Santa Ynez Valley Alliance
News
Public Comment Sought on Draft Negative Declaration for Proposed Firestone Consistency Rezone and Conditional Use Permit for Special Events
Santa Barbara County Planning and Development is soliciting comments on the adequacy and completeness of 08NGD-00000-00013. Add your voice to this event now! You may comment by submitting written or oral comments to the project planner identified below prior to the close of public comment on May 8, 2008 at 5 p.m. Due to the non-complex nature of the project, a separate environmental hearing will not be held. Click here for a copy of the Public Notice (PDF).
Third District Supervisor Candidate Forum (April 22)
The Santa Ynez Valley Alliance—in partnership with Buellton is Our Town, Preservation of Los Olivos (POLO), and Women's Environmental Watch— sponsored a forum Tuesday, April 22 for Santa Barbara Couunty Third District Supervisor candidates at the St. Mark's Church in Los Olivos. (More to come.)
Home Occupations
In residential zone districts, the County has allowed a residence to be used for certain "home office" occupations under strictly permitted conditions. For example, if the
occupation - such as bookkeeping - was kept to one room of the house, the number of clients was very limited, there was sufficient parking and the occupation would not be noisy or offensive in any way to the neighborhood and surrounding community. An example of a home occupation which would not be allowed would be an automobile repair business because that type of business would not "fit" in a residential area and should be conducted in an area zoned for commercial or industrial uses. Now the County is considering allowing home occupations on all agriculturally zoned land. However, they are proposing that the types of home occupations be completely unrestricted and not just limited to one room of the residence.
When this item was first put on the Board of Supervisors agenda in the Fall of 2006, there had been no environmental document prepared and so the potential impacts to traffic, noise, water, air quality and other issues had not been researched and quantified. Since then, this item is on hold as it is being studied as part of the cumulative impacts for the Uniform Rules update.
Permit Streamlining
Several years ago the County formed a "Process Improvement Team" to look at ways that
the Planning Department processes and policies could be streamlined for greater ease and efficiency. Some of the changes which have subsequently been made have been positive, for example the reformatting of the zoning code and putting more information on their website that is "user friendly." However, many changes to the permitting process are "downshifting" the level of decisionmaker on land use permits. This results in the general public having little or no chance to participate in the process in a meaningful way. For example, someone building or remodeling a house used to have to go through a land use permit process which required the posting of the permit on the property as to what changes were being proposed. This gave the neighbors and other interested community members ten days to learn about the project and ask questions. If issues arose, a neighbor could appeal the decision. Now, with permit streamlining, in most cases there will be no posting of the permit and no opportunity for the neighborhood or surrounding community to know about what is to be constructed before it happens and no right to appeal the decision. This permit streamlining is being applied to many types of land use decisions in all zone districts, particularly residential and agricultural.
Buellton Sphere of Influence
When the City of Buellton incorporated in 1992, its founders made it clear that they were not interested in creating an entity that would sprawl into the surrounding agricultural lands, and thus adopted coterminus boundaries between the City’s limits and its Sphere of Influence (SOI).
Unfortunately, this past Spring, the City of Buellton began a process that threatened to do exactly that, by proposing a “study” to expand its SOI. The big problem was that the area to be studied was triple the size of the existing City and to make matters worse, virtually all of the study area was agricultural land, much of it in Williamson Act contracts—designed to protect agriculture.
The Santa Ynez Valley Alliance provided advice to the newly forming Buellton Is Our Town (BIOT) and then joined BIOT in opposing the SOI Study. Organizations and dozens of individual citizens flocked to public hearings to protest the ill-thought-out proposal. VA testified before the standing-room-only City Council meeting in June, and on July 11, the Council voted to cease the process that risked destroying not only Buellton’s small-town character, but also damaging the rural character of the entire Santa Ynez Valley.Airport Authority Ups the Ante on Expansion (October 2007)
It seems as though plans have been in the works for years to expand the Santa Ynez Airport, but that nothing has really materialized. Nothing could be further from the truth--the future has arrived and expansion plans, along with a proposal by the County to locate an Emergency Operations Center (EOC) on the same site, are moving ahead.
