The perceived disconnect between residents and the Santa Barbara City Council motivated Cathie McCammon to enter the race for one of three council seats up for grabs Nov. 3. She’s one of 13 candidates on the ballot, and many of them have the same sentiment.
“We really need a change. They’ve really lost touch with people,” McCammon said of the current council. “I’ve heard it from all kinds of people on all different issues that City Hall just isn’t listening.”
A 37-year resident of Santa Barbara, McCammon is a retired attorney who’s been involved with the Santa Barbara League of Women Voters since 1972. She’s also served on the Harbor Commission, as vice president of the Allied Neighborhoods Association, and president and executive director of the Citizens Planning Association of Santa Barbara County.
She was also a member of the steering committee of Save El Pueblo Viejo, the group spearheading the Measure B ballot initiative that will ask voters to restrict downtown building heights to 40 feet.
According to McCammon, the disconnect between city organizations and residents became apparent when Save El Pueblo Viejo went before the council two years ago, asking it to put an ordinance on the books.
The ordinance was a reaction to the large, luxury condos that sprang up on Chapala Street, and the group asked the council to give the Planning Commission “the tools” it needed to say no to such projects, like height limits and setbacks.
The group’s proposition was turned down by the council, so it decided to take the issue to voters. Since the law prohibits multiple-issue ballot measures, the group decided that height limits were the most important element.
McCammon was part of the effort that gathered 12,000 signatures from residents to put the initiative on the ballot.
“I was amazed as we were gathering signatures how people really wanted low building heights,” she told Noozhawk. “They really wanted to preserve Santa Barbara’s character.”
McCammon said she doesn’t buy the argument that affordable housing will be placed in the downtown area if height limits are kept at 60 feet, either.
“What you have along the transit corridors are million-dollar condos,” she said, adding that she thinks developers have had plenty of time — since 1962, in fact, when the current height ordinance was introduced — to build affordable housing.
“Where is it?” she asked. “I haven’t noticed it.”
McCammon also rebuts the argument that height limits would push growth out, instead of up, causing sprawl.
“It seems to me that it’s the height of arrogance to assume that what happens in Santa Barbara will affect property owners in other jurisdictions,” she said, adding that Santa Barbara is bounded by the mountains and the ocean, limiting sprawl geographically.
A slow-growther, McCammon’s main interest is in land use, and she said she’s attended most of the workshops and updates for Santa Barbara’s general plan, Plan Santa Barbara.
“I don’t like the direction that’s going,” she said of the plan updates, which she said could potentially cause over-development and strained resources.
McCammon said a Plan Santa Barbara workshop addressing both housing and adaptive management was held Thursday, but the 100-page staff report was released the same day and only available in hard copy Sept. 21.
“How are people even supposed to read it, much less study it?” she asked. “At first, they would give us two weeks to look at these staff reports, and now it’s days.”
As far as the municipal budget is concerned, McCammon said she thinks the city has done enough one-time fixes, and that top priorities should remain public safety and infrastructure.
She’d also like to see public hearings when it’s not budget-crunch time to find out what people want to see as funding priorities. She said such hearings could be dispersed throughout the year.
The high cost of salaries and benefits are also a concern, she said.
As for layoffs of city staff, “It may have to happen,” she acknowledged, although she said salary cuts would be a better option.
Shifting to gang activity within the community, McCammon said she’d like to see the city make efforts with the school system and after-school programs to reach children at an earlier age and to work with parents.
“When you have the situation where children are killing children, you have to start really earlier,” she said.
McCammon said she doesn’t support an injunction for youth already involved in gangs. Older youth should have the opportunity to talk to rehabilitated gang members who have gone on to realize their full potential, she said.
She’s also compassionate toward the city’s homeless, many of which are veterans, and she called state and federal spending cuts for veterans facilities “a tragedy.”
“Half the homeless are wounded warriors,” she said. “We send people to war and we make it so that there’s a stigma to seek treatment for PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder).
“We’re just not taking care of them the way we ought to, and then we wonder why they end up on the streets.”
However, she’s very supportive of the city’s recently passed ordinance seeking to curb aggressive panhandling.
She also said she supports the “housing first” model of dealing with homelessness, and was complimentary of the city Housing Authority’s El Carrillo apartments, a collection of studios where the homeless live at reduced rent.
“But you can only do that for so many people. We just don’t have the resources, the money or the land,” she said. “And I don’t think any entity has totally solved the problem, and we need to keep trying.”
— Noozhawk staff writer Lara Cooper can be reached at lcooper@noozhawk.com.
