Santa Barbara Cemetery Historical Museum Talk and Walking Tours
 The Best Last Place – Founded in 1867, The Santa Barbara Cemetery is unique. It has not only passed through the five distinctive stages of cemetery development in the United States, but has melded these eras into the remarkably beautiful, functioning “Best Last Place.” Author David Petry spent eight years researching, while traveling to over 1,000 cemeteries around the country and around the world.
 He has given tours of the local cemetery since 1996, covering it development as well as some of the many notables buried there including many Santa Barbara business, political, and arts leaders; captains of industry, writers, screen actors, and a princess.
Santa Barbara Historical Museum members, please call (805)966-1601 for reservations for the talk or walks.
Lecture and Reception at the Santa Barbara Historical Museum, October 27 at 5:30 p.m.
$25 Museum Members ~ $35 Guests
Walking Tours at the Santa Barbara Cemetery, 901 Channel Drive
Saturday October 29 at 1:00
$10 Museum Members ~ $15 Guests
Sunday October 30 at 10:00 am
$10 Museum Members ~ $15 Guests
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Walking tour notes:
Meet at the Cemetery Chapel
Approx 2.5 hours, walking approx 1 mile.
Bring water, hats, and a camera.
UPDATE: The Lompoc Record did an update on this project. In the article, they mention my project with John Fritsche on Puritan Ice, “She recalled an instance of an author looking for information on the former Puritan Ice factories in Lompoc and surrounding areas, for a book on agricultural ice and shipping methods. She also noted that there isn’t much information readily available about the temperance movement in Lompoc, which was founded as a temperance colony.”
I also spoke with David Bell of Heritage Microfilm in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Heritage is the firm that will digitize the newspapers for the Lompoc Valley Historical Society. The Lompoc papers, as noted in the article, will be free to the public through California Digital Newspaper Collection, and accessible through the Library of Congress site. Heritage Microfilm also maintains the largest subscription newspaper archive available, NewspaperArchive.com, a site which I use extensively. The last decade of the Santa Barbara News-Press is located in this archive, but so are thousands of other papers from around the world.
Newspapers are both digitized for online access at Heritage, and saved to microfilm. The microfilm provides a safe master hard copy that would be preserved in the event of database or file corruption of the online versions. Heritage is adding thousands of pages daily to the site. Their target is all newspapers, but they can work with any newspaper published prior to 1923 as these are ‘off-copyright.’ Newspapers between 1923 and 1978 are usually ‘off-copyright,’ because a daily legal filing of copyright was required during this period. Papers still in copyright work directly with Heritage.
Pricing of such work depends on the number of pages, of course, but also on the condition of the papers.
Information on where to send a check for the Lompoc project appears below. I sent mine!
Original Decomposing article posted 3 October, 2011.
Newspapers are the daily thread of our history for over a century. As a historian, I have encountered towns and cities with truly abysmal remnants of their newspaper histories.
Others have made the transition to digitized, and online versions in such collections as http://newspaperarchive.com/, or Proquest.
The difference is immense. Online sources can be searched and printed. Items easily missed by the eye as you troll through cloudy and scratchy microfilm, or through decaying (and increasingly locked away) hard copies are suddenly revealed.
So, this missive from Karen Paaske of Lompoc is worthy of attention.
“Deteriorating in the basement of Lompoc Library are Old Lompoc Newspapers– The Lompoc Journal (or People’s Journal)1908-1918 and the Lompoc Review 1919-1921, for a total of 7 volumes and 9400 pages. Microfilming will make them available to patrons of the library before they disintegrate. The Lompoc Valley Historical Society is raising funds to microfilm these papers so they are available to the public.
Myra Manfrina, local Lompoc Historian says, “They are the only ones in existence, so far as we know and are deteriorating with use and age. If they were microfilmed, the public could be free to use them for research, while the original papers could be put aside to be preserved.”
About $4500 is required for microfilming. Additionally, to digitize, so they can be searched online is an additional $2700. The California Digital Newspaper Collection based at UC Riverside will add the newspapers free of charge to their searchable online collection so that they are available through their website and the Library of Congress.
Donations, which are tax deductible, should be sent to the Lompoc Valley Historical Society, PO Box 88, Lompoc CA 93438 Questions should be addressed to reference@lompochistory.org or call 805 735-4626.”
Karen and the Lompoc Valley Historical Society were extremely helpful to a fellow researcher and I last year when we were tracking down details of a company that was operating in Lompoc eighty-odd years ago.
I’m writing a check.
I’m hoping you will consider this and help raise the whole $7200.
The annual Halloween walking tours at the Santa Barbara Cemetery are coming up.
Saturday, October 30, 10:00 to 12:30.
Sunday, October 31, 1:00 to 3:30.
Meet at the Santa Barbara Cemetery Chapel, 901 Channel Drive, Santa Barbara.
Tours are $15/person, pay at the door.
Reserve a spot – 805 689 3423
This year, we’ve added Fess Parker Jr. to our tour, and returned to an old favorite, poet Kenneth Rexroth.
We talk about the evolution of cemeteries – which means the evolution of who we are – and visit the graves of Santa Barbara notables Stearns, Brinkerhoff, Fernald, Lewis Burton, W. W. Hollister and cemetery founder Charles Huse. The founders of Sambo’s are a stone’s throw apart. Industrialists George Owen Knapp (Union Carbide founder), George Boldt (founder of the antecedent to Corning Glass), George Oscar Mayer (production chief for the Oscar Mayer corporation), Carbon Petroleum Dubbs (the brains behind Universal Oil Products) and Frederick Forrest Peabody (founder of Arrow Shirt). Other favorites include Ronald Colman, Laurence Harvey and Domino Harvey.
The chapel was designed by George Washington Smith and Lutah Maria Riggs, gorgeous murals by Alfredo Ramos Martinez. We talk about the pyramid, the mausoleums, the Masons and Odd Fellows, and find the metal marker that looks like stone. The Chinese section is the only one in Santa Barbara County.
Hope we’ll see you there!
Father’s Day 2010
 Eugene Petry, M.D. I think my father was surprised at being a father, especially of two boys. He completed medical school at Kansas University (KU) in 1954 in Pediatrics and Cardiology. He completed an internship at Wesley Hospital in Wichita, where brother Ed was born in late 1955. Then my father shipped out with his family to Japan to serve as a physician (Captain) in the Army for two years. I was born there at the end of his stint. He took a slew of photos in Japan. I think the place and the photographic culture agreed with him.
He came back to do his pediatric residency at the Methodist Hospital in Des Moines, finishing up in 1960. From Des Moines, he returned to KU where he did a cardiology fellowship. From there, he took his first position as a Pediatric Cardiologist at Indiana University Medical Center.
His first area of interest was in improving catheterization for infants. Catheterization is the practice of inserting one or more catheters through veins or arteries, and coursing them along inside the vein or artery until the catheter reaches the heart. Once there, a physician can evaluate the heart and its functioning, identifying defects in detail. A complete analysis can require six or more catheters.
At the time, catheters were not used until children were older than six months, and only one or two catheters at a time. Clearly, if a baby is born with a congenital heart defect, this is too late to be analyzing the problem, and they were only analyzing the survivors whose problems were obviously not overwhelmingly life-threatening.
My father and his colleagues pushed the envelope, my father taking the lead in using catheters in younger and younger babies, and increasing the number of catheters to get better diagnostic information. His treatment and care of children dramatically reduced the death rate among babies with congenital heart defects at Indiana University Medical Center. Soon he was working with children six weeks old, rather than six months old. Even so, only the strong and not terribly ill lasted the six weeks to come into the sphere of treatment.
But IU’s Pediatrics Department was dismantled in late 1960s, and he found his next role at USC’s Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles in 1967. The year was my own personal crucible – moving from the Midwest to Los Angeles (Hollywood, actually), and finding myself smack in the middle of a counterculture I hadn’t even known existed – but for my father, he continued to push the envelope and was soon using catheters to successfully treat newborns, just hours from the womb, saving tiny lives. Still, the attrition rate was high. Some heart defects could simply not be repaired.
In 1972, he took Loma Linda University up on an offer to lead their Pediatric Cardiology program. Loma Linda was another teaching university, and I think my father loved teaching as much or more than his role as physician. Loma Linda — we moved to Redlands just down the road — was out of LA, and with two teen-aged sons, Los Angeles was becoming one frightening parenting adventure after another. It also helped that Loma Linda promised him new facilities and a hand in their design.
Twenty years later, when he retired, the new facilities were dusty and unfulfilled promises, and the shine was definitely off the opportunity. It turned out that Loma Linda University presciently saw infant heart transplants as a lightning rod for media attention. My father, working with surgeon Len Bailey, provided them their lightning rod. Baby Fae was the first bolt.
Baby Fae was an infant born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a rare congenital heart defect in which the left side of the heart is severely underdeveloped on October 14, 1984. The Loma Linda team transplanted a baboon heart into her on October 26th. A few hours later, the heart started beating on its own.
TIME magazine, in their November 12th issue (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,926947,00.html) reported that, “Last week, as television viewers got their first glimpse of the newborn known only as Baby Fae, it was her visibly heaving chest that stole the show. There was no mistaking the pulsations of life and no forgetting that the power source was the freshly implanted heart of a young baboon.
“One week after the historic transplant operation at Loma Linda University Medical Center in Southern California, the first infant—though not the first person—to receive a simian heart was reported to be doing remarkably well. “All vital signs are still good, and there’s no sign of rejection,” said Hospital Spokeswoman Patti Gentry, noting that Baby Fae was “just gulping down her formula.” Outside the hospital, there was wonder and excitement over this latest medical marvel, but the enthusiasm was dampened somewhat by controversy.”
The controversy was the response of antivivisectionists to the use of animal organs.
Twenty-one days after the surgery, Baby Fae succumbed to a kidney infection.
The media was enthralled. There were other babies to follow including Baby Moses and Baby Eve. As you can see, the treatment for a time took on Biblical proportions.
But there was another controversy underneath the hype. Many of these babies died. And not because of their new hearts. Children with congenital heart defects don’t usually have just the one problem. Their bodies are often touched with a host of problems. The likelihood of a child surviving such a critical transplant was and remains extremely low. The stress on the families is immense. Most of the parents of these children divorced in the years immediately after the transplants.
There was another disturbing factor. The University, in their drive to keep themselves in the media eye, went looking for infants that might benefit from the surgery. This meant going to third world countries. Loma Linda paid for the families to come to the United States and receive treatment. But these families, like their ill children, had a host of other pressing issues. Taking on the care of an infant transplant patient was overwhelming. Care required daily logs, regular and consistent medication, thresholds of cleanliness. If chances of survival for a child in a health-care rich environment were low, chances for these children were nil.
My father never approved of transplants in infants. He found the media circus ridiculous and damaging. The mothers of these children sometimes lived at our home to avoid having them stay in an impersonal motel. But the University’s neonatal ambulance chasing wore on him and he retired as soon as he was able.
His legacy remains with the hundreds of individuals surviving today who would not have survived without his care, the thousands who are beneficiaries of his advancements in diagnosis and treatment.
