Maybe Buellton has it figured out. The city recently approved forward momentum on a project intended to bring more life into the town along Highway 101, and increase accessibility for residents who may not have it.
In order to give city residents who need it the option to garden, Buellton City Council approved plans to study what it would take to allow a community garden on city property—with a city planning commissioner going the extra, unorthodox step of bringing his Cal Poly landscape architecture students out to the property to design what a community garden could look like in that space.
Everyone seems all for the idea, even those who are concerned about the “security” of ripe, red tomatoes and their susceptibility to would-be thieves. City Councilmember Elysia Lewis said the garden should “be locked up at night, because I think that it could be a trouble center.”
Those veggies could go for a premium on the black market!
“You can imagine people saying, ‘Oh look, tomatoes,’ and just going to help themselves to a few,” City Councilmember David King said.
If these two are worried about small-time tomato theft, what about farmers along the Santa Maria River Levee Trail? Shouldn’t they be worried, too?
Well, they are worried. And they have reason to be worried, because of the folks who have wandered off the trail and down into the riverbed and over to the fields. A group of farmers is worried that the sorts of issues associated with that behavior will get worse if the trail gets longer.
And CAUSE—which believes northern Santa Maria residents need better access to green and open spaces—seems extremely concerned that farmers will receive an outsized share of attention from electeds about the proposed levee trail expansion to Guadalupe due to their outsized “influence” in the form of economic dollar signs. Trails coexist with farmland in other areas, CAUSE Policy Advocate Rebeca Garcia said, and this trail can too!
I’m with her. I’m sure there’s a way to find common ground and get the trail expanded. I think farmers are into solutions and CAUSE is too, so don’t forget not to make enemies of those that could be allies.
Also, I’m not so sure Santa Barbara County electeds only see dollar signs when they make their decisions. If they did, the county probably wouldn’t have denied ExxonMobil’s oil trucking permit. But the Board of Supervisors did exactly that, and now the county is embroiled in a lawsuit over private property rights—as in ExxonMobil’s rights to make money off its existing operations.
When a governing board makes decisions on projects, those decisions must align with existing laws. In other words, the Board of Supervisors can’t just deny a project because it doesn’t like the project. ExxonMobil is accusing the board of doing exactly that when it denied the project, calling the decision “arbitrary, capricious, and [an] unlawful prejudicial abuse of discretion” that violates the company’s constitutional rights “to restart and operate.”
“Rather than focus on the merits of the project, however, the board improperly treated the consideration of the project as a referendum on offshore production as well as the transportation and use of crude oil in the county of Santa Barbara,” ExxonMobil’s lawsuit stated.
Ooh. Them’s fighting words. This is going to be interesting.
Send more fighting words to The Canary at canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in May 19-26, 2022.