Ah, the hills are alive! Enjoy it now people, the few weeks of lush green that comes after the rains, because you know what’s going to happen next.
It’s going to get hot, and it’s going to dry out, and those hills are going to turn brown, and every bit of dry brush will become possible kindling. We could be talking just a small vegetation fire, or another record-blazing inferno like the Thomas Fire.
But hey, the U.S. Forest Service is on the job! Forest crews were doing strategic controlled burns on Figueroa Mountain during the last week of March (page 7). These burns are to help mitigate the spread of possible wildfires by clearing out dead trees and creating a more manageable landscape for firefighters.
Now’s the time to do it, when everything else is green, but please, be careful! Things can get out of hand easily with fire, just take a look out at Santa Cruz Island. A permitted brush burn got out of hand on land managed by the Nature Conservancy and turned into a full-blown vegetation fire, scorching hundreds of acres.
Land management is serious business, though it may not seem that way all the time. It’s the same with a lot of things you might not even think about.
Take public transportation—what’s so serious about that? Well, when things go wrong, lives can be on the line, like the woman hit by a Santa Maria Area Transit (SMAT) bus while riding her bike on April 3 (page 5).
I can’t remember the last time a SMAT bus hit a pedestrian or cyclist, which is saying something about the people Santa Maria hires to drive its buses. But anyone who walks or bikes in Santa Maria knows the city wasn’t designed with those modes of transportation in mind, but favors cars, buses, and trucks.
You wouldn’t think that urban planning was like playing with fire, but when lives are on the line, it can be. Santa Maria is listed as one of the state’s most unsafe cities when it comes to hit-and-runs. It’s an issue that the city and the Santa Maria Police Department have done some work to address, requesting and receiving funds from the California Office of Traffic Safety.
Most of that money goes to DUI checkpoints, but I’d like to see more lighted crosswalks and clearer bike lanes. Gov. Jerry Brown approved the Road Repair and Accountability Act last year, freeing up funds for cities like Santa Maria to plan and build urban centers that are safer for pedestrians.
It’s nice to see the Santa Maria City Council working for solutions to a serious problem. It’s certainly an interesting contrast to the issues the Solvang City Council is wrapped up in.
Hours of meeting time has been sucked up by residents angry about a frickin’ horse trolley (see cover story on page 10). It’s worth noting that the trolley’s owners never asked the city for a shade structure, just a place to park, but a bunch of complainers who wouldn’t stop talking about it during public comment spurred the city to look into it. Then another cabal of complainers came out against what they saw as wasteful spending and favoritism.
I guess the council members are playing with fire every time they vote to spend, running the chance of getting scorched by public opinion. It must really sting that they were just trying to address concerns from another just as vocal, though probably overly concerned, group of Solvangians.
The Canary could be tilting at windmills. Send your thoughts to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Apr 5-12, 2018.
