Some Dos Pueblos High School teachers are expressing strong concerns about the Glen Annie 1,000-unit housing project that is scheduled to go before the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors on Friday.

“I have been deeply concerned about the proposal to rezone the Glen Annie golf course to a residential area with the potential of building up to 1,000 new homes,” said Kelly Savio, an English teacher at Dos Pueblos High School in Santa Barbara.

Although the Santa Barbara Unified School District and some board members came out in favor of the 1,000-unit housing project across the street from Dos Pueblos High School, they said the developers only agreed to meet with some teachers after a story appeared in Noozhawk.

Some of them have expressed concerns that the rules for measuring traffic impacts near projects that are part of the county’s Housing Element would be exempt from looking at and mitigating traffic impacts. The county Public Works Department would decide whether a project is implementing acceptable roadway and intersection improvements, under the new way of measuring impacts.

“I have taught at Dos Pueblos High School for more than 10 years now,” Savio said. “Students at DP have been expressing safety concerns for years, and literally last week there was a hit-and-run involving a bicyclist on Cathedral Oaks near DP in the 20 minutes just before school started.

“The [Glen Annie/Storke] off-ramp, Cathedral Oaks and the neighborhood side streets around DP are not designed to handle any more traffic, and you know it, or you wouldn’t have included the waiver.”

The Board of Supervisors plans to vote Friday on whether to rezone the Glen Annie site, which would demolish the course, and in its place would rise a mix of housing types, including apartments, studios and single-family homes. The proposal has been met with opposition from nearby residents who have raised concerns about housing density and traffic circulation.

The board, at a hearing scheduled to start at 9 a.m. Friday, will decide whether to rezone land to potentially build up to 5,664 units – 1,522 units for the North County and 4,142 units for the South Coast.

The fate of those dozens of sites set for rezoning has largely been decided by county planning staff.

The plan to build between 800 and 1,000 new homes at the Glen Annie Golf Club, on a hill across the street from Dos Pueblos, has sparked the most neighborhood controversy.

The 2023-31 Housing Element has identified 18 potential rezone sites in the North County and 18 potential rezone sites and nine county-owned sites in the South Coast.

“It is unconscionable to offer these developments a traffic impact waiver,” Savio said. “It is even more shocking that this waiver was tucked into fine print rather than openly acknowledged. These sites are already high-traffic zones, and the Glenn Annie/Dos Pueblos area is especially crazy and unsafe already.”

The mayor of Goleta and all of the council members have sent a letter to the board also raising questions about the exemption to traffic impacts. Although Glen Annie and other projects along the Hollister corridor in within the county, getting there mostly will impact city of Goleta streets and roads.

“Please do not allow exceptions to the County Circulation Element level of service standards for Housing Elements sites,” Mayor Paula Perotte write in a letter signed by all members of the council. “The vast new residential capacity of the housing sites proposed to be rezoned will have outsized effects on traffic circulation and must be held to the same level of service standards now in effect.”

Kevin Gleason, an art teacher at Dos Pueblos, said he knows the county supervisors are in a difficult situation. He hopes they can push back against the state.

“I want our county supervisors to fight for us and the natural, uncongested, beautiful community that we love,” Gleason said. “I want them to say no to the building mandates and welcome the penalties if that is what we need to do to protect what can never be reclaimed once this building happens.”

Gleason said rezoning green space is not the answer.

“It does not take much imagination to understand the impact of thousands of new houses built on green and open spaces that will further push the overdevelopment and urbanization of Goleta and Santa Barbara,” he said.