New Future for Goleta at the Heart of Monday Hearing

Santa Barbara Newsroom
By Tom Schultz
April 14, 2007

Following their campaign pledge to ease key planning rules across Goleta, newly elected City Council members are the driving force behind a raft of recommended policy revisions up for debate starting Monday.

In a hearing at City Hall, the council will discuss several proposed changes to a growth plan passed in October, including provisions that could spur new building. Some of the suggestions come from city staff members, others from residents and interests groups, or developers seeking more flexibility for specific projects.

"The purpose of this public hearing is to sort out all of the requests," according to a recent report by Planning Director Steve Chase.

If given the go-ahead, the review effort could cost an estimated $250,000 and take a year-and-a-half to finish, Chase said.

The spate of changes could affect the area for years to come. Land-use standards in the city's general plan will directly affect how Goleta will look and function for decades.
Councilmen Eric Onnen, Michael Bennett and Roger Aceves, all elected in November, are generally supportive of a new direction for the general plan along with Mayor Jean Blois, a councilwoman since Goleta formed in 2002.
In October, an erstwhile majority of longtime council members approved the city's first plan for traffic, noise, housing and other concerns one month before voters removed most of them from office.
Councilwoman Jonny Wallis is the last member to remain of that old majority, which included Councilman Jack Hawxhurst and Councilwomen Cynthia Brock and Margaret Connell. Wallis can expect an uphill battle preserving strategies approved in the original plan.

Onnen called the new proposals, which have formally bubbled to the surface in recent weeks, "just an amazing amount of data."

"Obviously, I'm thrilled that we have all these items on the table," he said Friday. "Obviously, they won't all come to the general plan at the same time. Some of the items are going to be easy, and some of them will require more. We've got a lot of work to do. It's going to be pretty time-consuming."

The recommendations include lowering affordable housing requirements at certain sites, softening restrictions on commercial development and easing language governing environmental protections. Bacara Resort & Spa could find it easier to grow, and would-be developers of Bishop Ranch might have a shot at putting housing on fallow farmland along Highway 101 between Los Carneros and Glen Annie roads.

Some changes would likely fall under a "fast track" schedule to unfold in the next three to six months at an estimated cost of $50,000, while others would take more in-depth review measuring their impacts on the environment at a cost of up to $200,000, Chase wrote, adding the latter could take nine to 18 months to complete.

The fundamental question at hand is an easy one. What, if anything, in the current plan should stay or go? But that’s where the simplicity ends.

While Wallis and other supporters largely see the current general plan as a tool for preserving Goleta as is, while adding some housing for workers, critics say internal inconsistencies, rigid language and unworkable strategies are key problems that threaten economic vitality and new home construction for the middle class.

Business leaders and affordable housing advocates supportive of a new direction have offered changes to the plan in testimony and writing.

On the other side, slow-growth advocates increasingly guard against wholesale revisions.

Hovering in the background are a series of lawsuits launched last fall against the city by landowners and business advocates who describe the original plan as legally flawed. Talk of settling these disputes still percolates among involved parties.

A key and likely change could come to housing policy.

In a March 19 letter to City Hall, the state Department of Housing and Community Development rejected for a third time the plan’s important housing element, stating it "continues to require significant revisions to comply with state housing law.”

“For example,” according to the agency, “the element still does not adequately demonstrate the projected residential densities and build-out capacities on the identified sites (for new housing) can be realistically achieved.”

While not stating so specifically, that passage was widely interpreted as targeting the plan’s so-called “inclusionary” housing policy requiring that 55 percent of all units in new projects along sections of the Hollister Avenue corridor be affordable.

Builders and affordable housing advocates say that level of inclusion defies market forces, rendering project proposals financially infeasible. It appears as though the new council majority aims to decrease the level to around 25 percent.

That might suit landowners such as John and Jana Price, who control nearly 9 acres at 6868 Cortona Drive. They want to put 132 residential units mixed with a recreational field, community center and deli at the site, and seek to include about 20 percent affordable housing, according to their agent, Harwood White.

"We look forward to working with council and staff to massage the general plan," White said in a March 5 letter to the city.

Wallis appears ready to hold the line at 55 percent. It’s a tool, she said, to ensure Goleta gets the workforce housing it needs.

By law, a city or county can only amend its general plan once a quarter, or four times annually. In Goleta, the council may consider a raft of changes all at once, or perhaps groups of them in a series of decisions.

Among suggested changes, the council would replace the word “shall” with “should” in more than a dozen passages to provide general rather than absolute policy direction.

For example, a line stating that “approvals of all new development shall require adherence to high environmental standards and the preservation and protection of environmental resources” would change, under the proposal.

Opponents of change have raised concerns about the unfolding process remaining open to the public. They praised the level of community input received for the plan approved last year.

“The (original general plan) process that got us here involved, I don’t know, a hundred meetings with hundreds of comments,” Wallis said recently. “I don’t want those to be lost. ... It would be a shame to lose that.”

On Friday, Councilman Bennett characterized the unfolding process as "so far so good."

"As always, the devil is in the details," Bennett said. He said the estimated fiscal costs of the changes to the city did not seem exorbitant.

"We're keeping our word," Bennett said. "We didn't run for office and go a different direction. We are keeping our minds open to all the stakeholders."

"I'm just really happy," he said. "Things are working as they should."