SHARE THE ROAD WITH SANTA: It’s become fashionable in some political circles to bemoan the so-called war on Christmas. Should this conflict play out anything like the war on drugs, poverty, cancer, or terror, I’d say Christmas — even when euphemistically referred to as “the holidays” — has clearly won. In Santa Barbara, by contrast, we fought our jihad against Christmas 15 years ago, and, I regret to report, Santa Claus was tarred and feathered, exiled ignominiously to Oxnard, and subsequently strafed by a carload of drive-by shooters, no doubt in the throes of youthful exuberance. I am referring to the 18-foot-high papier-mâché Santa Claus figure that for 52 blissful years loomed large over Santa Claus Lane as one of the most gleeful expressions of unrepentant tac-o-rama and roadside kitsch west of the Mississippi. Santa — along with an equally garish Frosty the Snowman — qualified as genuine landmarks for car-bound families on road trips, alerting them they were passing by Rick and Pat McKeon’s outlandish North Pole amusement park, replete with petting zoos, miniature train rides, and more date shakes than one could stir a straw in. By 2000, Santa Claus Lane found itself in the throes of a Guccification effort, and Jolly St. Nick was impeding the progress of property values. Despite valiant efforts by preservationists — the figure constituted a “vestigial remnant of the American roadside vernacular,” they explained — the Powers-that-Be decreed Santa had to go. It was a commercial road sign, they sniffed, not even architecture. Even King Herod would have been kinder. In 2002, the eviction orders were executed, and Santa Claus was relocated to the digs of a private Oxnard water company where he forlornly watches over the freeway.
I dredge up this ancient history because where Santa Claus is concerned, the Powers-that-Be are intent on adding insult to injury. They are quietly trying to snuff out what’s known as “The Santa Claus Lane bike path” before the plan’s ink has dried. To the extent there’s a villain involved, it’s Caltrans and that agency’s my-way-is-the-highway quest to widen the freeway from Santa Barbara to Carpinteria. Naturally. All roads, after all, lead to Highway 101.
Even by my standards, this may be a stretch. But it’s Christmas, so I’m entitled. To widen the freeway, Caltrans must first widen two Carpinteria bridges that span Highway 101, one by Linden Avenue, the other by Casitas Pass. Naturally, Caltrans wanted to install mondo-gargantuan, industrial-scale bridges, and naturally these mortally offended the Mayberry-style sensibilities of all card-carrying Carpinterians. In a tour de force of bureaucratic evasion, denial, and double-speak, Caltrans managed to ratify an environmental impact report decreeing there were no adverse “impacts” to the project, even though the document detailed how the new-and-improved bridges would inflict serious damage to two nearby creeks and also cannibalize eight acres of farmland. Normally these two non-impacts are deal killers. But because these adverse consequences were not officially designated as “impacts,” Caltrans was not legally required to mitigate anything. In a token concession to reality, however, the report concluded that these nonexistent impacts could and should be addressed at a later date when the Carpinteria City Council makes the necessary changes to the city’s Local Coastal Plan to allow the bridge widening — and freeway widening — to proceed.