In last week’s Best of Bill column, I lauded the customer service mindset of Santa Barbara Mayor-elect Randy Rowse, and said his magnanimous leadership style was just what the city needed at this point in history.
Just a few days later, freshly re-elected City Councilwoman Kristen Sneddon provided a glaring and graceless example of what not to do. Rowse has his work cut out for him.
As our Josh Molina reported, and every single voter should read, Sneddon used the City Council’s Nov. 9 interviews of potential volunteer Planning Commission members to unload with both barrels on businessman and entrepreneur Barrett Reed, who hopes to continue serving on the commission.
Reed, of course, had unsuccessfully challenged Sneddon for the District 4 council seat in a race she won by — checks notes — 61% of the vote, a landslide by any measure.
Not content to take the win, Sneddon instead piled on, accusing Reed of unethical behavior, absenteeism, double-dealing, name calling and somehow revealing confidential City Hall personnel records he would have no access to, among other perceived sins.
By the end of Josh’s story, I was starting to hate on Reed myself. And then I remembered that I’ve known him for years, and he’s none of the things Sneddon described.
But Reed’s more than capable of defending himself, which he did — with grace and integrity.
What’s far more alarming is an elected official’s wholly unwarranted attack on an applicant and private citizen willing to commit a significant amount of personal time to serve on the City of Santa Barbara’s most important commission. And that her council colleagues sat by passively and let it happen.
Reed has been a thoughtful, collegial presence on the Planning Commission, and his experience and perspective as a redeveloper — not a developer — of downtown and Funk Zone properties have provided Santa Barbara with an innovative path forward with repurposed space. He’s also successfully completed his projects while working with the city bureaucracy and not against it.
We need more citizens like Reed to step up and take on these often thankless tasks on our community’s vital boards and commissions. What he endured Nov. 9 will have a chilling effect on the next volunteer considering an application to serve.
The interview process should be tough, but it must also be fair. What Sneddon demonstrated was pure vindictiveness. It was not a good look.
Santa Barbara deserves better.
Noozhawk had an audience of 102,148 readers this past week, according to our Google Analytics. What follows is my take on the Top 5 stories you were reading during that period, which was again filled with mostly bad news.
You should know by now that this is my opinion column, not a news story, and I’m writing it in my civic capacity as Noozhawk’s publisher.
Whether you agree or disagree, feel free to email us a — short — letter to the editor.
1. Second Body Found Saturday in Santa Barbara, But Foul Play Not Suspected
Two dead bodies were found in separate incidents Nov. 6, but Santa Barbara police don’t suspect foul play in either death.
As our Tom Bolton first reported, Sgt. Ethan Ragsdale said a dead homeless man was discovered around 8 a.m. on South Milpas Street near the Highway 101 overpass and the roundabout.
Ragsdale told Tom that the death did not appear to be suspicious.
Just after 2:30 p.m., meanwhile, Lt. Bryan Jensen reported that officers had been dispatched to the 200 block of East Cabrillo Boulevard, where another body had been found, this one on the beach across from Chase Palm Park.
Jensen said the second death of the day may have been related to a medical issue.
The Santa Barbara County Coroner’s Bureau is investigating both incidents. Neither man’s identity was disclosed, pending notification of families.
The grim discoveries were the third and fourth in Santa Barbara in just three days.
On Nov. 5, a dead homeless man was found in Storke Placita in the 700 block of State Street downtown. Police say his death is believed to be from natural causes.
The day before, the lifeless body of a man was spotted floating facedown in the ocean below Shoreline Park on the Mesa. The Coroner’s Bureau has not yet released a cause of his death.
The identities of both of these two men also were withheld, pending family notifications.
2. Pedestrian Struck by Vehicle and Killed on Las Positas Road in Santa Barbara
A Santa Barbara woman was struck and killed as she was crossing Las Positas Road near the Santa Barbara Golf Club the evening of Nov. 4.
According to our Tom Bolton, police Sgt. Ethan Ragsdale said the pedestrian — later identified as 49-year-old Shelby Catherine Brady — was crossing the busy street just north of Stanley Drive when she was hit by a northbound Ford pickup truck at about 6:30 p.m.
Brady, who lived nearby, was pronounced dead at the scene.
Ragsdale told Tom that the pickup driver, whose identity was not disclosed, stopped immediately, and that alcohol was not believed to be a factor in the collision.
The SBPD Critical Accident Reconstruction Team is investigating the wreck.
As Las Positas Road residents and neighbors know, that street is not pedestrian-friendly. There isn’t even a sidewalk on its east side between Stanley Drive and State Street, more than a quarter-mile away.
Not that long ago, the street was restriped to make it two lanes from four on some stretches and to add turn lanes, but it’s still perilous even for drivers attempting to turn onto it from Samarkand neighborhood streets, from McCaw Avenue or from the MacKenzie Park parking lot.
The roadway also crests near where Brady was struck between Stanley Drive and McCaw Avenue and is not well-lit there, with a copse of eucalyptus trees on the east side and the golf course along the western edge. Dense fog also was enveloping the area that evening.
Brady’s funeral services are pending.
3. 7 Juveniles Arrested on Felony Charges in Connection with Assaults on San Marcos High Student
A series of violent attacks on a San Marcos High School student led to the arrest of seven classmates in the peculiar confrontation.
As our Tom Bolton first reported, seven male juveniles were arrested Nov. 10 in connection with the alleged assaults, which Santa Barbara County sheriff’s investigators say occurred on the San Marcos campus at 4750 Hollister Ave.
Sheriff’s spokeswoman Raquel Zick said school resource Deputy Sean Hampton “learned that a juvenile student had been seriously injured in a series of attacks by numerous students.”
