Old Town Lompoc is about to grow up. At the ripe age of 150 years old, the city is primed for a good ol’ fashioned growth spurt—from 45 feet to 50 feet tall.
Lompoc is aiming for increasing its housing density, both to comply with state law and some city goals. To do that, the Planning Commission suggests increasing building height limits in Old Town by 5 feet.
“In order to get the the capacity that was described in our element, the state wants tall buildings,” Lompoc Planning Manager Brian Halvorson said.
An extra 5 feet! Skyscrapers are coming to Lompoc, amirite?
Just kidding. Who are we building for? The people who were running around in 1874?
Apparently a 50-foot-tall building can hold five stories’ worth of floors, but a 45-foot-tall building can only hold three or four. So it seems like it’s the 45-foot limit that’s strange, but what do I know?
Every city should be increasing its downtown densities. It’s the place where that sort of thing make sense, even in Lompoc.
What doesn’t make sense is a nondisclosure agreement that prevents Santa Barbara County from understanding how a new technology will help prevent the Strauss Wind Energy Project from killing too many winged things.
The project that was late to the party when it came to managing the deaths of endangered or threatened species but got the go-ahead anyway went back to the county after a year of data collection. Guess what?
One golden eagle was killed in the past year. It was one of 47 winged creatures who bit the dust beneath those giant wind turbines outside of Lompoc. Not bad, I guess, considering that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service predicted that 15 golden eagles would succumb to the spinning blades.
But the project hit the threshold required to return to the county and explain itself and propose how it could create a future with fewer animal deaths in it.
“This facility has been operating for a year. It’s giant, almost 6,000 acres, 27 turbines—I think looking at the take after a year of 47, I’m sure there are some who would like that to be zero, as we see in a lot of mitigation requests for other sorts of projects, is not feasible,” 4th District Planning Commissioner Roy Reed said during the Dec. 11 commission hearing.
All in all, he thought, not bad at all.
But, the project operator, BayWa, still has some prevention work to do and agreed to evaluate the Identiflight technology designed to identify golden eagles and stop the turbines so they can fly through unscathed. However, Energy Minerals and Compliance Deputy Director Errin Briggs told commissioners that “there is a veil of secrecy about the units at the site and how they’re performing” thanks to a nondisclosure agreement the company signed with BayWa, which blamed its proximity to Vandenberg Space Force Base.
The government, amirite?
“There’s a ton of data there [that] they are not sharing with us that we are just in the dark on,” Briggs said.
But I guess if Fish and Wildlife thought the turbines would kill 15 eagles and they only killed one, something’s working, right?
The Canary is never planning to fly near the Strauss Wind Energy Project. Send alternative routes to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Dec 19-29, 2024.
