You know what the city of Lompoc is good at? Kicking the car down the road.
No, I don’t mean can. I mean car. As in motor vehicles that people park on the street and sleep in because they have nowhere else to go.
The city has grappled with the issue of giving those cars a safe place to park since June of 2018, and it hasn’t accomplished much of anything—which could be the goal for some of the city’s elected officials.
“Let’s do nothing,” City Councilmember Jim Mosby seems to always say. “Let’s wait until an answer we want falls out of the sky and bops us on the head.”
Yes. Let’s wait. Maybe then, Chicken Little, you won’t have to do anything.
In March 2019, when the Lompoc City Council voted to ban parking on streets in an area of the city that’s become a de facto “unsafe” parking area for vehicle residents, Councilmember Victor Vega was concerned people would start parking in the Walmart shopping center, “because we don’t have a safe parking program.”
Mosby said the ban was an initial attempt at addressing the larger issue.
“We plan on bringing forward a safe parking program and that this is a first step,” he said at the time.
Naturally, the issue came up again (I, for one, am shocked! Shocked!). The safe parking program was on the Oct. 1 meeting agenda, and I stupidly got a little giddy thinking the council had the votes to buck the Triad majority that runs the city. Wrong!
Vega and Mosby seem to be talking out of both sides of their mouths. Those two yay-hoos joined their third amigo in voting against the program. Hey, I can take solace in the fact that at least one amigo—Councilmember Dirk Starbuck—is honest about where he stands, even if it does make him sound like a heartless conservative.
“We’re going to have caravans of these people showing up, looking for the benefit that we can provide the few that are here,” Starbuck said.
“These people” in caravans, huh? This isn’t the border with Mexico, dude. It’s Lompoc, which is the “armpit” of the county, if you ask Congressman Salud Carbajal. It’s not really an “if you build it, they will come” situation. It’s more of a desperation situation, because housing is expensive and there’s a lack of it.
Every municipality has homelessness. Every municipality has people living in their cars. Every municipality needs a safe parking area for those people to go because we haven’t done a good job of ensuring our population’s housing needs are being met. Every city in California is facing this issue. Not one is immune. Get on board, Lompoc!
Meanwhile, Mosby is asking the council to await a U.S. Supreme Court decision on a case that SCOTUS hasn’t even decided to take up yet. Lompoc and 30 other cities and counties in the state joined a brief that appeals a federal court ruling that said cities can’t prosecute people for sleeping outside on public property if there isn’t a viable alternative.
Even if the Supreme Court does overturn the decision, some Lompoc residents still aren’t going to have a place to sleep, and cars will still be parked where people don’t want them.
The canary thinks progress is the only way forward. Send comments to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Oct 17-24, 2019.