An unusual amount of time and money have been put toward efforts to adequately answer a question that has perplexed Solvang City Council members for months now: Where should the Honen park?
The Honen, a horse-drawn trolley, is one of Solvang’s most popular and most photographed tourist attractions, according to Solvang City Councilmember Ryan Toussaint. But recent traffic complaints and concerns regarding the horses’ working conditions led the council to form an ad hoc subcommittee—consisting of council members Toussaint and Neill Zimmerman—to find a solution to the trolley’s pending issues.
The formation of the ad hoc subcommittee was unanimously approved at a Feb. 12 City Council meeting.
“I volunteered because I recognize the concerns of the public, surrounding businesses, the business owner, the city, and the care of the animals,” Toussaint said in an email to the Sun. “I do believe the owners take great care of the horses, and I would hate to see the trolley leave Solvang.”
The debate currently surrounding Solvang’s trolley stems from its struggle to find adequate parking.
While the trolley’s usual pickup location is outside the Solvang Visitor Center, Toussaint said its city-approved Horse-Drawn Conveyance License calls for use of a shady, public pickup location when temperatures hit 85 degrees or more, and city staff have long struggled to find a permanent location that provides shade for the trolley to park in. Every time its owner finds an area with shade along his designated route, surrounding businesses and community members complain about resulting traffic and parking issues, and he is forced to move.
To solve the issue, the trolley’s owner, Salvador Orona, asked that a permanent pickup location be added to his license. Various obstacles have so far prevented that from happening. City staff instead spent nearly 24 man-hours and $5,306 on a preliminary design and cost estimates for a proposed structure that would shade the horses and the trolley’s riders, which would have cost between $25,000 and $96,800.
The possibility of public funds benefiting a private business infuriated several Solvang residents, including Rochelle Mueller, who said at a Jan. 22 council meeting that the shade structure should be paid for and built by the trolley’s owner.
“To me it’s absolutely insane that money has already been spent in this regard,” Mueller said at the meeting. “I think that it is just a poor use of funds, particularly since it sounds like we don’t even have the funds to direct that way, much less the man power.”
Mueller isn’t wrong. The thousands spent on the project’s design and cost estimates were taken from an account intended for Second Street drainage improvements, according to a staff report on the shade structure, which concluded that no funding was available for the project.
Many commenters seemed to pointedly suggest that Orona was somehow begging for financial handouts, despite owning two other successful businesses. But he never asked for a shade structure to be built, only a permanent location to be determined, and City Council members tried to make that much clear.
Other residents’ concerns for the horses’ working conditions have outweighed any possible funding dilemas. Longtime resident Janice Butler said at the Jan. 22 meeting that she was proud of Solvang for wanting to help the horses. Horses are supposedly extremely sensitive to heat, Butler later said in an interview with the Sun, and she and several other community members are concerned about the trolley horses working for long hours on hot summer days.
The trolley weighs nearly 3,000 pounds, she said, it’s often filled to capacity, and Solvang’s asphalt roads only add to the Central Coast’s rising temperatures.
“There are a number of us who are very upset because the horses need to be treated humanely,” Butler said. “According to everyone I’ve been in touch with, the shade is absolutely critical or we’re going to have horses dying in the street.”
The city’s license requires that Orona rest his horses frequently, he said in an interview with the Sun, and they aren’t allowed to work at all when temperatures rise past 95 degrees. Orona said he uses a different team of two horses each day, sometimes four in the summer, and they each work for no longer than five hours a day. Orona also said he uses a rotation of eight horses, while all the trolley’s previous owners made do with only three.
“We really take care of all these horses,” Orona said. “This is not only like a business, the horses are part of our family.”
So Orona said it was shocking when attendees suggested he might be overworking and mistreating his horses during the summer, when business is at its most booming. Orona said he was also surprised to learn that community members seemed to think he had asked the city for public funds to build the horses a shade structure.
He didn’t, but he said he wouldn’t pay to build his own shade structure at this point because his current license expires every two years. He would also have to build it on public property. If the current City Council or newly elected members for some reason didn’t renew his license, he said it would be a wasted investment. Orona said he hopes to find an already existing, permanent location to park his horses for rest on hot days.
“In the 10 years that we’ve owned the business, we’ve never given problems to the city,” Orona said. “We are always above all the expectations the city has for us. But this is out of our hands now, and it’s in the hands of the city.”
Staff Writer Kasey Bubnash can be reached at kbubnash@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Feb 22 – Mar 1, 2018.