 Eugene Petry, M.D. and son (me) While they were living in Los Angeles, my mother and father ate dinner one night at The Matador restaurant on Santa Monica Boulevard and found themselves at a Flamenco show. The acts were compelling and vibrant – this was a troupe straight outta Madrid – and they were enthralled. Between acts and during the intermission, a small-boned, slender man bantered with the audience from his table. Completely uncharacteristically, my parents bantered back.
That night, my brother and I, ten and twelve years of age, still very wet behind our Midwestern ears, were on our own at our home on Normandie Avenue. We finally called the LAPD at midnight. Our parents had never come home after nine. The LAPD desk sergeant told us to call back if they had not turned up in 48 hours.
They came home at 2:30 am, scolded us for being awake still – we were almost more terrified at these two strangers who came home – and then ushered us off to bed because some people were coming over. Some people turned out to be twenty or more strangers. They wore loud colors in combinations of skin-tight and flowing lines. They came from Spain, from Argentina, from Cuba. They laughed, they sang spontaneously, they played guitars, they clapped in that staccato flamenco style that creates kinetic stereo in your cerebrum, they danced, they drank, and they smoked.
I don’t recall going to sleep that night, but I do know a couple were still bright and cheery as coffee was being made and my brother and I scrounged breakfast.
That night was definitely the end of my childhood. Not because of what I saw or heard, but because my parents had (wisely, I think) found something much more interesting than rearing two ungrateful boys.
My mother’s memory of the night is different. She believes they came home late, after going to Nico’s house with the troupe, and sent us off to bed. Maybe I have conflated a series of events into a single cataclysm over the years. But understand, she had been drinking and we were completely sober.
The flamenco parties continued for years, and my parents took a few trips to Spain. They gave away brides at weddings, they helped old guitar players find work, and they meshed their surprised medical social square with the flamenco circle with amusing results. My father switched his guitar playing from corny folk ballads, probably learned to entertain his young sons, to flamenco.
When my father finally retired, he moved to Socorro, New Mexico where he spoke mostly Spanish and befriended old cowhands. He bought a hundred-plus year old adobe near downtown, studied local history, played guitar, and hiked.
He died in 2001.
I don’t think he and I ever saw eye-to-eye. It was an antagonism born into being a boy, I think, that we never rooted out. He didn’t name me Sue, but did the equivalent, which was ridicule and shame me most of my life. It wasn’t intentional or personal, it was just that my brother and I were babies and then children, stupid and clumsy in the way that boy children are – I scratched his car with my bike, I hit my brother in the head with a golf club (accidentally), I snipped our cat’s whiskers off with scissors. Then, before he knew it, we were disgruntled and opinionated teens, egged on by our peers to groundlessly question everything and even more groundlessly profess our dissatisfaction in the world. I don’t think, in our later years with him, that he ever quite felt that his sons were wonders, or in any way incredible. He continued to see us as a bit stupid, a bit clumsy, and doomed to some brand of failure, which in his favor, of course, we were.
The hard part in being a child, I think, is to understand the shape of the world you grow up in. Some of the constraints are real, some are just perceived, but real for your belief in them. As you age, you try to unravel who you are by trying to see that shape. A major factor is, of course, who was my father? Then, you become the man you thought you hated, because you respond to the demands of life in similar — maybe genetic – ways.
Then you have children, and you realize that the hard part of being a child was not so hard at all. In fact it was no more than a boo-boo that a well-timed kiss and a band-aid would have swept away had anyone know you harbored such a wound. The hard thing is being a parent, and understanding that your own children will someday be asking the question, ‘Who was my father?’ and ‘Why am I the way I am because of that?’
My daughters, full and step, are incredible to me. I have immense trust in them and love what they do in this world. This is the gift of life and of parenting. I hope my father had some moments of that. I cherish mine.
 Resignation, by Ettore Cadorin May 30, 2010
10:00 am – 12:30 pm
$25 per person
900 Channel Drive, Santa Barbara, CA 93108
This Memorial Day weekend, take a walk through Santa Barbara history, and through the history of cemeteries, at one of the premiere cemeteries in the West. Founded in 1867, the Santa Barbara Cemetery successfully passed through all six stages of cemetery development in the United States, and has attracted business leaders, performers, architects, artists, and political icons. There are over 40,000 interments at the cemetery, and at least 100,000 stories.
Your tour guide is David Petry, former historian for the Cemetery, and author of The Best Last Place, A History of the Santa Barbara Cemetery. The book, normally $30 in bookstores, will be available for $15.
To make a reservation, e-mail dlpetry@gmail.com.
Join The Best Last Place Facebook group and get a tour discount!
The Past, Present and Future of Santa Barbara’s Local Currencies
David Petry
Santa Barbara — March 20, 2010
 The 1/2 Hour Bill. Santa Barbara has had its very own currency two times. The first from 1900 to around 1929 was simply an extension of the federal currency, the dollar, and was a convenience for the banking system. The second, launched in the late 1990s, was independent of the dollar, and promised to forge tighter community bonds, keep the precious fruits of our labors in circulation closer to home, and buffer Santa Barbara from the fluctuations and heartlessness designed into the very fiber of the U.S. dollar.
The initial response in the late 90s to what was called the Santa Barbara Hour was enthusiastic. A governing board formed quickly. The Fund for Santa Barbara anted up seed money. Newsletters, bumper stickers and educational forums blanketed the town. Bills were designed and printed. Over 300 participants signed on and the currency began to flow. A handful of businesses started accepting the currency giving it the promise of becoming widely functional. Mayor Harriet Miller wrote an official letter in support, encouraging the currency’s use and adoption.
Santa Barbara Hours came in like a wave, but receded quickly. In a few months, the currency that showed such great promise had all but disappeared. What happened was personal and local, but it was also national and even global. It was a story that many communities across the United States experienced in the late 1990s as they flirted with local currencies.
But, ask around town now about Santa Barbara’s local currency experiment and the answer is nearly always, ‘Never heard of it.’ Then, after a healthy pause, ‘What’s a local currency?’
Water Under the Bridge
“I’m afraid the failure of the Santa Barbara Community Currency left a bad taste in the mouth of the people who might be willing to try it again.” Jeff Nighman, a local business owner and a student of local currencies, would like to see local currencies get a new start in the Santa Barbara area. “I wasn’t in town when the last experiment took place.”
For the two years from 1997 to 1999, Santa Barbara Hours circulated among a small group of initiates. Such currencies were spreading quickly around the globe in the 1990s and promised to buffer local communities from the relentless tides of global economics. In fact, such currencies were designed to strengthen and enrich communities in direct opposition to the ebb and flow of the global economy.
 Bruce Bigenho, one of the founders of Santa Barbara Hours, the local currency of the late 1990s. “There were several hundred people involved. There was a newsletter, a monthly potluck.” Bruce Bigenho, pronounced ‘big-ain-yo,’ is a musician, music producer, and videographer who has lived in Santa Barbara for more than thirty years. He was one of six founders of Santa Barbara’s first true local currency.
It started from disparate points and fused through one committed lightning rod of an individual. “Bruce and I were talking to Elisabet Sahtouris,” Mark Phillips, an engineer with Continental Wind Power in town, and another of the currency’s founders, speaks quickly and fluidly. “She was giving the Al Gore talk [An Inconvenient Truth] well before Al Gore. And she was saying, there’s this thing called Ithaca Hours. If you really want to do something for your community and not just talk about doing something, then this is the thing to do.”
“Then we get a call from Amory Starr saying she’s starting this thing up, and are we interested? We’d never met her.”
By the time Starr called Bigenho and Phillips, she was already under a full head of steam. In January of 1997, Starr had sent off for the Ithaca Hours startup kit. Ithaca Hours is a local currency that was founded in Ithaca, New York in 1991 by community activist Paul Glover. Six years in and the system was showing great promise. It was gaining widespread use, a rising circulation and adoption from businesses that provided real goods and services – food, shelter, clothing, and health care. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in value were being cycled through the currency. All of it created and retained locally. (Ithaca Hours remains one of the strongest and best example of a homegrown local currency.)
The startup kit was Glover’s basic cookbook for developing a local currency, Hometown Money: How to Enrich Your Community With Local Currency. Starr reviewed it and at the first meeting, presented it to the group she had gathered. “We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel.” The group agreed and became the Santa Barbara Currency committee. That initial meeting was attended by Starr, Bigenho, Phillips, Dinorah Molina, and Tony Samara. They decided to meet weekly until they got the currency launched.
Starr was confident. “These systems are easy to start. When the organizing committee got to work in Santa Barbara, we were surprised by the level of positive response. The mechanics of getting it going are minimal, costs are low, and participants (ranging in age from 8 to 82) are enthusiastic. They come to meetings and even clean up afterwards! Participants constantly testify to the sense of community that they gain in these experiences and how it gives them a sense of abundance.”
But people looking in from the outside were skeptical. Why did we need another currency? We had one already.
The Currency Toolbox
Jeff Nighman, co-owner of the wholesale nursery Santa Barbara Natives, Inc., earned a Masters in Complimentary Economics through the Hutchins School at Sonoma State. He participated in the Sebastopol Economic Forum which was designing and organizing a community currency, a currency which has yet to be launched.
Nighman believes the definition and function of a currency is rarely questioned or observed. “Most people don’t know there’s anything else. The financial air Americans breathe is the dollar. In Mexico, it’s the peso. In Europe, they have the euro.”
 Jeff Nighman, co-owner of Santa Barbara Natives, Inc., and a student of complimentary currencies. “Even though no one seems to know about these currencies, there is a ton of material available.” For the model of how Santa Barbara Currency went about it, Nighman points me to Paul Glover’s work on the Ithaca Hour. But to understand the national currency and why you would want a local currency in the first place, he cites Bernard Litaer and Thomas Greco.
Litaer was one of the designers of the euro. In his development of the euro, Litaer came to understand more clearly the structural requirements behind national currencies. He traced those requirements back into the history of currency, wondering why the currencies had been designed the way they were, and whether there wasn’t a way that a currency could be modified or built that would provide a more sustainable and abundant economy.
Litaer looked at currencies from the standpoint of what the designers of the currencies intended. They were fitting out a toolbox in order to build something specific. National currencies were all more or less cemented into their current forms during the mid- to late-1700s. What they were building at the time was the capital framework for the Industrial Revolution. Bankers may not have spoken about it in those terms then, but they knew what they needed.
What they needed was funding for massive, long-term development across multiple companies and across borders. They needed to be able to provide a string of companies a guarantee of funding for immense speculative ventures. The distance from design to raw materials, to assembly, to distribution and sales, and all the way out to a buyer, was simply impossible to traverse without a specialized financial tool. That tool was the national currency.
Litaer identified four fundamental components that are shared by all national currencies.
The most obvious is that national currencies are national, or in the case of the euro, bounded geographically and politically. A national currency creates an economic unit, a team if you will, of all the businesses and residents within those defined boundaries who have a shared and vested interest in the real and comparative value of the currency they use. It matters to every single one of them. The existence of competing currencies across the border creates an enforced us-versus-them dynamic. We’re all pulling for whatever our buck happens to be.
Secondly, a national currency is issued at the whim of the government. It is fiat. Which means that the government mints the bills and coins we use in daily transactions. But physical cash is only a minute fraction of the money supply. While the government prints physical money, they actually do not create a single cent. They give banks, through a legal contract, the ability to create money. They do this using the third structural requirement of a national currency, debt.
