What’s your function? Hooking up Lompoc with nonprofits and Santa Ynez Riverbed cleanup efforts.
Dysfunction junction, how’s it function? Lompoc has three favorite phrases that don’t get the job done.
Dysfunction junction, what’s their function. They want “liability insurance” because of the “potential for injuries,” and a need to “issue permits.” Those’ll get you pretty far when it comes to a riverbed cleanup.
But you can’t go anywhere without liability insurance, volunteer instructions, and an agreement to not sue the city if you get injured or sick cleaning up hazardous waste from abandoned homeless camps without all of the right permissions.
So far, Planting-A-Seed, which has engaged in several riverbed cleanups over the last few months, doesn’t have any of those things in place with the city of Lompoc. And everything was going swimmingly until Lompoc decided it would no longer waive its waste disposal fees for the unpermitted cleanups, leaving Planting-A-Seed with a $2,000-plus bill and a lot of residents with residual anger.
“Instead of trying to work with us … Lompoc told the public that we can no longer go on public land and clean,” the organization wrote in a Facebook post.
People were not happy to hear that!
“Lompoc get your head out of your ass. These people are volunteering to clean up a mess that you are allowing and yet you can’t even waive dump fees,” Aaron Knight responded.
“I would like to know WHY, especially when you consider what it costs every time the city cleans up it runs ten times the cost. This needs an answer NOW,” Denise Morehead said.
The answer is simple: It’s complicated, Denise.
The Santa Ynez Riverbed has a been an issue for years. It’s a place to live for many without homes, which leads to trash and hazardous waste buildup—a blight on the community that Lompoc successfully cleaned up in 2018, albeit temporarily. All it cost was $500,000! What a steal!
Lompoc is cash-strapped, with limited resources for public safety and an obvious inability to deal with homelessness issues. And many residents are super thankful for the work that Planting-A-Seed has been doing—which includes organizing volunteer cleanups, doing outreach, and serving meals to homeless residents in the city.
But all of this work on public property without the proper permitting, rules, or oversight puts the city in a weird position. Liability issues abound with the cleanup of human waste and hypodermic needles, plus there are private property rights to contend with (yes, homeless people own things, too).
The biggest problem, though, seems to be that Planting-A-Seed isn’t exactly a legal nonprofit, according to the Franchise Tax Board of California, which suspended the organization’s license. Meaning: Planting-A-Seed can’t legally operate. It can’t fundraise. It can’t organize volunteers. It can’t get liability insurance. It can’t actually do what it’s been doing.
So while everyone is just reaming the city and praising Planting-A-Seed, things are just always way more dysfunctional than they sound on the surface.
Maybe it’s time to put our reality pants on and actually do the work that’s needed to figure out what the actual issue is instead of hollering about how poor city leadership is. Maybe then the community can pull together and get Planting-A-Seed legally operating again so it can continue the good work that it seems to be doing.
The Canary lives at dysfunction junction. Send conjunctions to canary@santamarisun.com.
This article appears in Apr 29 – May 6, 2021.
