In 1969, my class from Santa Barbara Christian School walked the beach after the Santa Barbara oil spill. I was 6 or 7. I remember seeing all the tar and the large oil-stained dead fish and tried to pry an eye out of one of them because I thought it would be cool to have. That was the start of the modern environmental movement.
Seventeen years ago, two teen girls saw a 21-acre Orcutt open space that needed protection and gathered 1,300 signatures to stop a mixed-use development. With letters of support from the Sierra Club, county Supervisor Das Williams, the Environmental Defense Center, etc., the Tree Amigos, as they were called, was born. The girls saved an open space that thousands upon thousands of commuters have enjoyed on their way to work every day to Lompoc and Vandenberg. This open space sits on the corner of Clark Avenue and Orcutt Road, 7 miles south of Santa Maria.
The Tree Amigos proved that North County teenagers are not powerless, do have a voice, and can work with government to protect environmentally sensitive areas. The Tree Amigos was able to get Fish and Game to put a pause on the development, resulting in almost two decades of visual relief for weary, hardworking commuters. With stunning views, abundant wildlife, and incredible scenery, Key Site 11 is a peek into the past of what Orcutt used to look like. That undeveloped, Western, oil “boom town.”
Because Santa Barbara County Supervisors passed an affordable housing plan based on 100 percent build-out of all open spaces in Orcutt, Key Site 11 is slated by developers to become 150-plus apartments and ball fields (“Housing headway,” May 9). No longer a wildlife corridor, but a gleaming mixed-use development full of old-fashioned themed retail and grocery stores, ironically with the theme of “boom town.” Birds of prey will soon be replaced by the cheers of parents in baseball stands. Coyotes will be replaced with gas-powered mowers, delivery trucks, and shopping carts.
I guess you can’t blame the owners of the car wash next door for building this project. Everybody’s entitled to get the biggest return on investment, aren’t they? But, wouldn’t it be nice, for once, if we all stepped back and told developers and the county of Santa Barbara: You got 99 percent of what you wanted in Orcutt open space. Why don’t you just save us one little piece of the past?