Debt is an IOU issued for currency that does not exist. When a bank approves a $1 million loan for you to buy a house, the bank is essentially saying, ‘We will credit your account $1 million because the house, the physical asset, is worth $1 million.’ But that money does not yet exist. The moment the bank credits your account, the money is created. A teller issues you greenbacks or you whip out your ATM card and the cash goes into the money flow – buying a celebratory dinner on the town, paying the movers, and tanking up the college kids’ checking accounts. When a portion of that money goes to pay off an existing loan, and thus re-enters the banking system, it essentially disappears again. Currency experts call this the hole at the center. There is no ‘there’ there. Buddhists could mediate on it with excellent results.
Debt is ingenious. It allows banks to select the borrowers they will create money for by choosing those who they believe will successfully compete economically. It also enables banks to control the flow of money to keep it relatively scarce and therefore valuable.
Federal banks extend the right to create debt (new currency) to private banks. When your local bank loans you money, they are creating the debt locally in the national currency.
 Santa Barbara’s first home currency was national currency issued locally. These bills are on display at the Santa Barbara Surfing Museum. The top bill was minted in 1902, the bottom bill in 1929. In the early 20th century, Santa Barbara, like other cities, printed their own currency to provide cash flow so that local loan recipients could withdraw from their account. The bills could be traded as dollars anywhere a dollar could be traded. National banks are extensions of, or stations on, the federal banking system, and as national cash flow became more fluid and the minting of physical currency was better distributed, locally minted currencies died out.
The last requirement for a national currency is the kicker. If you have a national currency, created by fiat through the generation of loans, how do you ensure that your system is competitive, growing and profitable?
You add interest.
Interest, like debt, is money that does not exist. Consider the impact on an average home loan. You just borrowed $1 million. Assuming 5% interest and a 30 year term, if you do not sell or refinance, you will pay the bank roughly double the original $1 million. The underlying assumption is that the economy will more than double in 30 years, and that you will successfully compete against other currency interests (for employment, investments, inheritances, etc.) for the physical funds (which do not yet exist) with which to repay the debt.
That example is for a conservative home loan. According to indexcreditcards.com, credit card annual interest rates are running an average of 16.7% in the United States. Combine all debt – corporate, home, consumer – and apply interest and it’s akin to forcing the economy to carry a massive weight while leaning 15 degrees ahead of center. The whole thing is designed to stumble forward at a healthy clip and to cast aside anyone who can’t keep up.
As Litaer sums it up, the resulting national currency “encourages systematic competition, fuels the need for endless economic growth, and concentrates wealth.” Great for states, industries, and the capitalists who control them, but not so great for people.
Nighman puts it this way. “In terms of a toolbox, national currencies are a hammer. They are very good at one thing: building an endlessly growing industrial economy. What’s needed are other currencies that accomplish different goals in the community. They don’t replace the national currency, they compliment it. We need the equivalent of screwdrivers, wrenches, and files.”
The Revolution of No Revolution
In looking at what a currency should do now, rather than at the start of the Industrial Revolution, Litaer sought a currency model that could support what he calls ‘sustainable abundance.’ Instead of creating such a currency from scratch, he looked at the various currency experiments that had taken place over recent history. During the Great Depression, a time when the dominant world currencies were not serving individuals well at all, Litaer found that “literally thousands of communities started their own currency systems.”
Because the national currency had become so scarce in these places at these times, local communities created their own currencies to enable business and personal exchange to operate. They sought to resolve some apparently intractable problems.
The money supply was shrunken and slowed as the primary engine of growth, the extension of debt, was not functioning. (Remember, money is created when an account is credited by the bank through a loan.) Thus as money returned to banks as some loans were paid, and no new money was created, the supply dwindled. Fear caused institutions and individuals to hoard valuables and cash, further limiting the circulation of currency. Because companies could not get loans and could not sell their goods, they laid people off. Not only did these people without work stop spending, they ceased contributing their intellect and labor to the community. Worse, they became public expenses at a time when the public coffers were strangled by losses in their tax base. If money were air, entire communities were asphyxiating.
One after another, taking the lead from neighboring communities, local currencies launched. These currencies were typically valued relative to the national currency, often created with a small deposit in the local bank against which the currency could be drawn, but once the currency was in existence it could be traded locally. An early example in Germany, the Wörgl scrip, issued to pay for public works projects, required a stamp within 30 days to keep it valid. Recipients had to either spend their scrip within 30 days or obtain a stamp on the scrip for 1% of the value, otherwise it would revert to the government.
The town started the experiment with a 20% unemployment rate and a high level of abject poverty. In the short period it was allowed to operate – the national government soon branded the experiment as unfug (craziness), communist, and facist – only 5,500 schillings of the Wörgl scrip were ever outstanding, but because it had a 30-day window, and because it was local, each of these 5,500 schillings cycled an average of 416 times in the course of 13 ½ months. That’s 2.3 million schillings of productive value that was simply absent from the local economy in national currency. The 1% fee for validating the scrip month-to-month, a demurrage fee, was used to maintain a soup kitchen that fed 220 families.
Of the thousands of currencies created by 1935, only one survived, the Swiss WIR. The WIR came into existence in 1934 when a group of businesses starved for capital from their banks got together to talk about their problems. They soon realized the majority of the money they borrowed from the banks was to pay each other. They developed a currency tied to the Swiss Franc, but created through mutual agreements between participating companies that began circulation immediately. As the system matured, businesses found that it was a less expensive borrowing system to use, that it created a prescreened group of organizations to work with (trust was easier to extend), that small businesses could participate more easily, and that the system automatically became more useful at times when the Swiss Franc was stressed, exactly those times when keeping currency within the country’s boundaries made the greatest sense.
It Takes Money To Make Money
Paul Glover, founder of Ithaca Hours hammers on the necessity for a long-term, focused organizational effort. His number one recommendation for launching a currency is to hire a fulltime networker. That person’s role is to constantly promote, facilitate and troubleshoot circulation. He was that person in Ithaca for the first eight years of the currency’s existence.
The Santa Barbara Community Currency committee could not create that position given local funding options, but they had a committed leader in Amory Starr. They also had deep volunteer commitments and they believed they could acquire funding to help pay at least some of the organizational costs.
They developed a grant application to the Fund for Santa Barbara in March of 1997. When they heard back from the Fund later in the grant review cycle, they got a nice surprise.
 Geoff Green, Executive Director of Fund for Santa Barbara believes a local currency remains an important achievement that remains to be tackled for Santa Barbara. When the grant application came in, according to Fund director Geoff Green, “they asked for something like $800. The grant making committee [the GMC] looked at what they were doing and wanted to give them more. That’s rare. It happens, but it’s rare.” The grant, awarded in June 1997, was more than double the group’s original request. “The GMC really wanted them to be successful.”
Bruce Bigenho, who was on the board at the Fund at the time, sat out during the discussions on the Santa Barbara Community Currency to avoid any conflict of interest. “The Fund was great to work with,” he said. “They don’t just give you money and then wash their hands. They check in, ‘How are things going?’ ‘What do you need?’”
The committee invested their time in the next several months in getting the new currency designed and printed, developing a newsletter, translating everything they published into Spanish, working out the tax status of the organization, and promoting the upcoming launch of the currency.
In October 1997, just nine months after forming the organizing committee, Santa Barbara Hours debuted to the community.
To use the new currency, you joined the organization, though once the Hours were in circulation anyone could choose to accept and use them. When you joined you received four Santa Barbara Hours to spend. Every eight months, members received another two Hours.
The committee frenetically promoted the currency. What you could spend Santa Barbara Hours on was limited to what members – they were called participants – offered for sale. In the next few months the committee was able to build the participant list to over 300 individuals offering over 700 goods and services, and increase the currency flow to over 1500 Hours.
The initial list of available goods and services ran to the marginal. You could obtain massages, biofeedback services, vegan advice, and crying assistance. You could buy an hour of “democratic revolution” or learn about “industrial hemp.” But there were many other skills and services offered including architectural drawing, tutoring in a host of subjects, childcare, yardwork and gardening, computer maintenance and office work, and lessons in Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, English, Olde English, and Esperanto.
Goods were rare. There were used books, yarn, firewood, custom t-shirts, and meditation stones. Only a handful of participants offered food. You could get avocadoes in season, organic lemons and brown turkey figs, homemade pies, and “fantastic homemade salsa.” Only one farmer offered “organic produce at the Farmer’s Market.”
The committee was well-aware that the lack of food, shelter, and other usable goods was a weakness in the early stages of the currency system they wished to build. Aware that mostly services would be made available, and that their user base might be viewed as marginal, the committee clarified in their promotional brochure that “Once we have a strong currency backed by many local skills, we expect that local businesses will also participate.” They knew, the bigger the margin, the closer you get to the center.
For the local currency to thrive, Starr and company had to widen those early-adopter margins and begin to attract the bricks-and-mortar business community.
One strategy they followed was to gain the approval of City government. In July of 1998, with participation growing and circulation up, they convinced Santa Barbara Mayor Harriet Miller to write an official letter on behalf of the group. “Businesses and services offered by local residents contribute greatly to the sense of community we cherish in Santa Barbara,” she wrote. “The Community Currency Project is an effective way to promote the concept of community-based living. I encourage local businesses and community members to support each other with Santa Barbara Hours, our own local-money system.”
Mayor Miller got the community message loud and clear. What was missing from Miller’s statement were the economic benefits to individuals and businesses. If the committee could not break down the wall with the mayor, how were they going to break it down with the local businesses that were crucial to the survival of the currency?
Mi Hora, Su Hora
By the 1990s when Paul Glover was dusting off the old models for Ithaca, New York, the WIR was cycling 2.5 billion WIR Francs through the country’s economy. The WIR is a national complementary currency, insulated from world currencies and built largely for business-to-business uses. The Wörgl was a currency created by a far-seeing mayor of a community to invest in the town and its residents. In both cases, the currency was valued against the national currency.
The determining value of national currencies for centuries has been precious metals. Very early on money was its own value. Golden coins were literally worth their weight in gold, and in fact, still are. Eventually, and quite recently, the dollar was freed from the gold standard and is now worth itself, a value determined at any given instant by the forex global exchange market.
Whether it is valued against gold or a concept called the dollar, the value is in the money itself. You can store money away. People will pay you for storing it in their investment instruments. You can accumulate it. You can lend it. It flows easily, but it just as easily eddies and pools. Because it contains the value of itself separate from the goods and services you trade it for, the quantity of it required to obtain something can fluctuate wildly.
What Glover wanted to achieve was something on a more human scale. He chose a model that detached the value of local currency from the national currency and traded in what were called hours.
Valuing transactions in hours is something anyone can do. Two people can agree between themselves that a half- hour massage is worth an hour in the garden. If they were the sole participants, a simple barter could arise. But this severely limits any individual’s buying power to only those things they can trade directly for with other individuals.
If, at the time of the massage, that hour of value could be represented by a denomination or bill and transferred to the masseur, and the masseur could spend the bill later on with a gardener who didn’t need a massage, you would have an effective local currency.
