An outsized debate in Solvang prompted one City Council member to ask city staff to just make it stop.
“At the most minimal effort and cost, I want us to assist this group to make this go away,” City Councilmember Robert Clarke said during the Oct. 25 Solvang City Council meeting.
Here, here, Clarke! This is the same council member who told shed-complaining residents earlier this year to deal with their complaints by forming a homeowners association because the city isn’t a referee.
Umm, I think by default, the city is actually a referee, but that’s a conversation for another column.
Of all the things to take up City Council time with, this is the most ridiculous! Downtown Solvang’s Danish architectural compliance issues are a close second—considering the rules basically brought down almost a whole City Council, caused a giant fight over marketing and branding, and sparked heated debate among city “elders” about what an architectural compliance committee should look like. All because city’s downtown has to look like it’s a small European town! So quaint!
But I digress.
A July complaint from a Skytt Mesa neighborhood resident about her neighbor’s shed being too close to her bedroom window caused a backyard full of trouble for 20 more of the area’s residents—whose sheds also violated the city’s municipal code.
And may I just say one thing? Only in Solvang.
OK, I’m actually going to say way more than just one thing, obviously!
In July, when this shed-violating-setback-rules crowded the view from one lady’s window, she complained to the city about her neighbor, who then tattled on 20 of their neighbors for also having large sheds that didn’t follow city regulations—but only as justification for their own shed. Are you following? And then, the whole neighborhood was all of sudden being investigated by code enforcement for their shed violations.
“Their intent was to justify keeping their very large shed, not to make the rest of the neighbors lose their sheds,” Skytt Mesa resident Chris Horn said at the Oct. 25 meeting.
Solvang, Horn said, needed to adjust its rules because hundreds of homeowners across town weren’t abiding by them. And what’s a rule, really, if no one follows it and no one enforces it? A moot point.
“With some minor adjustments to the code or your interpretation of it, we’re confident we can allow Solvang residents to have small garden sheds in sensible locations while avoiding aesthetic and public safety issues,” Horn told the council.
I don’t even know how the city would referee what a “sensible location” entails, because it seems pretty arbitrary. And can we define “garden shed” for the purposes of this debate? Does it need to look like a Danish shed? And how “small” is small, you know? And what exactly is the public safety issue when it comes to backyard sheds?
I’m a little lost.
Obviously, Solvang’s rules need to be changed, for nothing more than avoiding another Great Shed Debate. And I think I speak for everyone when I say: Nobody cares.
Send “sensible” canary-sized sheds to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Nov 4-10, 2021.