The Valley Alliance has already posed a number of questions about who will benefit from the Airport’s proposals and who will bear their impacts. First, however, the facts:
The Airport is planning Four Phases of development on the existing 125-acre airport site which currently has about 183,245 sq. ft. of development on it. The Airport is claiming that Phases I and II are separate from Phases 3 and 4 which are only “conceptual”. We smell a rat.
Phases 1 and 2 would add about 126,415 sq. ft. of development, including security trailers, office space and storage, hangers, 6 helipads and parking. Furthermore, the airport has just indicated it wants to place an additional ten feet of fill onto the existing fill located on the site. Phase 3 would add at least another 18,000 sq. ft. of development, including hangers, a residence, a fixed base operations structure and 63,500 sq. ft. of parking.
This represents a major expansion of the airport, not to mention the 500-foot runway extension which substantially increase the use of the airport by the latest new fad, “very light jets”, designed for use on runway lengths of 3000 to 3500 feet. With the proposed 500 foot runway extension, the Santa Ynez Airport’s runway will be 3304 ft. long. This proposed extension will, therefore, make the Airport fully operational for this fastest-growing sector of aircraft. Some 75-80-% of all VLF jet usage is slated for air taxis, which is precisely what we can expect them to be used for in the Valley
In late May, County Planning Department staff issued an “Initial Study” letter on the Airport Expansion indicating that an Environmental Impact Report (EIR) would not be required, surprising a number of community organizations and individuals. As a result, a coalition of groups has formed to work collaboratively on this issue. The Coalition consists of Santa Ynez Valley Alliance, We Watch, Preservation of Los Olivos, Preservation of Santa Ynez and the Meadowlark Ranch Homeowners Association. Also participating in the discussions are two key property owners in close proximity to the SYV Airport—Dan Gainey and Nancy Crawford Hall.
On June 15th, five major community groups collectively submitted a four page critique of the Initial Study, identifying two of the project’s very significant impacts which were all but ignored by the County’s report—Noise and Visual impacts.
NOISE—Santa Ynez residents living in the vicinity of the airport already experience intolerable noise due to non-emergency helicopter traffic. Creating six new helipads on the property will place this airport, in terms of helicopter capacity, between the John Wayne Airport in Orange County and the Long Beach Airport. As usage increases, noise will increase and it will impact everyone, including residents far from the airport. The new location of the helipads will also expose people visiting the Gainey Winery to “excessive noise levels”, thereby adversely impacting that agricultural operation as a whole. The Initial Study doesn’t even bother to consider how this proposal will affect other nearby agricultural operations, such as impacts to horse and cattle operations. Protection of agriculture is critical to the protection of the rural character of the Santa Ynez Valley.
VISUAL—the new hangars, which are large warehouse type structures, will be highly visible from Highway 246 and will also be visible from Highway 154, as well as other Valley locations. The airport’s new proposal to add up to ten additional feet of fill will greatly exacerbate this impact.
The time to get involved is now!!! If you are interested in getting more information on this topic, you can email Valley Alliance Board Member Carla Frisk.
Helpful Links:
CEQA Process Flowchart: EIR or Negative Declaration?
Santa Ynez Valley Baseline Report
After months of requests by POLO/POSY, Women’s Environmental Watch and the Santa Ynez Valley Alliance, the Board of Supervisors finally voted to withdraw the request for a Santa Ynez Valley Baseline Report. The report originally approved to provide a cost-benefit analysis on Tribal Gaming in the Santa Ynez Valley had morphed into something unrecognizable by our community groups with a price tag none of us felt appropriate.
Archived News Items
Information on archived news items relevant to the Santa Ynez Valley Alliance are available on the following topics:
First Annual Membership Meeting, 2007
North County Board of Architectural Review Statement