The Hours model raises the question of parity among participants. Could someone provide “CEO skills” and, as in the national currency, charge 1,000 or 10,000 hours, while the person who taught their children or tilled their gardens could only charge 1 hour for their services? Clearly, if someone had CEO skills and valued them, they would probably not participate in such an exchange. But among those who did participate, the question of parity had to be addressed.
The Santa Barbara Currency Committee attempted to tackle the issue in their June 1998 newsletter, Love My Tender. “Coming from a perspective of valuing all people, pay equity suggests that all kinds of work should be valued equally. Users of SB Hours [could] sell their services at a rate of 1 SB Hour per hour of work, regardless of their normal dollar rate.”
But, the newsletter article goes on to clarify that there is no set valuation. Any transaction in Santa Barbara Hours (as in any currency really) is an agreement between the participants. Someone may feel their goods or services have an inherently greater cost and want to charge more. The maximum the committee recommended was 5 Hours to any 1 Hour. In other words, an attorney might charge 5 Santa Barbara Hours for a one hour consultation. But those same Hours might be valued differently in another transaction. For example, the attorney might charge 1 Hour to someone whose services they feel are on a par with their own, such as a therapist.
Even so, the hour as a basis best serves individuals exchanging services. Goods are harder to value, and in order to get businesses on board, a straightforward and standardized dollar-to-hours conversion is usually required; they need to know what an Hour is worth relative to the things they sell. Several months in, as the Hour picked up steam, the Santa Barbara Committee established an exchange rate. One Santa Barbara Hour was worth $12.
With 1500 hours circulating, a home-grown economic system responsible for sustaining $18,000 in local goods and services had been developed. If you factor in the circulation – the number of times an average Hour changed hands – that number multiplies. Santa Barbara Hours had no means of tracking circulation so any number is a guess, and most Hours probably saw little or no circulation. But over the eighteen months of existence, it is fair to estimate that somewhere between $10,000 and $250,000 in goods and services were exchanged.
Making Money
Glover’s second top recommendation for making a local currency viable is to design something credible as the means of exchange – the physical bills. “Make it look both majestic and cheerful, to reflect your community’s best spirit. Feature the most widely respected monuments of nature, buildings, and people. Use as many colors as you can afford, then add an anti-counterfeit device.”
The Santa Barbara Currency Committee turned to local artists and local events and places for their inspiration. Bills were issued in denominations of ¼, ½, and 1 Hours. The ¼ Hour bill with artwork by Ken Korten, depicted the Santa Barbara’s Farmers Market, a critical target pool of participating businesses. The bill was green, and like the other denominations, Spanish on one side and English on the other. The ½ Hour bill with artwork by Benjamin Bottoms and Richard McLaughlin depicted the Solstice Parade. The 1 Hour denomination showed the Wilcox Property which at that time was going through a shaky acquisition process as a public park. This was drawn by Karen Monson. The anti-counterfeit device was a serial number stamped on each bill.
 In Spanish and English, all three Santa Barbara Currency denominations. The bills were essentially worthless outside Santa Barbara. But this was one of the design features. Most wealth in the national currency accumulates elsewhere. “When you shop at a Costco, within 24 hours, 94% of your money is out of town,” Mark Phillips explains. “Even at a Mom and Pop store in town, 60% is gone in 24 hours. They have to buy supplies. But with local currency, 100% stays in town. Going to Costco is just pumping money straight out of Santa Barbara.”
Riding on the growth of the Santa Barbara Hours in participants and circulation over the course of almost a year, the committee returned to the Fund for Santa Barbara for a fresh infusion of national currency with which to launch the local currency.
All the Reasons Why
When the committee applied to the Fund for additional monies in September of 1998, they included a review of the preceding year in their packet. “The ultimate, long-term yardstick by which the SB Hours can be evaluated will be the extent to which real sundry day-to-day needs can and will be met by using Santa Barbara’s local currency.” They looked to Ithaca in all things, and especially in regard to this measure of success because in Ithaca, “there are individuals who can meet all of their basic needs (shelter, food, clothing, etc.) via local currency.”
“SB Hours already has had in its user base people who sell organic produce and organic cotton clothing. As the idea catches on in the community, the utilitarian promise of local currency will undoubtedly become fulfilled.”
On first read, it seems that the “has had” is a typo. But it is probably not. Being the sole vendors of goods like organic produce and organic cotton clothing within a closed economic system would make your products very popular. You would accumulate a lot of Santa Barbara Hours. But how do you spend them? You may be providing food, something everyone wants, but you can only buy massages and Spanish lessons. You’re holding out for other providers, a food coop, a medical or dental clinic, someone selling shoes. The early adopter businesses can get hit hard.
Perhaps the group’s natural affiliations were killing them. One observer termed the committee and participants “transitory and marginal. They were graduate students and the people you would expect to jump on something like this – the usual suspects.”
The packet also identified ‘fiscal sustainability’ as one of the stumbling blocks they faced. As with the WIR and the Wörgl, it takes money to make money. The committee had already begun soliciting donations. Other means of gaining hard currency to offset the goods and services that businesses were not willing to provide for Santa Barbara Hours included selling discounted Santa Barbara Hours, selling display ads in the newsletter, holding garage sales, selling bumper stickers, and completing grant applications to other funding organizations.
 The Santa Barbara Currency bumper sticker. They received funding from The Fund for Santa Barbara, but the demise of the Santa Barbara Hour came quickly after that. Amory Starr, the key founder and organizer was leaving to accept a position as a professor of Sociology at Colorado State. Her vision and dedication had attracted and held the group together. She is clearly, even at the distance of the internet, a controversial and convincing leader.
Author of Naming the Enemy: Anti-Corporate Social Movements Confront Globalization, Starr receives wildly mixed student reviews on RateYourProfessor.com. On the one hand, she is described as a “leftest [sic] radical. she provides one view. hers.” And, “she is completey [sic] crazy.” Other students see her as wholly inspiring. “A really great professor. I knew her when she was a graduate student at U.C. Santa Barbara. I’ve never forgotten her.” And, “Take a Starr class ASAP!! She is an amazing professor.” If you’re interested, syllabi for several of her courses are available at Trabal.org.
In an e-mail, she recounted the demise of the Santa Barbara Hour as being caused by a number of factors. The inability to “build value to the currency by getting a diverse set of goods and services offered,” a lack of time to do the outreach, “complaints that some participants did not return phone calls,” the loss of some transactions as people took their exchanges offline and bartered directly, and the overhead of maintaining a completely bilingual institution were all elements. But perhaps most tellingly, Starr writes that she was “really good at huge amounts of office work, including the really huge task of formatting the database for publication. I think that after I left no one was really interested in doing all that work.”
Mark Phillips said, “Amory Starr was the firebrand that was keeping this alive. She was the spark. When she left it was the beginning of the end. The rest of us were just doing it part time. We’d been going a year and a half at that point and it was starting to wear.”
Paul Glover, consulting with the Santa Barbara Hours group and many others around the country at the time, replied to the question of why so many had failed. “The main reason Ithaca’s HOURS grew huge while so many other community currencies faded is that we had a full-time networker for the first 8 years. That was me. Constantly promoting, troubleshooting, and facilitating circulation. Particular effort was made to bring staple goods and services into the system– food, housing, clothing, health care.”
Still others believe that the currency was more a victim of the times.
“You Need Troubled Times”
Jeff Nighman, talking about the Sebastopol Economic Forum project he worked on in graduate school at Sonoma State, said the reason that program has not been rolled out is that the times are not bad enough. “You need troubled times to make a local currency work.”
Scores of local currencies were launched in the late nineties. Most failed. By 1998, the U.S. economy was in a steep ascent. National unemployment was at 4.3 percent, the lowest in nearly four decades. In retrospect, 1998 was the front side of the dot.com bubble. The NASDAQ, where much of the high-tech speculation of the era took place, hit 1500 in 1998. By March of 2000, it would hit 5000, a run-up of over 330% in a matter of two years.
Santa Barbara Currency founder, Mark Phillips said, “Yeah, it was good times. People weren’t in a harsh condition.”
By March of 2003, the NASDAQ was below 1300. But by then, of the hundred or so local currencies that launched later in the 1990s in the United States, over sixty were listed as defunct. Santa Barbara’s was one of these. But Starr, Bigenho, and Phillips all echoed that no matter the outcome, the currency was a success.
“We were all regular folks,” Phillips recalled. “We weren’t economists.” Yet they created and operated an alternate currency successfully. Starr wrote that her “goal for getting involved was … to teach people that the economy belongs to them, not to bankers and experts.” That goal, she felt, had been achieved.
Everyone agreed that the forging of community was the most important and satisfying result. “What people are hungry for is a sense of community,” Phillips said. While traditional currencies enforce and encourage the ability to deal with strangers for all our needs, local currencies require face-to-face exchanges. “That was the really rich part of the [Santa Barbara] currency. The pot-lucks, the transactions between individuals… everyone knew each other.”
Drawing Boards
Dr. Benjamin Cohen, Louis G. Lancaster Professor of International Political Economy at UCSB, and author of a dozen books on currency-related matters, was largely unaware of the Santa Barbara experiment while it was underway. Local currencies remain peripheral to his studies and he doesn’t see local currencies as “creating a revolution in the money system as we know it.”
But he does see a place for them in much the way Starr, Phillips and Bigenho experienced. “Local currencies have the capacity to build a sense of community and engagement. They help protect the economic welfare of a local community. You’re buying and selling from each other rather than from anonymous corporations.
“A local currency tends to encourage activities that are environmentally friendly such as supporting local organic farmers. [Such transactions] decrease the need for obtaining food from over long distances.”
But, “given the difficulty of getting a local currency up and running,” and the fact that such currencies “require a critical mass” of partipants who are “persuaded it will be useful,” Cohen feels that the stakes are higher than what the Santa Barbara organizing committee was prepared for, and he does not expect a new local currency in the area to arise easily or soon.
“I don’t think the time is right [in Santa Barbara] for another local currency,” Mark Phillips says. But if he were to do it again, “I would try a hybrid LETS-Hours model.”
LETS, Local Exchange Trading Systems, tie themselves to a national currency rather than to time. It makes it easier to value the LETS units. The system is simple. Users have accounts. An agreement between two individuals credits the provider’s account, debits the receiver’s. Currency can also be issued by the organizing body. Initiating flow is easy. There is automatically enough.
LETS is taking off in Australia where over 100 systems have been successfully launched in recent years. Argentina, following an economic crash early this century, forged hundreds of LETS out of sheer desperation. According to Phillips, the systems successfully stabilized the economy and have substantively increased quality of life across the country.
Another model that has arisen is the Slow Money model articulated by Woody Tasch. The Santa Barbara Permaculture Network sponsored a talk by Tasch at Victoria Hall in Santa Barbara a year ago March. Slow Money focuses not on local currencies, but on rewiring our current investment strategies with national currencies. Tasch argues for investing capital in companies closer to home, and in companies that are responsible citizens, dealing fairly with their employees, aligning themselves with organic principles, and reducing their carbon footprints – companies managing for the long term health of a corporate entity and the planet at the same time. The Fund for Santa Barbara provided some funding for Santa Barbara Permaculture to bring Tasch to town.
