Cover Stories
It’s holiday time!
It’s the time of year again, when you dust off those boxes full of lights and tinsel and deck the halls with festive cheer. No matter how you celebrate the season, the Sun has your back with its annual Holiday Guide. Learn about an opportunity to make your own greetings cards, a Christmas tree farm…
Three cheers: Allan Hancock College produces award-winning wine as students roll up their sleeves for harvest and winemaking
“Hey, look what I found.” My husband handed me the magazine he’d been reading, open to a page near the back. As I scanned the columns, numbers and words blurred together before I found what he was talking about. There it was, atop a column of 92, 92, 91 in the buying guide of October’s…
Lompoc parents have until Nov. 9 to review proposed sex ed curricula
When Jessica Collier was in school, she didn’t attend sex ed. Her parents were conservative, and Collier said that along with a strict “no dating policy,” they didn’t want her learning about sex and puberty in school. They signed a contract opting Collier out of sex ed, and each day when health class turned to…
Santa Maria, a caring community
A while back the Sun wrote a small piece on my son Sebastian Saiz (Athlete of the Week, Aug. 23) who is the quarterback of the Santa Maria High School Saints this year. His mom, my wife Irene Rodriguez Saiz, recently passed away from cancer. The outpour of support is so awesome that I want…
Eat good, feel good: Sexy Eats’ Dannika Stefano offers inventive dishes in her meal prep service
Dannika Stefano had big dreams for herself growing up in Guadalupe. The makeup artist-turned-private chef spent her youth dreaming of going to Hollywood to pursue her dreams. “I was in the beauty industry doing makeup for a long time, since getting out of high school,” she said. “I came to Los Angeles to pursue acting…
The Cimo Brothers win Best Live Performance at the tenth annual New Times Music Awards on Nov. 2
It’s Friday, Nov. 2, and all the beautiful people are in SLO’s Fremont Theater for the 2018 New Times Music Awards (NTMAs). There’s glitz, there’s glamour, and there’s a whole lotta music filling up the old art deco theater. The Sun and New Times welcomed musicians of all stripes from Santa Barbara and SLO counties…
Author Christopher Meeks reads selections from novels and short stories in Orcutt
Author Christopher Meeks is very comfortable being interviewed for a newspaper article because he knows what to expect. “I started out as a journalist,” he said. “I was a freelancer at first and then specialized in interviewing authors. I got hired by [California Institute of the Arts (CalArts)] to interview artists of all sorts.” On…
Jan Howard debuts solo show at Valley Art Gallery
You won’t find Jan Howard’s work on any website or social media platform. The painter, who is featured as the artist of the month through Nov. 30 at Valley Art Gallery, doesn’t put her work online. She’s never downloaded Snapchat and doesn’t have a Facebook to promote her work. She doesn’t use email, so if…
Guadalupe edits zoning ordinance after objections from community
A proposed ordinance that would update some of Guadalupe’s 38-year-old zoning regulations faced a few setbacks recently, after a developer and members of the agricultural community pushed back on added restrictions to facilities in multifamily zoning districts. Ordinance No. 2018-476, which would amend portions of the city’s municipal code that were adopted in 1980, was…
County Sheriff’s Office eradicates 400,000-plus pot plants at unlicensed farm field in Santa Maria
Row after row of pot plants were weed-whacked into oblivion in late October as county sheriff’s deputies served an enforcement operation on a massive unlicensed cannabis cultivation in the Santa Maria Valley. The Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office received a tip that a large-scale cannabis grow was ongoing among the valley’s farm fields east of…
Hancock’s $75 million bond fails in Nov. 6 election
After an extensive campaign effort, several endorsements, and what appeared to be vast community support, Santa Barbara County residents took to the polls on Nov. 6 and voted down a $75 million bond that would have funded facility improvements at Allan Hancock College campuses. “We are disappointed in the early results,” Hancock President and Superintendent…
Cunningham wins second term in state Assembly
Republican Assemblymember Jordan Cunningham (R-San Luis Obispo) will return to Sacramento to serve a second term, winning re-election over Democratic Party challenger Bill Ostrander, according to unofficial voting totals. Cunningham, an attorney with a practice in Templeton, received 63,771 votes Nov. 6, garnering 58.6 percent of the total vote. Ostrander, a SLO-based activist and former…
Soto and Waterfield take Santa Maria City Council race
Santa Maria’s first-ever district City Council election was one for the history books, and in a hard-fought, nail-biter of race, two polar opposite candidates both managed to land seats on the council. Despite hopes–and fears–that the city’s new district-based voting system would churn out high marks for left-leaning candidates, Santa Maria voters clutched tightly to…
