[Note: Part one in a three-part series.]
When was the last time many of you, those of you who don’t work at UCSB, visited the campus and surrounding area? It will amaze you what has been built and continues to be built.
A couple of examples are the off-campus, multistory, university-owned structures bordering the now dead Ocean Meadows golf course that are sprouting like environmental weeds. I say that because they have solar panels, and that will offset their carbon footprint. Yeah, right. The other is the massive faculty housing development along Phelps Road.
And now, the California Coastal Commission — think about this, the Coastal Commission, the unelected body that says no to everything — approved 1.8 million square feet of new space to accommodate 5,000 more students and 3,650 more parking spaces!
Our family has owned 2,500 acres of farmland for over 40 years. We’ve never built a thing, and yet I can’t even build my retirement home without the threat of blackmail by the CCC and local environmentalists.
It’s ironic the very incubator that was responsible for breeding a large number of our local antagmentalists (antagonists/environmentalists) were hatched at this very campus and then spread out into the community to dictate their ideology on the rest of us. These are the very people who fought the construction of the Bacara Resort & Spa until they were bought off with millions of dollars to quietly walk away.
They are also the very same who fought the construction of the homes adjacent to the Sandpiper golf course until they forced the developer to cluster the houses into a tiny pocket while virtually ignoring the nearly 1,000 acres of UCSB spreading into the urban reaches of Goleta. These are the same ones who for years fought the Naples project (regardless how you feel about it) preaching it was the end of the coast as we know it.
But you didn’t and don’t hear a peep when 17 multistory apartment units were built right on the bluff on the east end of Isla Vista. And the silence was deafening when the faculty housing sprouted and wrapped around a “wetland.”
UCSB is nearly as big as the city of Lompoc. It will swell in size to 40,000 bodies on campus; 10,000 of those new people were just added in the coastal zone where there is no water and now a heck of lot more traffic. McDonald’s up the road in the Camino Real shopping plaza was denied a drive-through based on a traffic argument. Target keeps getting grinded because of a possible traffic increase. Meanwhile, UCSB, with the royal blessing of the Coastal Commission and blind eye of the enviros, continues to expand ever further.
This isn’t intended as an attack against a place of higher learning; it’s to again point the hypocrisy of who can get something done and who can’t in this county and why. For years and years and still years to come, groups like the Gaviota Coast Conservancy and Environmental Defense Center have sued over the construction of a single home because they just didn’t like it or it was too big in “their” opinion. And the California Coastal Commission has fined people for impacting the coast over a single picnic table.
How’s that for fair and balanced?
— Henry Schulte of Santa Barbara owns and operates Dos Pueblos Ranch. He has been politically active in the community for years. Click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.