(While outside the scope of this article, the recently formed American Riviera Bank in Santa Barbara is currently advertising that they only invest locally, thereby slowing your money down by keeping it closer to home.)
Or could the failure of Santa Barbara Hours be in their initial conception? Did they try to do too much at once?
A Bigger Toolbox
Nighman had the unique experience of working on two vastly different complimentary currencies at once. The Sebastopol Economic Forum is a project to create a city-wide, government-sponsored, business-oriented local currency. “It’s a beta project,” Nighman says. Which means that a great deal of organizational structure and political will are required to launch it.
“The political will can appear in times like these when cities are looking at layoffs and furloughs of their employees. If the system is ready, if there are businesses in line to accept the currency, and if people can pay a portion of their city services and taxes with the currency, then the city could potentially negotiate staff pay cuts, say ten or fifteen percent, and replace it with a bonus paid in the local currency.”
Such systems, more similar to the Wörgl than to Hours models, promise a deeper, more widely accepted buffer against fluctuations in the national currency.
But Nighman also created the Sonoma Time Bank as his Master’s thesis. Time banks, less ambitious and more straightforward than Ithaca Hours, are a simple, online hours bank built on Edgar Cahn’s models. “Time banks are extremely easy to start and maintain. They are strictly time based. You can trade goods, but not as part of the exchange. An hour of gardening could include a basket of vegetables. An hour of baking could include a couple loaves of bread – as long as the ingredients were already paid for with the national currency.”
The reason goods are outside the system is because of sales tax. Taxes were never tackled by Santa Barbara Hours, and for the most part the Federal and State tax agencies ignore such currencies. But if the currency had increased substantively in size, because they were seeking to trade goods, sooner or later the demand to value the currency against the dollar and pay taxes in dollars for transactions in Hours would have arisen.
Another reason time banking is legally tax free is because parity is an absolute requirement. An hour equals an hour equals an hour, whether you are teaching Spanish, babysitting, walking dogs or offering legal advice.
Nighman believes the Santa Barbara Currency experiment may have suffered from trying to invent the Swiss Army knife for Santa Barbara. By attempting to cover goods and allow for disparity among hour valuations, they were setting their expectations too high. “If Santa Barbara Hours were [started as] a time-bank,” he says, “they might still be functioning.”
Time banks are typically run with a simple accounting software available from Cahn’s Timebanks website. The organization, like Ithaca, has a startup kit. The systems are designed to match unmet needs with un- or under-used resources. “These systems are great for bringing older people back into productive relationships, and making it possible for young people to participate.” For each hour you spend doing something for someone, you earn a Time Dollar. You can then spend your Time Dollar on having someone do something for you.
“We paid our teachers to teach,” Nighman says of the program he set up at Sonoma. “I was chopping wood, giving landscaping advice.” Over 20 students and teachers participated in a light-weight but very effective ‘networked barter’ system.
“Ten or fifteen time banks could be running effectively in a community the size of Santa Barbara.” Nighman says. “Then, when the time is right, when the city is facing budget cuts and furloughs, citizens are facing a loss of services and buying power, non-profits are struggling to raise money and attract volunteers, and businesses are facing a drain of consumer spending, then, without shutting down the time banks, those people and the experience they have with these systems, will help you leapfrog to a city-wide system.”
In Us We Trust
Can a new currency effort find a foothold in Santa Barbara?
“There’s always interest in another local currency,” Geoff Green says, the man who has helped provide seed funding for scores of progressive, grass roots organizations over the last decade. “It’s one of the fundamental things a community can do to improve the quality of life.”
“It all comes down to trust,” Nighman says. “They print ‘In God We Trust’ on the national currency to try to make us trust it.” In the same regard, with local complimentary currencies, participation by individuals, businesses, nonprofits, and governmental agencies will only happen when there is trust in the rationale behind the system, and the systems’ stability, longevity, and leadership.
But trust is easier to extend when there is need. “The national currency is in dire straits. The last bubble could have kept growing for awhile,” Nighman points out, “except that oil hit $150 a barrel.” The endless growth mechanism in the national currency ran aground on the restraints of a natural and limited resource.
“The time is really ripe to look at these tools again. We could really use them.”
David Petry
March 13, 2010 — Santa Barbara’s distinctive community library, the Eastside branch, reopened their main room today after undergoing a $240,000 makeover.
 Santa Barbara Mayor Helene Schneider cuts the ribbon for the Eastside Library's reopening. As the time approached for the official opening at noon, children crowded towards the front door, clearly eager to get in. Irene Macias, Santa Barbara Public Library system’s Director, spoke to the crowd, thanking local resident Rose Karat for her generous bequest to the library. She also thanked the staff and Friends of the Library for their focus and hard work. She reminded people what a great resource the Eastside library is for the community.
Mayor Helene Schneider took the mic and reminded the local residents of the cloud hovering over public services with millions in budget cuts at hand. “We tend to take libraries for granted. But we shouldn’t take them for granted. This is a place where the community learns and grows and meets each other.”
When Marivel Zambrano-Esparza, the Eastside Library branch supervisor, spoke, she thanked her staff, the Friends of the Eastside Library, the city Public Works department for the work they did on the remodel, and the community. She repeated the speech in Spanish and as soon as she allowed, the children rushed inside where they were once again brought up short, this time by a red ribbon that blocked access to the library.
 Children pouring in to test the new computers and check out the new books and DVDs. Mayor Schneider, with the help of Council member Frank Hotchkiss and the requisite pair of giant scissors, cut the ribbon. The children swept inside, adults studded among them. It felt like an Easter egg hunt as the children fanned out. They filtered through the children’s room and went up and down the aisles between new tables and shelving in the main room.
“This library has about 20,000 volumes.” Sarah Rosenblum, the Library Services Director, responsible for all the branches, is navigating from one interview to the next. “The circulation is around 80,000 books a year. Circulation is going up. Not a lot. But this library is focused more on computer usage.” She gestures towards the evenly spaced black monitors paired off one-to-one with someone using the computer. “Because that’s what this community needs.”
They bought $20,000 in new books and DVDs. But they also acquired six new computers, bringing the total internet access count in the main room to twelve. There are also two dedicated word processing machines, also in use, and two dedicated on-line card catalogs.
“People like this library because it’s small and intimate.” Two young boys weave between us and down an aisle. “Well, not like today so much.”
“This library is not as quiet as most,” Irene Macias is also moving between notepads and video cameras. There are a gaggle of teens at the bank of new computers. A girl of two navigates over the arm of the new reading chairs while her mother pulls magazines to look at. Macias is clearly proud of the fact that the Eastside Library is different.
 Mayor Schneider and Library Director Irene Macias greet the community in the revamped main room of the Eastside library. “This library is more of a community gathering place. There are a lot of community meetings in the King center next door. The kids run in here after school lets out. I get lots of compliments from the community that we engage so many kids here. Marivel,” she nods towards branch supervisor Zambrano-Esparza, “knows these kids individually. She loves introducing them to books and reading.”
Library patron, Carolyn Clancy says, “I come here because they have books that Central doesn’t have.” She names one book she comes for often, a Chilton repair manual. “Just don’t say what kind of car it’s for. Otherwise it might be checked out when I need it.”
Other patrons come because the library is compact and the parking is easy and free. Head reference librarian from the Central branch, Jace Turner, says, “Riviera residents come here to pick up their holds.”
But most come because they use the on-line services. Ten minutes after the doors are opened, every computer is in use, most by two or three teens at once. They are scrolling through web pages, playing games, finding interesting music and images, and they’re talking. The talk is not loud, but it is a persistent drone as the children lean over a shoulder, point at a screen, and watch patiently while their friend moves around on a page or clicks through to something else.
One older patron is an island of calm among the computers. He’s got the New York Times open on-line. If he were to run a quick search, he would find the news of the last few years peppered with reports of troubled libraries. If the economy were a mine shaft, libraries would be canaries. The City of Boston held public meetings earlier this week where they discussed the possibility of closing branches. The meetings were well-attended and heated. Closer to home, Montecito branch supervisor Jody Thomas sent out a plea to the community last week for funding help to stay open and retain staff, services, and programs.
But today, the Eastside library is celebrating. Standing in the main room, it looks exactly like a library, but it is behaving like something else, something vital and bustling. Paraphrasing Mark Twain, ‘Reports of the library’s death were exaggerated.’
“Rose Karat was my neighbor,” Elvira Tofoya recalled. Tofoya is the President of the Friends of the Eastside Library. She has been President for 15 years, and has been a member for 20. “Rose had no children, but she loved animals and she told me once she was going to leave her money to animal shelters. I didn’t know she had anything really.”
 Lucy O'Brian, Treasurer, and Elvira Tofoya, President of the Friends of the Eastside Library, checking out the crowd outside the library. Karat was born in Poland in 1910. She immigrated to the U. S. as a child with her family, settling in Michigan. She married Joe Karat, born and raised in Michigan, during World War II. They were wed March 18, 1944. After the war, like many thousands of servicemen and their families, the couple moved to Santa Barbara. They purchased a home on North Salinas and lived there until their deaths, Joe in 1986, and Rose in 2001.
Rose grew to know many people in the community. For several decades she ran the quaint Dee Dee Gift Shop at the Miramar Hotel. In later life, she volunteered as an usher at the symphony. She visited the Eastside Library often and chose it as one of the five organizations she left her estate to.
The gift was a boon to the Eastside Library which does not have the same funding options as the other branches. “The Central Library has 500 Friends,” Tofoya says. “The Montecito Library has a strong Friends [organization]. The Eastside Library Friends has 20 members. Dues are $5 to start. That’s like a penny a day.”
The Eastside Friends raise money by selling books that donors have given them. A small room at the library houses the less expensive books, where they are priced at either fifty cents or a dollar. “I sell the more expensive books on Amazon on-line. It brings in $300 or $400 a month.”
Tofoya used to travel to garage sales on Saturday mornings asking people to donate their books. “They can write off the donation on their taxes.” She also used to go door-to-door, to businesses and residences both, asking people in the neighborhood to join the Friends. “They did. But the next year, we mailed them renewals and… nothing. It was flat. People in this community need that personal touch. You can’t just put something in the mail and expect them to respond.”
Tofoya grew up in Texas and spent afternoons under the care of her sister. “I love libraries because my sister loved to dance. On the way to the dance studio, she would drop me off in the library and I would stay for hours. So I’ve just always loved libraries.”
She touches my arm; this is serious. “Libraries are not a band-aid. You can give money to the homeless. I’m not saying you shouldn’t. But a library develops the mind. It is the best source of democracy we have. Everyone has access.”
Outside in the patio, paintings line the walls. A tall flamboyant man with flowing dark hair rights a work knocked down by the wind, but when I stop him to talk, he ushers me over to Marylee Guerrero and Yareli Coronel.
 Marylee Guerrero's "SB" appears with other Art Alliance works. “That’s Carlos Cuellar,” they tell me. “He runs the Santa Barbara Arts Alliance. He gives us experience in the arts. He shows us how to do stuff like this,” they gesture at the paintings and photographs, “set up art shows.”
The Alliance has been ensconced in the Franklin Community Center next door to the library for several years, but they have recently been bumped by a remodel underway there. Now they meet in the city’s new teen center at 1235 Chapala.
