A lot of Goleta folks recently received an email from the Ty Warner Group asking us to tell the City Council to expedite their process in order to get the Sandpiper golf course remodel done quickly. It’s not often that I agree with a developer, and probably even the Chamber of Commerce on this one.
While the act of using a historic asset as a bargaining chip is less than an honorable practice, it is often an effective one. As a non-golfer, I probably wouldn’t care if the Sandpiper golf course got remodeled or not, if it weren’t for the inclusion of one of Goleta’s most famous and recognizable buildings. And from what I’ve seen in the presentations, they are offering to do a lot of other good things on this project. Not just for golfers, but for the environment and the citizens of Goleta. So I am very much in favor of this project getting done sooner than later. Not because I’m worried about Mr. Warner's busy schedule, but because the Barnsdall-Rio Grande station is getting tired of standing, waiting for salvation.
I recently had to write about an old wooden tower that collapsed in the wind. The POW camp tower was a very important and unique part of local history that is forever gone because preserving it never fit into the ranch owner’s budget. A few months before that I wrote about the death of the historic palm trees at Refugio that were planted nearly 100 years ago by a pioneer Goleta family. A valuable asset supposedly protected by the California State Parks, one by one they fell into the surf and floated out to sea. So paralyzed by their own bureaucratic quagmire, the state could never even give a straight answer as to why they couldn’t have been saved, but everyone assumed it had to do with their budget. For the past decade we have been waiting for the City of Santa Barbara to figure out how to save the two original hangars at our airport. Despite their acknowledgement that they are a valuable historic asset, they just can’t fit them into their budget.