In Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors news, the changing of the guards is complete!
Second District Supervisor Laura Capps took the chair’s gavel from 5th District Supervisor Steve Lavagnino, and new 1st District Supervisor Roy Lee took his seat on the board on Jan. 7.
I don’t know about you, but I’m going to miss Lavagnino and his off-the-cuff humor. No offense to Capps, but she said it too: If she can lead the meetings with half the humor and ease that he does, she’ll be doing good.
I’m not sure if I’ll miss former 1st District Supervisor Das Williams, who bowed out in December. He had a tendency for rambling that wasn’t my favorite, but maybe I’ll miss the way he voted—time will tell with Lee in his chair.
As Williams took the opportunity in December to wax poetic about his political career and the youthful anger that compelled him into action, Capps took the opportunity on Jan. 7 to wax idealistic about the power of local government.
“We must work every day, tirelessly, to show our constituents that government can work for them,” she said. “We can do better when it comes to good governance, and good governance means delivering intended results.”
For her, that work seems to start with affordable housing, which she called the greatest issue with the greatest impact on everyone’s life. She plans to focus on the fact that employers can use their own land for employees. Parking lots can be turned into housing.
“How can underutilized government land be turned into housing, desperately needed workforce housing,” she said. “That is, I think, the smartest, most efficient thing we can be doing.”
Interesting to think that employers should build housing for their employees. The kind of control that can come from an employer who not only writes your paycheck but also owns the home you’re living in is something that raises its own set of issues.
How’s it working when it comes to farmworkers? The federal H2-A program is the primary example of government requiring employers to provide employee housing.
In concept, it’s a great idea. In reality, the bumps and bruises that have come from implementing it—allegations of poor living conditions, etc.; community pushback on exactly where these units can be built and who can live in them; the expense of building—have made it an underutilized tool.
To think that school districts are starting to consider building homes for their teachers is wild. We have enough trouble funding our schools without tasking them with also providing housing for the teachers.
Capps pointed to the DignityMoves projects—the pallet or shed housing that provides temporary shelter to homeless individuals—as a great example of using underused government-owned land.
“It’s almost ironic that the reason why DignityMoves is providing housing for our homeless is that it’s hacking our own system,” she said.
And DignityMoves is making moves to hack the system at the state level through legislation that would essentially compel local governments to use their underutilized land for exactly the sorts of projects that DignityMoves seems to be good at setting up.
We’ll see what hacking the system gets us.
The Canary is a hack. Send comments to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jan 9-19, 2025.