 Yareli Coronel's "You Know" and Leslie Rodriguez's "The Mission" in the entryway displaycase. “Mine’s just called SB,” Guerrero says. Her work, hanging on an exterior wall in the courtyard, is stylized graffiti on canvas, the hard-edged SB tempered with pink handprints and baby’s footprints in red. Guerrero is a junior at Santa Barbara High, entering the school’s Visual Arts and Design Academy (VADA). She hopes to remain in the arts as a career.
Cuellar, hanging on the edge of the conversation to see how his students do with the press, and vice versa, steps up. “We feed a lot of kids to VADA. They teach the kids the art. We teach them the hands-on. Art as a profession. How to speak out. How to show their work.”
Coronel wants to be a police officer. She’s a sophomore at Santa Barbara High. Her piece, ‘You Know’, is an abstract paint spatter set in the display case inside the front door. Cuellar laughs, “Like ‘Which painting?’ ‘Oh, you know, that painting.’”
The next big group project for the Alliance is a pair of murals for the construction walls at the Santa Barbara Airport. “We’ve drawn the panels,” Guerrero explains. “It’s going to show postcards of Santa Barbara – dolphins, the Mission – to welcome people to Santa Barbara.”
Other than bequests like the one from Rose Karat, money is tight for the Santa Barbara Public Library System. Book and DVD purchases are down, hours are reduced, staff has been cut, and services and programs have been minimized. “I was just lucky to have the media pick up my comments,” Jody Thomas, supervisor at the Montecito branch said. “All the branches are struggling.”
 Branch supervisor Marivel Zambrano-Esparza pulls out local author Mariana Titus' "Graveyards and Bayou Bars." Last week, the Montecito Journal printed Thomas’ plea to the community for $175,000 to keep the Montecito branch open and staffed. The Friends of the Montecito Library makes possible the libraries summer children’s programs, all books-on-CD purchases, and two half-time staff members. “This year,” Thomas says, “they’re also buying all the new books.”
Santa Barbara currently operates six libraries. Of these, four are in the County and are operated by the City’s public library system under contract. Each library has a specified district and the County provides $6.90 per resident in each district annually to the regional library. The County libraries the City operates are Carpinteria, Montecito, Goleta and Solvang. Montecito is allotted roughly 12,000 residents. “We split Summerland with Carpinteria.”
Summerland had their own branch several years ago, but the library closed the branch. The Santa Ynez and Los Olivos branches were also closed. Closing outlying branches is one of the first measures library boards must consider when funds get tight. A proposal on the table – one of many to help meet the County’s $39 million budget shortfall – is to reduce the library allotment per resident by 7% to $6.42. The reduction would make hard choices still harder to delay or avoid.
But branch libraries are crucial to the communities they serve. The Eastside branch is perhaps the most striking example in the Santa Barbara system.
The possibility of an Eastside library branch was approved by voters as part of the City’s 1964 General Plan. It was one idea, among many in the plan, that the local community was motivated to support. In the midst of the discussions about the Eastside library, on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
Mrs. James Belden, school librarian at Monroe Elementary felt the city, and more specifically the Eastside, needed a fitting memorial to the great leader. She suggested a multi-purpose room be added to the nascent library. Land was available on the site, but there were no funds for the addition. Belden successfully raised the required $50,000.
The multi-purpose room was a critical addition to a host of community services that were co-located on a single city block. The library, the community multi-purpose room, a health clinic, and other services were all built on a lot that backed up to Franklin School, a facility that a large segment of the local population would go to either as a student or parent in the normal course of daily life.
 The new computers attract kids like metal to magnets. The library would be at the center of the community hub.
When the need for the new branch was questioned, Library Trustee Samuel Gerson responded that the existing Santa Barbara library system had “a complex problem, some facets of which have existed for some time and have been aggravated by population pressure and character of population.” In simple terms, Santa Barbara Central Library was getting crowded, and it did not serve Santa Barbara’s Spanish-speaking community. City Council approved the project unanimously on September 2, 1968.
“Each branch reflects their community,” Thomas of the Montecito branch says. “The collections vary depending on the patrons. It also allows a bigger breadth of a collection. Individual branches can specialize.” At the Montecito branch, art books proliferate and there are no music CDs. At the Eastside branch, Spanish-language materials are a focus, and according to Carolyn Clancy, certain car repair manuals which shall remain nameless.
“It used to be that the Central branch had one copy of everything. That’s not the case anymore.” Now patrons use the library’s interbranch request system to get specific books to patrons. That system was expanded in 1986 to encompass a regional network of libraries called the Black Gold Library System. Any patron can go on-line, indentify the book they want at any of seven library systems, and request it to be delivered to the Black Gold library of their choice.
Construction at the Eastside library got underway in early 1969, but even in the flush years of the late 1960s, funding became a problem. The Federal government’s promise to kick in a third of the estimated $144,000 construction cost was hollow. In October, the library trustees announced a six month delay, but in the same breath said they were looking for an “angel” in the community to help them complete the work.
Over a year passed before Santa Barbara County stepped in and allotted funds to finish the project. Construction resumed two years later, and not until four years after ground was broken for the project was the library opened. The library was dedicated May 12, 1973. Focused on the local community from the very beginning, bilingual Margaret Blanchard was the first branch supervisor.
Eastside opened their doors with 40,000 volumes. Of these, 13,000 were children’s books. Today, the Eastside branch has closer to 35,000 volumes. “They’ve done a lot of weeding,” Jace Turner noted. They have also filled in the gap with many DVD titles, addressing the community needs.
Two days before the opening, Sarah Rosenblum worked shoulder-to-shoulder with Marivel Zambrano-Esparza. Thick canvas bags of books are filed away on new shelving. A host of new DVDs are alphabetized in gleaming rows. Plastic wrap is cut from reading chairs, and heavy wooden desk chairs are hauled from storage to stand guard on the new computer stations. The new freestanding shelves where the latest fiction and nonfiction and the shiny new DVDs are displayed look stolid and permanent, but Rosenblum pushes one easily out of place. “They’re on casters. The idea is to make everything flexible. We can push these aside and have a really big space here for a reading or a presentation.”
 A Very Important Patron tries out the new chairs. One box is full of plastic-wrapped Plexiglas shapes. Zambrano-Esparza peels away packing materials and protective coatings and holds the pieces up in different ways. Rosenblum starts to fit them onto wall fittings like you might see in clothing stores, or shoe stores, or …
“Bookstores.” Rosenblum catches my curious gaze. “Libraries are looking more like bookstores.”
“It’s true.” Zambrano-Esparza sets a waterfall shape of Plexiglas aside to be filled later with DVDs. “The trend is to put more out on display. It’s more inviting. People will pick things up and look at them.”
Rosenblum fits a display unit to the wall, “And check them out.”
Join Friends of the Eastside Library. They can be contacted at (805) 963-3727 or c/o Eastside Branch Library, 1102 East Montecito St., Santa Barbara, CA 93103.
Identify the Friends of the Library for your branch.
Plan Santa Barbara Comes Alive with Street-Level View
By David Petry
How do you plan Santa Barbara? How do you shape the future of a town as complex and historic and beloved as this one?
This city has been planning their future through a General Plan originally adopted in 1964, amended many times since, and now in the process of the first significant overhaul in forty-five years. The General Plan lays out the rules and priorities for what, where, and how development will take place in the city. City Council has some leeway in their final determinations, but the philosophical, policy, and regulatory basis for all land use decisions is the General Plan.
This time around, the process to determine what updates to make to the General Plan is being called Plan Santa Barbara. Launched in 2005 by the City Council, it has turned out to be large, expensive, and controversial.
Randy Rowse, owner of the Paradise Café and longtime participant in the Downtown Organization, recommended I look at the website. “There’s a vision of Santa Barbara there that is surprising. I think it will surprise a lot of people.”
What is a General Plan?
The General Plan contains sections (called elements) covering land use and growth management, economy and fiscal health, environmental resources, historic resources and community design, housing, circulation, and public services and safety. There are goals and objectives and policies for each element.
 Santa Barbara's land use finds older residential neighborhoods backed up against large new mixed-used developments. Plan Santa Barbara, available now for review, and to be released in draft form on March 18, consists of a number of studies, presentations, and workshop records. The primary document is the 75-page Policy Preferences which pulls together all the Plan Santa Barbara recommended changes to Santa Barbara’s General Plan.
New to the plan with this update is something called a Sustainability Framework. The framework sets out a definition of sustainability, a vision of Santa Barbara in a sustainable future, and sustainability principles. As the draft plan states, “Being a sustainable community means making decisions based on the connections between the environment, the economy, and the people of the community, for the benefit of all and to preserve and enhance our community character.”
Also in this iteration is an adaptive management element. Adaptive management is a catch-phrase meaning that the city will evaluate progress toward the plan goals and objectives.
The city has made the Plan Santa Barbara process as public as they can. Each study has been rolled out to public review. Every workshop has been announced. The City Council has held review sessions. Special workshops were held for high school students.
But there are multiple problems in making the process accessible. Planning is an abstract practice. The General Plan lies behind the decision-making of the City in regards to infrastructure, housing, commercial development, environment, and services. To some, it’s a bit like knowing the calculus behind architectural requirements. When it comes down to it, architects just use a formula. And that’s pretty much what the City does. They apply formulas from the General Plan that are based on more complex calculations.
Like calculus, there is a technical terminology at play in the planning process. This time the terminology includes Mobility-Oriented Development Areas, form-based codes, adaptive management, sustainability frameworks, floor area ratios, inclusionary ordinances, Smart Growth, historic integrity, and old favorites like affordable housing, transit corridors, and cumulative open space.
The Abstraction Blues
Finding a toehold in the dialogue is almost as hard as getting a mortgage in this town.
The Plan Santa Barbara Policy Preferences document is obscure at best. The first sentence stalls the average reader. “The purpose of this document is to set forth the sustainability framework and policy direction for updating the General Plan.” What is a “sustainability framework?” It’s not defined for another nine pages. What is a “policy direction for updating” anything?
The remaining 74 pages stir the dense planning terminology in scores of ways. Affordable housing, a high priority in the existing General Plan and in this update, appears 54 times, each time the context, need, objectives, and the means of achieving the ends are restated. It would seem that every concept must be linked to every other in order to convince us of their necessity and immediacy.
The magnitude of the city’s responsibility identified in the document is also overwhelming. The Policy Preferences document places responsibility on the city for a successful local economy with businesses oriented to global and environmental imperatives, for shaping development to specific ends such as high-density and lower cost residential units in the downtown core, getting us out of our cars, reducing obesity, and making our lives and the spaces around us vital and livable.
To an extent, the city does tackle all of this, and none of it is necessarily bad or wrong. But in many cases the values and imperatives the document adopts are shaped by current thinking, taste, and assumptions. For example, the document posits as a given that “Socio-economic diversity is essential for maintaining a healthy culture and stable economy, and should be supported through: housing affordable to all income levels; affordable mobility options; economic policy to encourage livable wages and good jobs; and opportunities for all to participate in education, cultural events and arts.”
