After 14 years of digesting massive, complex planning documents on almost a weekly basis, Cecilia Brown has called it quits and stepped off the County Planning Commission, where she functioned as a persistent, congenial, and always prepared voice of Goleta community pride. She’s been replaced by Laura Bridley, a career planning consultant, longtime contract planner for the City of Goleta, and Santa Barbara city resident.
Brown, a retired naval officer, served at the pleasure of three different 2nd District county supervisors — Susan Rose, Janet Wolf, and Gregg Hart. She’d initially hoped to remain on the commission long enough to see ERG’s oil development project proposed for Cat Canyon to completion. But that project — the first of three major steam-injection projects with a combined carbon dioxide footprint of 760,000 metric tons a year, 250,000 of which come from the ERG project — kept getting pushed back.
In recent weeks, the proposed project — a target for climate-change activists — has been delayed indefinitely to allow for a major redesign to install solar panels to help meet the project’s power needs. How much that reduces the project’s carbon footprint, however, remains far from clear. In addition, ERG — which has been long floundering under the shadow of bankruptcy — has just recently been sold. Brown, approaching her 75th birthday, could no longer wait. She has trees in her backyard to sit under, she explained, and mountains on the horizon in serious need of staring.