She added that school administrators had videos of the attacks and shared them with Hampton.
No details about the assaults or the extent of the victim’s injuries were disclosed.
Zick said the seven suspects were arrested on suspicion of felony assault with force likely to cause great bodily injury, and conspiracy.
Six of them were transported to Santa Maria Juvenile Hall for booking on the charges, while the seventh was released to the custody of his guardians.
Identities and ages were withheld because all of those arrested are minors.
Zick said the investigation is ongoing, and anyone with information is asked to call the sheriff’s Criminal Investigations Bureau at 805.681.4150.
Click here to leave an anonymous tip online, or call 805.681.4171.
4. Bicyclist Suffers Critical Injuries in Collision on Highway 154 Near Los Olivos
Two bicyclists were injured — one critically — when they collided with a vehicle on Highway 154 in Los Olivos the afternoon of Nov. 7. The most severely hurt victim was flown by helicopter to Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital.
As our Tom Bolton first reported, the crash occurred about 3 p.m. at the intersection of Foxen Canyon Road, on the western end of Los Olivos.
Santa Barbara County fire Capt. Daniel Bertucelli told Tom that the cyclist with major injuries was treated at the scene by paramedics before being flown by a Calstar medical helicopter to Cottage Hospital.
The other cyclist was treated at the scene for minor injuries.
The identities of the cyclists were not disclosed.
No information was released on the vehicle or its driver. The California Highway Patrol is investigating the cause and circumstances of the collision.
5. Proposed UCSB Munger Hall Dorm Building Sparks Local, National Criticism, Student Protests
Munger Hall is a menacing monstrosity of a dormitory proposed at UC Santa Barbara, which happens to occupy one of the world’s most naturally beautiful settings for a college campus.
If constructed as planned, the 11-story, 1.5 million-square-foot building would be the tallest structure on the South Coast.
Inside, 4,500 students would be assigned small, single-occupancy rooms — nearly all of them without windows — and the edifice would contain enough amenities so no one would ever need to leave the confines of its quasi-sci-fi utopia.
UCSB desperately needs the student housing, as Noozhawk has been chronicling, but this thing is a piece of work, even by the arrogant standards of the University of California System.
I can’t take the proposal seriously, because it’s an unserious solution that deserves all the derision it gets.
Frankly, I don’t think there are more than even a handful of people at UCSB who truly believe it’s a good idea either — but for the fact that local billionaire Charlie Munger is willing to put up a mere $200 million toward the approximately $1.4 billion project on the hubristic condition that his design specifications must be followed to a tee.
Our Jade Martinez-Pogue did a deep dive on the controversial project after a consulting architect on the university’s Design Review Committee quit in protest.
“In the nearly 15 years I served as a consulting architect to the DRC, no project was brought before the committee that is larger, more transformational, and potentially more destructive to the campus as a place than Munger Hall,” architect Dennis McFadden, vice president and global design principal of Los Angeles-based LEO A DALY, wrote in his resignation letter.
“The basic concept of Munger Hall as a place for students to live is unsupportable from my perspective as an architect, a parent and a human being.”
Munger was unmoved.
“When an ignorant man leaves, I regard it as a plus, not a minus,” he dismissively told CNN Business. “He’s just plain wrong.
“All I can say is that I have been doing this for a long time, and no building has failed yet.”
Munger, a part-time Montecito resident who made his fortune as vice chairman of former world’s-richest-man Warren Buffet’s holding company, Berkshire Hathaway, is right in one sense: At 97 years old, he has been doing this for a long time.
But just because he can point to what he calls a similarily designed dorm at the University of Michigan, where it snows all winter, doesn’t mean the authoritarian concept is the right fit for an active-lifestyle Southern California campus steps from the beach.
Add the sweeping and disruptive changes in how indoor interactions are handled in the COVID-19 age and this thing suddenly looks more like a relic than a rethinking.
Pressure from UCSB’s acute student housing shortage has been building — on campus and off — and Munger Hall has triggered an eruption of angry dissent from local architects, officials, residents and students, as Jade reported.
The project also has the potential to rain ash over what are likely to be the final years of Chancellor Henry Yang’s heralded tenure, even if it neatly enables UCSB to meet its 2010 Long Range Development Plan goal of building housing for 5,000 students by 2025.
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Last Year on Noozhawk
What was our most-read story this time last year? Emergency Personnel Respond After Man Jumps to Death from Santa Barbara Freeway Overpass.
• • •
Americans Held Hostage: Day 74
After 74 days, there are still hundreds of American citizens and tens of thousands of U.S. green-card holders trapped in Afghanistan — including at least two dozen American schoolchildren, most of whom are from California. It’s been almost as long since President Joe Biden has even uttered the word “Afghanistan” in public.
• • •
Bill Macfadyen’s Story of the Week
One of Los Angeles’ most beautiful and historic edifices is the old Herald Examiner Building in downtown. The William Randolph Hearst-commissioned, Julia Morgan-designed, 1914 Mission Revival structure fell into sadness and disrepair after the “HerEx” newspaper closed in 1989, but the building’s rebirth is spectacular: The Many Histories of Julia Morgan’s Los Angeles Herald Examiner Building.
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Best of Bill’s Instagram
We celebrated the life of my friend and former colleague, Noozhawk iSociety columnist Rochelle Rose, in my Instagram feed this past week. Her children, Marie and Travis Brashears, definitely inherited her event-planning skills.
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Watch It
Which one are you after daylight-saving time?
(ValorK9Academy video)
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— Bill Macfadyen is Noozhawk’s founder and publisher. Contact him at wmacfadyen@noozhawk.com, follow him on Instagram: @bill.macfadyen, or click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.
