Landlord and developer Ed St. George stood in front of the Santa Barbara Planning Commission last Thursday afternoon — hat firmly on his head and not in hand — and took his lumps. “I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize,” said St. George, who in recent months has become both a charismatic and polarizing force on the Santa Barbara Mesa. “What I did was wrong.”
St. George was referring to the 39 trees he cut down without city permits at the 97-unit apartment complex he purchased two years ago by the intersection of Loma Alta and Cliff Drive, now known as Beach City. Of those, 36 were eucalyptus trees used by monarch butterflies as a winter roosting habitat. Many were part of an officially designated environmentally sensitive habitat. St. George explained he cut the trees down because they provided cover to multiple homeless encampments on the sprawling property abutting Honda Creek. He worried about fires, he explained, and whether some of the squatters posed a potential physical threat to his tenants, almost exclusively out-of-town City College students.
St. George found himself squarely on the hot seat last week — and facing up to $91,000 in possible fines — for planting a row of palm trees without permits, expanding the parking lot by 25 additional spaces, building a bocce ball court, installing a concrete ping-pong table, and making numerous changes of a visually spiffy nature to the exterior of his apartment complex. In all the many public meetings held over the past five months to discuss St. George and his ambitious plans — since withdrawn — to transform the once bedraggled apartments into massive new City College dorms, this was the first time he has ever apologized.