Californians are being forced to endure a lot of things these days, and it would appear that our safety is not a priority.
The authorities may act like our safety is a concern, with events like Tsunami Preparedness Week and Fire Severity Zone Updates, but the state housing mandates make all of that null and void.
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s housing mandate to force local leaders to build vast amounts of housing is intended to make housing more affordable, and that might work in some parts of the state.
But along the Southern California coast, it will never work.
They could completely fill in all the Goleta Valley, from the mountains to the sea, with solid blocks of three-story apartment buildings and they will still all sell at market value.
Because basically, the whole world wants to live here or be a landlord here, or both.
There will never be sufficient supply for the demand. Our local politicians may know this, but “they have to” approve this because Newsom is forcing them to do it.
Which is actually a perfect plan and a brilliant political play, giving local politicians the perfect scapegoat, their boss.
Our elected officials can honestly throw up their hands in despair when their constituents complain, but they know later they’ll get to roll in all that new tax revenue and a temporarily boosted economy.
Newsom repeatedly states that climate change was a major factor in January’s Los Angeles County wildfires and we need to prepare for more of the same.
Meanwhile, his housing mandates make it quicker and easier for developers to build more houses in the direct line of fire for the santa ana winds that have been blowing down through these canyons for centuries.
You may have seen the recently released Fire Hazard Severity Zone Maps that were updated to reflect local knowledge like terrain hazards, wind patterns and “evacuation complexities.”
Nearly all of the City of Goleta boundary is labeled as severely high fire danger, but one of the few exceptions was Glen Annie Golf Course — the same Glen Annie Golf Course that Santa Barbara County currently has scheduled for more than 1,000 new homes.
Common sense would dictate that a golf course or other large open parcels would be excellent fire breaks and we could use that to our safety advantage, but our county Board of Supervisors say “they have to” build a bunch of houses on the biggest fire buffer we have.
And if anybody thinks that those brand-new homes on a hillside overlooking Goleta and less than a mile from a beautiful beach will be affordable, I’ve got a bridge to sell them.
What makes this particular location even more dangerous is the pre-existing traffic problem. The Glen Annie/Storke roads corridor is already so congested that the extremely long northbound exit ramp backs up onto Highway 101 every day.
The county has turned a blind eye to this obvious problem and continues to insist that Glen Annie is still a great place to build more than 1,000 additional homes.
This is not a solution to a housing problem; this is a problem becoming a disaster. Talk about an “evacuation complexity.”
Meanwhile, over on Patterson Avenue, traffic is getting worse daily and the construction projects on that corridor continue to be approved.
A new three-story apartment building that was vigorously opposed by neighborhood groups is nearly complete on a former avocado orchard at Calle Real and North Patterson Avenue.
Just across the street, they are building another apartment building on a sliver of land by the freeway exit ramp.
Down on South Patterson Avenue, the owners of Por La Mar Nursery are hoping to build 800 new homes where their greenhouses sit.
What do all these housing developments on Patterson Avenue corridor have in common? They all use the same freeway overpass! So, when there’s an emergency evacuation, they will all be stuck sitting in the same traffic jam.
Our fire departments have rules about how many occupants can utilize a building safely. They use the square footage to determine how many exits are needed for X number of people to safely avoid a disaster.
So why aren’t our local politicians held to the same standards of safety on a neighborhood scale? They are building thousands of new housing units but not providing any new exit doors.
Instead, they are moving the opposite direction, with a cool new trend called a “road diet” that takes lanes away from cars to make the roads “safer.”
But if and when we have a large-scale evacuation, everybody’s going to need to get to an exit pronto, and our anorexic roads will not suffice.
If all this isn’t bad enough, there’s one more factor that Newsom is forcing upon us that makes all this even more dangerous.
His Advanced Clean Cars II regulation requires that all new vehicles sold in the state be zero-emission by 2035. This obviously will require a lot of readily available electricity and Newsom’s path to that goal are battery energy storage systems (BESS).
The Goleta City Council was quick to obey Newsom’s commands and built a BESS facility right in the busiest part of Goleta before most residents even knew what a BESS facility was.
Now, as the council paves the way for a second BESS facility right by Ellwood School, we are learning that this technology is so new, even the experts don’t know how safe it is.
What they do know is that when they catch on fire, the official plan of action is just to let them burn out by themselves, and they can release toxic gases while doing so.
BESS facility proponents will be quick to note that the Moss Landing facility that spewed toxic smoke for several days earlier this year was inferior technology, and Goleta has superior Tesla batteries, but there have already been fires involving Tesla Megapack batteries as well.
The technology is just too new to know how dangerous it is yet, but we are taking that risk.
So to bring this all full circle, our existing Goleta BESS facility is on the same Storke/Glen Annie corridor as the congested freeway exit ramp and the proposed 1,000 new homes on our only wildfire buffer.
For our safety, local authorities have an emergency alert system that makes everyone’s cell phone beep when there’s a fire anywhere in Santa Barbara County.
For our safety, our phones sound an alert when there’s just the chance of a fire because of a predicted windy day.
For our safety, our phones beep immediately after an earthquake.
For our safety, the city has narrowed Hollister Avenue to only two lanes through Old Town.
For our safety, we have a whole week dedicated to tsunami awareness, even though we haven’t had a tsunami here since 1812.
But we recently had devastating wildfires in Los Angeles County and a huge fire and toxic event at a BESS facility near Monterey Bay and we are expected to just keep building, because “we have to.”
