Canary

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 […]

When new ownership and management started making changes to their mobile home park’s policies and rent, residents of Del Cielo Mobile Estates in Orcutt spoke up. First, they went to the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors with their concerns about the park becoming an all-ages community, and the board made changes to local policy.  […]

Local governments have been making and/or crossing some interesting boundaries lately. Lompoc is trying to prevent the too-long arm of the state from taking away the city’s control over where it puts new housing, which hasn’t really been happening in the city of arts and flowers. “Last year we built zero homes,” Mayor Jim Mosby […]

Budget cuts are hitting Santa Barbara County. One reality is an almost $10 million cut to the Public Health Department that’s closing pharmacies and other services in both North and South counties. If you need to use the county-run pharmacy, you’ll have to run to Lompoc. It’s the middle ground—so at least it’s not just […]

The Paul Nelson Aquatic Center’s potential six-month closure really got Santa Maria residents interested in what the city is doing with its budget! With 120 public comment letters submitted prior to the City Council’s discussion about the next two-year budget cycle on June 2, the city had no choice but to listen. The meeting was […]

One Buellton motel owner finally made good on a promise he made to the city months ago: He sued them. Farmhouse co-owner Kerry Moriarty is asking a court to nullify an ordinance the city passed earlier this year requiring the long-term housing Moriarty and his fellow co-owners’ have provided for years to revert back to […]

In no surprise to anyone who followed the mildly controversial roll-out of the Santa Barbara County Vintner’s Association running the county’s winery business improvement district (for a small fee, of course), Flying Goat Cellars finally sued the county over the deal. It could have been Stephen Pepe who pulled the trigger—after all, the Clos Pepe […]