Elizabeth Twomey
Lompoc High School senior Elizabeth Twomey is the “definition of hardworking.” That’s according to head cheer coach Kira Gonzalez, who said Twomey has been a leading force on the cheer squad for all four years of her high school career and team captain for two. Meanwhile, Twomey has consistently juggled a rigorous school course load,…
Spotlight on: Open World Leadership Center
The editorial staff at the Sun and its sister paper New Times are used to answering questions about the paper from curious readers, but Nov. 2 was one of the first times they needed the help of a Russian translator to do it. That morning, the New Times Media Group’s publishers, editors, and reporters hosted…
County officials say new warning systems will save lives
As the one year anniversary of the Thomas Fire and Montecito mud flows approach, emergency responders and government officials are attempting to assure the public that they will receive proper warning if the worst is to occur. On Nov. 6, the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors accepted a report from the county executive and…
Toussaint defeats Richardson, ends ten year mayorship
There’s a new mayor in Solvang. Councilmember Ryan Toussaint unseated incumbent Jim Richardson by a margin of more than 300 votes, or roughly 60 percent of all ballots cast. Elected in 2008, Richardson held the position for a decade before being ousted by the sitting council member known for starting an IT company at 19…
Lompoc’s Jenelle Osborne becomes first woman mayor in 20 years
For the first time in 20 years, Lompoc’s mayor will be a woman. “I really wanted to give the community an opportunity to have a choice in who the voice and face representing them was,” Councilmember Jenelle Osborne told the Sun before capturing more than 50 percent of the vote to seal her victory just…
Rep. Salud Carbajal holds House seat for Democratic majority
Cheers filled the small downtown Santa Barbara restaurant as Rep. Salud Carbajal (D-Santa Barbara) climbed a staircase to address the crowd just after he was projected to win California’s 24th District for the U.S. House of Representatives for a second time on the Nov. 6 election night. Supporters, Democratic Party organizers, and state and local…
Political Watch 11/8/18
• Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California) won her bid for re-election on Nov. 6 according to preliminary results with 54 percent of the votes in California. Her challenger, progressive state Sen. Kevin de Leon (D-Los Angeles), won 45 percent of the vote. “Now I go to the Senate with 25 years under my belt with a…
Origami artist featured at Wildling Museum
The Wildling Museum in Solvang will present a new exhibit titled Folded Art: Origami Animals by Robert Salazar from Nov. 10 to March 25. Salazar is a deployable structures contractor at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) who is also a famed origami artist and environmental activist. Salazar designed the origami crease pattern for Starshade’s Optical…
Sol Aromatics holds natural perfume workshop in Buellton
Sol Aromatics will host a workshop to teach the fundamentals of natural perfume on Nov. 10. The workshop features a lesson in building a personal scent by Susan Farber, who will teach attendees about botanical essences from around the globe and discuss 15 essential oils and absolutes. Games meant to teach the connection between scent…
Historical society, library co-host lecture on wolves
The Santa Ynez Valley Natural History Society and the Los Olivos Library will co-host a lecture on the gray wolf on Nov. 15. The featured speaker is Pamela Flick of Defenders of Wildlife, who will talk about the state of the wolf in North America. The wolf, which was driven to extinction by the mid-1930s…
The border
Well, according to CNN, MSN, CBS, NBC, ABC, and the rest, there are between 1,600 and 6,000 people coming this way through Mexico from Honduras and Guatemala. I see these comments about the president being a racist for trying to stop them. He has to stop them. All you guys that want to just let…
The library’s Friends thank you
The Friends of the Santa Maria Public Library want to thank our customers for supporting our recent book sale to benefit the library. Many of them were regular visitors to our former shop. We are also grateful to the large donations of books from David Adams, a former bookseller, and Joe Lazaer of AL&S Inc.…
Political exhaustion
Politics is tiresome, I know I’m not the only one who thinks so. For journalists, election season can feel like a long grind leading up to the big day. We follow multiple races for months, talk to dozens of candidates, wade through legal jargon in measures and propositions, and then make it out on election…
Tale of two worlds
What follows is a tale of two worlds. And it says something about the world we, and all children, live in. A few weeks ago the phone rang at my home and it was a lady from our main library in Santa Maria. I had returned a book, dropping it into the large metal collection…
