in between the corporate mobile home park owner/operator’s marketing gobbledygook, the headlines are not good.  The company recently purchased Del Cielo Estates in Orcutt—a 55-and-over mobile home community where seniors own their homes and rent the land they sit on—and informed residents that it was planning to make the […]

Should farmworkers make $26 an hour in Santa Barbara County?  CAUSE (the Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy) thinks so.  “If you asked any farmworker in our county what’s the biggest challenge they face, it’s low wages,” CAUSE Co-Executive Director Hazel Davalos told the county Board of Supervisors on Aug. 27.  Of course […]

It seems a little strange that Guadalupe is moving forward with its theater renovation project without having all the cash it needs in the bank yet.  The Royal Theater revamp fund is still short $3 million—that’s the same $3 million the Guadalupe City Council declined to ask its residents to fund via a bond measure […]

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency wants to cancel DCPA—aka the pesticide dimethyl tetrachloroterephthalate; aka a weed-eating herbicide often used to treat broccoli and onion fields that’s associated with certain birth defects.  But officially canceling DCPA ain’t easy. It’s not like a clarion call to boycott your neighborhood racist coffee shop on TikTok. Or the right-wing […]

I’m a little confused about a recent Santa Barbara County Planning Commission decision about cannabis—mostly I’m confounded about Commissioner John Parke and his support of a processing project, something I assume he’s against.  You know, he’s always talking about that odor. Cannabis smells impacting quality of life seem to niggle Parke like no other, insinuating […]

Kudos to all the firefighters and other personnel who worked so hard to get the Lake Fire under control and prevent it from spreading more.  The 38,000-acre fire patchworked its way through the forest, left homes (but not property) relatively unscathed, kept campgrounds and trail systems fairly intact, and didn’t turn into the megafire that […]

Homelessness is not an issue that the majority of Santa Maria’s City Council seems interested in tackling, solving, or taking a bite out of.  To me, it simply sounds as if Mayor Alice Patino would simply like for it to just go away. Patino, by the way, is running for mayor, again. She doesn’t seem […]

Our country’s celebrity obsession hit a new low earlier this month.  If it please the court of readers, I’d like to submit these exhibits regarding the Lake Fire.  Exhibit A: “The battle to save Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch from destructive Lake fire” is the headline for an LA Times July 12 feature-length piece. Exhibit B: […]

Can you believe that governments aren’t required to record their public meetings and post them in an archive so anyone can view them? It seems like they have to, but they don’t. They have to keep “minutes”—and depending on the governing board those can be extremely detailed or not detailed at all.  Basically, if you […]

Who knew a 24-hour gym was such a big deal? 24-Hour Fitness has gyms all over the state: the greater Los Angeles area, the Bay Area, Santa Cruz, the Sacramento Valley, San Diego area, and in Santa Barbara.  But there isn’t one in the Santa Ynez Valley, which has a YMCA that wants to keep […]