UCSB’s forest of high-rise housing and the Goleta Water District’s January flyer explaining how building in the Goodland is peaking during the worst drought in California history are cause to reflect on when this stupidity started. Faced with similar circumstances, in March 1991, district president Katy Crawford proposed a contract with a Canadian company to ship water to Goleta: “The main thing that would stop us is the permitting process … which is horrific, but it has to happen because [in a year] Lake Cachuma will be dry.”
“We won’t look so smart” said board member David Bearman, “if it rains.” The Canadian contract never happened, the rain came, and Bearman was right — Goleta Water District was not smart.
Crawford and Patrick Mylod abandoned Goleta’s longstanding water moratorium and drove our community into the abyss of state water. State water brought with it the hungry, too little, bourgeois City of Goleta and fueled the ambition of UCSB’s economic forecasters and their banker sponsors. State water created an Orange County traffic jam at the Storke and Glen Annie intersection that will only get worse. State water is why Goleta Valley’s largest employer — UCSB — is expanding housing at a breakneck pace while contributing nothing to the county tax base. State water is why building is booming while agriculture goes bust and the rest of Goleta rations water. Worst of all, five years into a statewide drought, Lake Cachuma stands at 16 percent of capacity; state water will not save the Goodland.