Lompoc. Here we go again.
We’ve got gadflies Justin Ruhge and Ron Fink plinking away on their keyboards in frustration to let everyone know how stupid they think City Councilmembers Jim Mosby, Victor Vega, and Dirk Starbuck are when it comes to the budget nonsense that the Sun can’t seem to stop writing about. We can’t help it. We’re addicted to the drama! I will give it to Ruhge: I kind of like nicknaming the terrible threesome “The Triad,” but it’s got an aura of badassery about it that Mosby, Vega, and Starbuck definitely don’t deserve.
They’re definitely not that. What they deserve is a slap upside the head. At the latest budget meeting on May 15, cuts were in and taxes were out. But maybe later, our threesome said. Maybe after we’ve cut $3.6 million from our budget by handing out pink slips, then we can talk additional sales tax.
I wonder when they will figure out that nobody—not even those of us penning columns for liberal rags—actually wants to pay taxes, but maybe we freedom-takers just understand that in this imperfectly infuriating Democratic system, we’ve got to compromise so things don’t fall apart. Unless of course, that’s what you’re aiming for—a city wobbling on the edge of disincorporation like Guadalupe has done so many times over the years because it almost doesn’t have the budget to exist.
Now that would be quite a legacy.
Meanwhile, as City Manager Jim Throop looks to a future where he will be relegated to conjuring up new sources of revenue out of the air he breathes, the Santa Barbara County Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO) is actually going to make his life harder than it already is. As the city looks to annex land that it can actually develop (read: bring in more revenue), LAFCO wants to make the annexing process for farmland more difficult.
“Everyone else is doing it,” LAFCO said. “Let’s make an example out of Lompoc!”
Everyone else is making land more expensive and harder to develop on! So I guess Santa Barbara County needs to go ahead and jump off that bridge because it already solved the housing crisis (not) and land is way too affordable (double down on that not)!
Lompoc is surrounded by legacy farmland that is slowly turning away from its legacy, but if an agricultural landowner wants to sell its parcel to the city for development purposes, LAFCO is proposing that the loss of agricultural land gets mitigated through preservation of land elsewhere.
Who can afford that? Not the city of Lompoc, which can barely afford to keep minimum staffing levels at the police department—say goodbye to all that money the city spent on moving the homeless out the Santa Ynez Riverbed. They’re already trickling back and the police department doesn’t have the staff to patrol it.
Well, that lasted all of six months. Way to waste your money, Lompoc!
The Canary hates waste. Send comments to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in May 23-30, 2019.