This is not the model Santa Barbara has followed to date. The gap between the wealthy and poor continues to increase and the middle class continues to become a smaller percentage of the population. Some might argue that catering to wealthy condo owners is exactly what is needed to create a stable economy.
Regardless of one’s point of view about the document’s premises, it begins to read like a wouldn’t-it-be-nice-if fantasy. In the vision portion of the document, twenty years from now we’ve given up our personal cars and have opted for car shares. Such massive societal changes seem less designed and more an outcome of personal and economic options that arise.
There is also a level if indirection in the document that is hard to pierce. The methods outlined for achieving the idealized future state are largely passive. One example is the shift in housing density and values. By pushing any residential development that does occur to focus on affordable housing in the downtown area, improving access to transit, and by making the area more livable, it is assumed that fewer people will need to drive cars, or possibly, over the long term, need to acquire them in the first place.
The obvious means to get people out of their cars is not to slowly move more of the housing stock to a downtown corridor, but to increase the cost of driving. Add a $1 per gallon surcharge to all gas in the city. If congestion remains too high, increase it. To get parked cars off the street, add a $1000 annual registration fee.
But it is not so simple. Not only are such laws illegal, but they are obviously very unpopular. So cities must satisfy themselves with slow, veiled movements with the hope that their movements precipitate intended results.
Randy Rowse feels the proposed updates are a “monumental artist’s concept” of what Santa Barbara should be, but one that bears little resemblance to what the town is now, or will likely become.
The plan is expensive ($2.4 million to conduct the EIR), it is large, and it is abstract. And it is, in many senses, our future.
For all the heat that might arise with the updated plan drafts, however, Weiss believes the process, called Plan Santa Barbara, will remain solid. The majority of the new City Council members have strong backgrounds in the planning process, and all members have seen, and have had the opportunity to comment on, the various components of the update.
“We’ll have hearings at the Planning Commission where the City will hear from the public. Then we take it to the City Council in June.” Weiss hopes that at that time, the Council will “give us guidance and send us away [and] we’ll come back in October with a finished General Plan.”
It’s a tough exercise, but one the City has completed multiple times before. Each time with intended, and unintended, consequences.
Walking the Walk
To better understand what Plan Santa Barbara means, I invited Weiss to take a walk through a portion of town of her choosing where we could see first hand some of the issues the City is attempting to tackle with this General Plan update. Because a critical component of Santa Barbara planning is the transportation component, she invited Rob Dayton, Principal Transportation Planner with the City’s Public Works department to join us.
 Santa Barbara Principal Transportation Planner, Rob Dayton, and City Planner, Bettie Weiss, on the Ortega Street pedestrian overcrossing in Santa Barbara. The route Weiss chose started on Wentworth Avenue on the lower Westside. The plan was to then walk from Wentworth, cross the Union Pacific railroad tracks and the 101, and then walk along Ortega Street and through the controversial Chapala corridor, across State Street and back once again to the City planning offices on Garden Street.
Along the way, we would talk about Plan Santa Barbara as a process and a set of guidelines, and we would look at many of the situations that Santa Barbara’s General Plan update is attempting to address.
I am hoping this walk will connect some of the dots, make some of the concepts come down out of their aeries and take shape.
When we arrive, Weiss stops us before we’ve gone twenty feet. “I want to talk about a premise here, a philosophy, that’s not always understood.” She provides a colorful, one-page, two-sided, hand-out. “The Council set the goals for [Plan Santa Barbara] in 2005. But those goals are a reaffirmation of the goals set twenty years earlier. And before that in the 1970s. And before that in the 1960s. The [current] process is based on that foundation. People have responded with fear. Fear that things will change. But the process is based on that foundation. Not a lot has changed since those plans were put in place.”
Dayton nods his agreement that this is important to get across, “That’s good.”
Numbered 1 through 9, the goals are:
- Live within our resources by balancing development with available resources and promoting sustainable, pedestrian-scale, transit-oriented development.
- Ensure affordable housing opportunities for all economic levels in the community, while protecting the character of established neighborhoods.
- Provide safe and convenient transportation through improved transit, circulation, and parking.
- Ensure a strong economy that provides the revenue base necessary for essential services and community enhancements.
- Advance regional thinking, collaboration, and solutions.
- Maintain the unique character and desirability of Santa Barbara as a place to live, work, and visit.
- Provide adequate services and facilities.
- Encourage public involvement, and participation at all levels of city planning and other government activities.
- Develop explicit environmentally sustainable policies.
But we had to start somewhere, and with the big picture in hand, we dropped immediately into the details.
Small Changes, Big Improvements
“Stand in the middle of the street.” Dayton points to the barren asphalt, midstream on Wentworth. “This street is wider than the average street.” The average Santa Barbara street is 36 feet wide. Wentworth is 42 feet wide.
 Steel toucans on the Ortega Street pedestrian crossing with tennis shoes. Before the city went to work on the street in 1995, the street felt at once depopulated and urban. As a result, drivers tended to drive faster on Wentworth. People were more likely to abandon cars and unwanted furniture and televisions there. With the Union Pacific right-of-way on one side, it felt less like a neighborhood and more like a thoroughfare.
The city has a limited tool bag. Of these, some of the most concrete are infrastructure improvements and park development. For Wentworth, the city used both.
One end of the street was anchored with a public park, El Parque de los Ninos. The park wraps around a couple of residences at the corner, one leg of the park providing community gardens, the other a playground. According to Weiss, “Critics of the plan said the park would be too noisy” because it backs up on the tracks and the freeway. “But now that its here, I think you have to say its better to have it than not.” Every time I visit the neighborhood, the park is in use by children and their families. The park is largely garbage and graffiti free.
To reduce the impact of the open width of the street, the city added relatively inexpensive tree planters in the parking lane. These are free-standing, raised, curbed areas that don’t impede drainage or consume limited parking (on a street where parking is more than adequate). As the trees matured, they created a sense of narrowing overhead closure on the street.
 Bicyclists walk the Ortega Street overpass. The street is one of the city’s success stories. It feels more like a neighborhood now, calmer and quieter. The traffic is slower. People dump less often, and when they do, they tend to at least shove their unwanted goods over the fence into the Union Pacific right-of-way.
That right-of-way is the first of Santa Barbara’s big barriers.
Where Are We
“We’re constantly trying to break down barriers.” Dayton has stopped high on the pedestrian overpass that links Ortega Street from west to east. The overpass is new, replaced after being hit by a passing truck on the 101. The gaunt steel vultures and toucans designed by local artist David Shelton peer down at us, cars slip past, a tidal signature of garbage and graffiti crusts the Union Pacific corridor below. “The 101 corridor is a challenge for cars, pedestrians, and bicyclists. The most congested intersections are along this corridor. The walking experience in those intersections is not good. For cyclists, it’s a narrow point. The freeway becomes the barrier.”
 Homeless encampment in the 101 corridor near Ortega Street. The barriers are as old as Santa Barbara, and are worth thinking about.
Downtown Santa Barbara is essentially an alluvial fan of eroded soil from the Santa Ynez Mountains. The spread of soil is boxed in on the south by the Mesa. Mission Creek, Rattlesnake Creek, and Sycamore Creek drain to the sea along Santa Barbara’s beaches and carry fresh soil. Though we like to think of Santa Barbara as ‘all cooked,’ the terrain has changed fairly dramatically in the last 100 years.
Laguna means lake and for the first several decades of European development in Santa Barbara, a seasonal estero or lake, according to Neal Graffy’s Street Names of Santa Barbara, “extended at its fullest from present day Milpas to Santa Barbara streets and from Anapamu to the beach.” The entire area flooded during heavy rains and dried to a flat hard-pan in the summers. Santa Barbara put a racetrack there and the fairgrounds; ephemeral pursuits for an ephemeral area of town.
Then, through successive floods and some engineering, the area filled in, the streams were channeled and diverted, and housing and commerce stretched out onto the lowlands.
By then, the major transportation lines had already been drawn, and they were all drawn around the lakebed. The first major access to town was from the beach. Arriving passengers and dry goods, livestock, horses, building supplies, and much of the regions’ food was off-loaded from ships into the surf and then eventually Stearn’s Wharf. Hides, otter skins, tallow, asphaltum, and a smaller number of passengers leaving than arriving shipped out.
Coach roads slipped in from the south along the coast, crossed a rise that lay between the beach and the estero or lake, and then turned up State Street. Coaches carried passengers and their luggage, mail, and smaller commercial packages.
Access and commerce were nearly one and the same. One needed the other, like blood and breathing.
When the railroad arrived in the late 1880s, the rails paralleled the old Los Angeles Stage Road, and then, instead of turning up the State Street corridor, it jogged out a few blocks to run between San Pascual and Rancheria streets, and ran north from there. To get across the estero, a raised railbed several feet deep was built like a levee across the lakebed with intervening bridges and culverts to enable the water to run off to the sea. Commerce and access were separating, but just by a few blocks.
The fate of the town was set.
When the State highway came through, or more accurately was organized from disparate existing roads into a contiguous system, it linked Coast Village to State and then Hollister as California’s Pacific Coast Highway 1 for a time. Where the road bed entered town from the south, it was also built like a levee and crossed bridges and culverts for drainage. But when the 101 was built in 1951, it hugged the railroad, consuming Rancheria Street with eminent domain. In 1995, when the stoplights were finally removed from Santa Barbara’s interface with the freeway, transportation was finally transportation. Commerce was effectively separated from local access.
As a result, much of what we inherit is, as Rob Dayton says, “two different Santa Barbaras.” One lies north and east of the Union Pacific/101 corridor, the other to the south and west.
A significant portion of what the City has accomplished in the twenty years since the last General Plan amendments has been focused on breaching the barrier between the two. Successful projects include the Mission Street—101 underpass, the Micheltorena Street bridge replacement, updates to the Carrillo underpass, major improvements along the State and Garden street crossings, and now underway, an overhaul at Milpas.
Much of the work has been done by Caltrans, but the City has worked closely with Caltrans architects and engineers to produce the best possible experience for pedestrians, bicyclists, and drivers in Santa Barbara.
We start across the pedestrian bridge and look down.
The Line Between
Neither Weiss nor Dayton stands on sure footing when we talk about the freeway and rail lines that pass beneath us. Like the pedestrian walkway, their primary interests lie in getting over the obstacles, less in the nature of the obstacles themselves.
 The Southern Pacific right-of-way with graffiti and dumping. Weiss recognizes these as major transportation corridors. “They’re going to generate noise and air pollution.” They attract crime, dumping, graffiti. But, she points out, the jurisdictions for these corridors overlap. The governing bodies are Union Pacific, Caltrans, Santa Barbara Police, and the CHP. “The problems [in the corridor] are mostly treated as public safety and enforcement concerns.”
Weiss notes that one way to deal with the noise and pollution is to invest in heavy landscaping. But the heavy landscaping tends to increase the other problems of homeless use, dumping, and other more serious crimes. A lot of landscaping has been removed from the 101 and Union Pacific corridor in Santa Barbara in the last ten years. As a result, crime is down; noise and air pollution along the corridor are up.
One potentially large impact to the city plan update during the Plan Santa Barbara cycle is a request from the County Air Pollution Control District that new development along the downtown freeway corridor occurs only outside a 500-foot buffer zone. For reference, 500 feet is roughly the length of a city block. If the buffer were to be realized, think of a dead zone for new development that stretched from San Pascual to Castillo, Gutierrez to Yanonali.
