Rarely since Moses and the burning bush has a sign been more influential to a people than the sign that appears will be the deciding factor in the upcoming Buellton City Council election. To a certain degree, that’s how influential the candidates are making it sound, anyway.
At least five of the town’s eight City Council candidates are basing a large portion of their campaign on whether the community would want the sign in question: a 40-foot-tall, 48-foot-wide, digital, “Welcome to Buellton” sign along Highway 101.
The whole issue began at a City Council meeting on Feb. 28, 2013, according to Ron Anderson, the current Buelton Chamber of Commerce president who’s also running for a council seat. Anderson attended that meeting as a representative of the chamber and asked the City Council to amend an ordinance in the Buellton municipal code.
The proposed change would make it possible for the chamber to pursue building a new billboard in a county that has banned the construction of new billboards since the ’60s.
For more than half a century, the only billboards allowed to exist along Buellton’s stretch of Highway 101, as well as in the rest of Santa Barbara County, have been those that were built before the Central Coast’s sections of the highway were declared to be state scenic highways.
The few remaining billboards are permitted as grandfathered-in relics. The Buellton chamber owns and maintains four of those.
Anderson explained that the change in the city ordinance was necessary because the owner of the land that one of the chamber’s billboards is built on decided against renewing his contract with the chamber. As Anderson describes it, the landowner’s decision was made because of the City Council’s decision to approve the Meritage Senior Living project. The billboard didn’t fit with the project plan, so the landowner let his contract with the chamber lapse.
The landowner was unavailable for comment prior to press time.
Wanting to replace the sign that they were losing yet enslaved by the existing ordinance that didn’t allow billboards to be built, the chamber approached City Council about changing the ordinance; the initial proposed plan would have allowed the group to build one standard billboard.
On March 14, 2013, the City Council voted unanimously to adopt the new ordinance allowing the chamber to move ahead with proposals to build a new billboard.
During the Feb. 28 meeting, Anderson had told council members that someone asked him why the chamber didn’t go digital with the sign. Mayor Judith Dale zeroed in on that remark during the meeting, saying that there were some nice digital billboards being built.
That’s when a plague of accusations surrounding the not-yet-built digital billboard began.
“They’ve made [the sign] a platform for Tom Widroe and Mark Preston,” Anderson said. “It’s all they’ve been able to campaign about.”
Widroe and Preston are two council candidates running with platforms against a digital sign.
“This election comes down to special interest versus the public [interest],” Widroe said.
Preston acknowledges that the sign issue is a big one for him, one that a large portion of his campaign website—preston4council.org—is devoted to, but he said he tries not to let it be the only issue he talks about. He speaks passionately about what he calls a “$700,000 boondoggle” regarding money the City Council allocated to the Buellton Visitor’s Bureau at its June 12, 2014, meeting, while, in comparison, only allocating $50,000 for the senior center.
Because the chamber runs the Visitor’s Bureau, that large allocation of funds—when coupled with this 40-foot debate about a highway billboard—leads folks like Preston to question the motives behind the decisions.
“Why do we need $700,000 to promote visitor services? It’s a little weird,” Preston said.
While the affiliation between the chamber and the bureau might make it hard for some people to separate financial issues from putting a shining beacon on the side of Highway 101, candidate Widroe has no problem seeing two distinct issues. He doesn’t like the sign, and to him, the financial decisions are a different beast.
He stresses that prior to awarding the $700,000, there was no debate and no serious public input. For him, the lack of public debate is an issue that makes him question the current City Council’s decision-making ability.
The chamber’s sign controversy towers over the council campaign-scape, blacking out other issues that could be key in a City Council race. Preston points out that of the eight people running for City Council, three are current chamber board members: President Ron Anderson, First Vice President Dan Baumann, and Director Joe Padilla.
Padilla is content to let the sign issue rest, especially since the chamber decided to pull its development proposal for the digital sign.
According to Anderson, the chamber nixed the project because it hadn’t heard anything from the community about it.
“As far as I’m concerned, the sign project is shelved, and I have no intention of moving forward with it,” Padilla stated in an email to the Sun.
Padilla’s opponents accuse him of running as part of a power grab: If he, Bauman, or Anderson are elected there’s nothing to stop the chamber from reintroducing their sign proposal. But Padilla counters their arguments, citing that during his time working for the chamber and the Visitor’s Bureau he saw “poor leadership and narrow-minded decision making” by some of the current council members, which caused him to enter the race.
“The sign issue is nothing more than a ruse used by my opponents to distract and take the focus off their own lack of credibility as potential City Council members,” his email continued.
As the campaigning continues, Buellton residents are taking sides.
“We don’t have anything to advertise,”
Peggy Brierton, who opposes the sign, said.
Standing on the other side of the issue is Buellton resident Kathy Vreeland, whose comment in favor of a new billboard during that fateful City Council meeting in February 2013 sums up a lot of the frustration felt by sign proponents. With it, the city gets more visibility.
“It’s giving [people] one more reason to come off the freeway instead of flying by and saying, ‘I don’t want any pea soup,’ because that’s all they see on the highway about Buellton,” Vreeland said during the meeting.
Contact Staff Writer Michael McCone at mmccone@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Sep 25 – Oct 2, 2014.