Happy Pedestrian Safety Month!
Did you know that was a thing? I didn’t. But I’m not a pedestrian.
Well, this winged wanderer just got another reason to be glad I’m neither a driver nor a walker. Local police are starting to enforce a new law this month, one that went into effect in January.
The “daylighting” law now prohibits folks from parking their cars within 20 feet of corners, intersections, and crosswalks, even if they are unmarked. So drivers who need to squeeze their SUV into the last spot right by that stop sign will now get cited and have to pay $100.
Santa Maria Police Sgt. Felix Diaz explained that the nine-month grace period not only gave drivers time to get warnings instead of citations, it gave officers time to get used to watching out for new lawbreakers.
“I know it’s tough to find parking anywhere you go, but we don’t just want to start enforcement,” Diaz said. “It’s new for all of us. New for us and for them.”
This law is aptly named, as in getting fined a hundred bucks for parking by a corner would scare the daylights out of me. Many of said curbs around here aren’t painted red, and now drivers have to remember that intersections function as crosswalks, even if they don’t have the fancy flashing lights and painted lines.
On the other hand, if I were more of a walker, I’d breathe a sigh of relief. After all, this law is designed to keep intersections clearer for bicyclists, kids, dog-walkers, and joggers, as explained on the city’s social media and in an episode of Santa Maria Today, which locals can watch on YouTube.
“It’s just for the safety of all people, the whole community, in terms of watching out for one another,” Diaz said.
Consider yourself warned!
Speaking of being warned, the county Planning Commission all but issued a sternly worded warning to a naysaying neighbor near Ballard.
Jan Vandebos Naify has brought appeals against not one but two building projects that her neighbor, Thano Adamson, submitted to the county. It took commissioners all of two seconds to realize that, as 4th District Planning Commissioner Roy Reed said, “none of the issues have any degree of merit.”
Naify most recently objected to a two-bathroom addition to Adamson’s property, totaling about 150 square feet, after appealing Adamson’s approved plans to build a home on his 10-acre rural property on Alamo Pintado Road in 2021. That appeal got unanimously denied as well.
In a court of law, such a move would “border on malicious prosecution,” said 3rd District Planning Commissioner John Parke. During the appeal hearing, he counted “two, three, six professionals from county planning and county counsel who are salaried employees. They’re taking up the time to review this,” he said. “There’s no cost-recovery mechanism. … The public pays for it.”
NIMBYism has a cost—and it’s a lot more than the $812 to file an appeal.
The Canary flies high. Send a safety vest to canary@santamarisun.com.
This article appears in Sep 11 – Sep 18, 2025.