A local developer’s plan to construct 82 new apartments in downtown Santa Maria recently gained unanimous support from the city’s Planning Commission, and backlash from a multi-state labor union.
More than a dozen members of the Southwest Mountain States Carpenters attended the Planning Commission’s Sept. 6 meeting to protest the Vernon Group’s proposed six-story, mixed-use project on the southeast corner of Main Street and Broadway.
“I know you see seated all the orange vests. Can all of my brothers stand up?” Santa Maria resident Scott Zimmerman said during public comment, alerting his union peers—easily identifiable thanks to their bright safety vests.
“This is a fraction of the amount of membership we have in Santa Maria alone,” Zimmerman said. “You couldn’t fit them all in here.”
Zimmerman spent his allotted time during public comment criticizing the Vernon Group for planning to rent out all 82 units of the Alvin Newton Apartments project at market rate.
“In the construction industry, people are still making wages from the 1980s,” Zimmerman said. “How are the people building this going to be able to afford to live in it? It just doesn’t happen.”
On Aug. 15, attorney Mitchell M. Tsai sent a letter on behalf of the Southwest Mountain States Carpenters to Santa Maria’s planning division that outlined a handful of complaints from the union and accused the project of violating the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).
The letter delayed the Planning Commission from reviewing the project, as its public hearing was originally agendized for Aug. 16. City staff drafted a response to debunk claims in the letter ahead of the Planning Commission’s Sept. 6 meeting.
Staff outlined its review of the project and the conditions it has met in order to be exempt from CEQA and responded to other assertions from the carpenters union, including its argument that the city should require the Vernon Group to hire local workers to construct the apartments.
Staff’s response was that there is no current city policy requiring project applicants to hire local workers.
Shortly before motioning that the commission recommend the project’s approval to the City Council, which passed in a 5-0 vote, Planning Commissioner Robert Dickerson scrutinized Tsai’s letter.
“The tactic of using last minute letters from attorneys to stop the process quite frankly, at best, is an annoyance. And at worst, it’s disingenuous,” Dickerson said. “There certainly are reasons to present things along this line for environmental concerns. If they’re genuine, then they should be brought forward. But not if they’re a tactic just to slow things, gum up the works, and delay things, for someone who’s trying to put a project together.”
Dickerson added that he agreed with statements from Glenn Morris, CEO of the Santa Maria Valley Chamber of Commerce, who spoke during public comment to support the project.
While Morris acknowledged that the market-rate Alvin Newton Apartments project “may or may not meet people’s expectations” of affordable housing, the project should be considered with the context that other downtown Santa Maria developments in the future will be “designed specifically for that affordable housing component.”
Morris commented on Tsai’s letter and its request for the Vernon Group to hire locally, before criticizing its invocation of CEQA.
“I think that the conversation about who builds a project is an appropriate conversation to have in the community. But it’s a conversation that should happen between the labor unions and the development community,” Morris said. “There’s a business decision that should be conducted through negotiation.
“Using the environmental laws in our state, which we take seriously in this community, as a smoke screen,” Morris added, “to try to bully a public agency into requiring a developer to give something that the group hasn’t been able to achieve on their own in the marketplace is an inappropriate approach.”