 Multi-unit workforce housing in the proposed 500-foot development-free buffer zone along the 101. Smaller buffer zones are being debated.
The buffer is directly counter to stated objectives elsewhere in the plan, specifically of locating workforce housing close to transportation corridors. If the workforce lives close to major transportation lanes, workers travel distances are shorter and their access to alternate transportation much easier to orchestrate.
We descend onto Ortega Street on the east side of the freeway. Here, the city has pulled out their infrastructure toolkit again, targeting the highly-traveled corridors leading to and from the two pedestrian freeway overpasses.
Red-Carpet Treatment
In a development called the West Downtown Project, the two streets feeding in from the two overpasses are receiving what Dayton calls the “pedestrian red-carpet treatment.”
 Handicapped ramps and tactile surface for the blind. The treatment includes pedestrian light standards, brick intersection crossings, curb extensions with ramps for the handicapped and tactile surfaces for the blind, and plantings. The tactile surfaces are Federally-mandated. “The Feds have changed their minds twice in the last ten years about what the [tactile] surface should be,” Dayton says. Thus different surfaces have been implemented at different intersections throughout downtown, depending on the standards in place when they were put in.
The pedestrian light standards are shorter that street lights, they hang over the sidewalks instead of over the parking lane, and they use a lower wattage.
Dayton particularly likes the corner treatments. When we reach the first corner at Ortega and Castillo, there are cars and bicycles and pedestrians passing through. A resident working in her yard, takes a break to talk with a neighbor. A work crew is installing the new light standards in the next block.
Some people have called the curb extensions ‘bulb-outs’ which are physical obstructions meant to slow traffic. Mistakenly, in Dayton’s view. “The curb extensions are not bulb-outs. They don’t obstruct the traffic lanes.”
 Looking north on Castillo at Ortega. Curb extensions and bricked walkways leave the traffic lanes open. “Stand in the middle of the street.” Dayton sends me out into traffic to see the intersection and the flow from the perspective of a bicyclist or driver. Standing in front of an on-coming burgundy Jetta and looking north, I can see the bicycle and traffic lanes are unobstructed. Weiss points out that “only the dead areas where there’s no parking are used.” The curb extensions shorten the pedestrian crossings from 36 feet to 24. It feels safer as a pedestrian. When you stand in the extension, ready to cross, your intention to traffic is clear.
Dayton turns to two middle-aged Latina women as they pass through the intersection. “How do you like this?” He points to the fresh plantings, the new concrete ramps, the bricked-in crossings.
They smile and nod, “It’s nice.”
“Do you feel safer? Does it make the street look nicer?”
“Yes. We like it.”
But the city’s investment is more strategic than simply enhancing the walking and biking environment. Weiss points out the homes along Ortega, all of them well-kept, many of them original architecture from the teens and twenties, and tasteful where additions have been made. “If you create quality infrastructure, the neighborhood tends to live up to the quality.”
The discussion quickly shifts from infrastructure to what is happening inside the structures on the street.
Luxury Creeps Downtown
The zoning along Ortega, and throughout this section of town, is multi-unit and has been for decades. As a result, there are a lot of what might be called pop-ups and carve-outs. The pop-ups are the more recent two-to-four unit structures built in the back yard of the original home. You generally don’t see them until you’re right out in front of the house and then the higher roofline of the rear units looms between the trees.
The carve-outs are the larger original homes, often Victorians that have been cut into multiple units. These sport a row of mailboxes on the front porch and a variety of curtains in the windows.
Both these types of development leave the character of the street largely untouched. Except, of course, for increased numbers of cars on the streets and more people in the neighborhood. But because the transition from single family homes to multiple units has occurred over many years, the impact of increased density is not experienced as a sudden, negative shift.
In previous general plans, Santa Barbara has focused on the number of permissible units in neighborhoods like this. “That has had some unintended consequences,” Dayton says. We’re in the 400 block where Dayton owns a rental and has some personal experience with the changes that have occurred.
Most of the homes in the block are older, circa 1910 to 1930. All have been split into multiple units running from two units to six. The individual units range from 450 to 1200 square feet. In any classification, these would be considered workforce housing. More recently, a residence went in with three units, averaging 2200 square feet.
The development was permissible based on the number of units, but the size of the units and the new construction significantly increased the value of the units relative to the neighborhood. The differential can create stresses, both now between the expectations and means of neighbors, and for property owners in the neighborhood as decisions are made in the future about selling or remodeling, and in determining what the neighborhood and market will bear.
More importantly, the structure was seen as a loss to one of the city’s closely held objectives, that of retaining and creating more workforce housing. The new units were not considered workforce. As former mayor Sheila Lodge, writing from her position as chair of the General Plan Update Committee for the Citizen’s Planning Association wrote, “We do not need more luxury condos.”
“How do you avoid these kinds of unintended consequences?” Dayton is moving towards Bath Street. “One way is to limit the size of units.” Limiting unit size is one of the key means that the city is looking at to encourage the retention and development of more affordable, workforce housing. And workforce housing, according to many of the plans developers and critics, is the heart and soul of Plan Santa Barbara.
Workforce Housing
Where Ortega crosses De La Vina, the intersection appears under siege. De La Vina for the moment is narrowed to a single lane due to the city’s curb and brick work underway. On the corner, yellow tape and raw plywood signify ongoing construction on a multi-unit building.
 Santa Barbara Housing Authority project on De La Vina Street. Weiss stops to admire the work on the apartment building at 633 De La Vina. “I don’t know this project, but it looks like a great project. First of all, I see the yellow Notice of Development sign up which means it has come through the city. It’s been reviewed once or possibly twice by the ABR.” The ABR is the city’s Architectural Board of Review which reviews development with an eye to the consistency of the project with aesthetic standards for the downtown area.
“It’s a conversion of a 1950s or 60s boring stucco box to more of a Spanish Colonial,” Dayton says. “It looks like it started with six to eight units and will keep that many. So it retains the density.”
The contact on the Notice of Development sign is architect Christine Pierron. “Santa Barbara Housing Authority owns the property,” Pierron explains when I call her later. “These are the kinds of projects they like to do as they get funding.” Grants were received to upgrade the windows and utilities. The funds were extended to upgrade the appearance of the structure also. The building started with eight units and will retain eight units.
To a large extent, the battle for workforce or affordable housing is at the crux of the General Plan update, and has been a Santa Barbara stumbling block for over sixty years.
In a letter to the Planning Commission from Naomi Kovacs, Executive Director of Citizen’s Planning Association, the fundamental problem is that “given the worldwide competition for real estate in the Santa Barbara area, the expense of owning or renting a place of residence here will remain above the national average for the foreseeable future. As a result, the private sector cannot build our way out of the jobs/housing imbalance. Indeed, all four basic “scenarios” analyzed by the consultants produce considerably more market-rate than affordable units and would thus increase that imbalance and decrease our city’s economic and cultural diversity.”
What Kovacs is pointing to are the two mutually exclusive principles Santa Barbara planners are perennially asked to address: to retain Santa Barbara’s “small town feel” which is a product of the city’s “slow growth path” while reducing “the current jobs/housing imbalance.”
The General Plan supposedly precipitates the resolution of these two principles down through infrastructure improvements, regulated development, and successfully encouraged new behaviors.
Everyone in the battle seems to know, however, that over the long haul, that’s not going to happen.
Santa Barbara’s Old Math
One of the things the planning process brings to the surface in Santa Barbara is the concern about the widening gap in the economic strata, and the flight of the middle class. In other words, the rich are getting richer, the poor poorer, and the middle is slowly leaving.
Limiting the size and growth of a place, especially one as beautiful and climatically equable as Santa Barbara, causes the limited stock of housing to increase in value. As housing values increase, the demographic begins to skew: more people who can afford more expensive homes move in. (If they didn’t move in, the housing values would not rise.)
For people on the lower end of the earning spectrum, as housing values increase they find fewer and fewer opportunities to buy. But rental prices also rise. Ultimately, fewer and fewer can afford their own place. In order to work in this beautiful town, the lower earners begin to bunk-up, moving more people into fewer units and less square footage.
The middle class, ever-pragmatic, prefer to own rather than rent. Home ownership brings with it the stability a family requires to weather Santa Barbara’s very expensive housing market. You need to get in, set your housing costs, and then increase your earnings over time so that by the time you retire, you have paid your mortgage down and have some security. In the middle class mentality, a middle class renter is really just a future poor person. Thus the middle class in Santa Barbara, if they have not gotten a mortgage within the first five to ten years of their working life here, tend to leave.
“I agree the trend is real,” Weiss says. “But the City can put a good program in place to maintain the percentages [of affordable housing units]. We don’t have to lose ground.”
At the corner, we step out of the workforce housing debate, and back in time, as we enter another type of pocket in Santa Barbara’s complex matrix.
History Street
We hit Bradbury Street and head south. Bradbury is a one-block long, little-traveled street, with homes on the west side of the street and mostly the rear entries to Chapala businesses on the east.
This is a street with older homes that the city does not treat as an integral historic area because of the mix of structures and uses. A yellow Notice of Development sign flags new development on the street that has been passing through the approval process. “The building will be more modern in appearance,” Weiss has seen the plans. “It will have a flat roof and be very green, but it will still mesh with the character of the street.”
 Chapala Street's new mixed-use zone looms bewteen historic Brinkerhoff buildings. A quick jog to the west and we’re on Brinkerhoff. Doctor Samuel Brinkerhoff owned the large white home at 124 Cota Street and graded the lane below his house for development in 1857. Weiss has an affinity for the street. “There’s a great deal of historic integrity on Brinkerhoff. [But] where you have a lot of integrity of historic structures, you have struggles with use. These [structures] have all switched back-and-forth between residential and small commercial use for a long time. Sometimes it happens without permits.
“We would like to beef up our position on code for historic structures in our Historic Resources Program. We don’t want to compromise the character” of an area like this.
One of the components that Citizen’s Planning Association would like to see established in the General Plan is a Historic Resources Element. According to Weiss, this will start to happen with this update. “We call it a framework. It’s a table of contents, a placeholder. It will be a section in the General Plan called a Historic Resources Element. We’re putting the existing [historic resources] policies and some new policies in there.” At a later date, the element will be addressed as a whole and revamped.
We pass through the alley between Brinkerhoff and Chapala. “This alley is a great buffer zone,” Weiss points out. Services, trash cans, garage doors all face each other across the narrow lane, stitched together by overhead cable and phone lines. The difference between Brinkerhoff and Bradbury is stark in this regard. Homes on Bradbury face the rear entrances and services of businesses; on Brinkerhoff the rear entries of the two distinct land uses – in strictly technical terms – abut.
We turn the corner once, twice, and we emerge onto Chapala Street. This is the site of Santa Barbara’s perhaps most visible and talked about unintended consequences. And we’re right back in the debate about workforce housing. Or more accurately, luxury condominiums.
The Street of Unintended Consequences
Planning is the art of avoiding unintended consequences, and conversely, of achieving intended consequences that age well. But there is no escaping the unintended, and no guarantee that intended consequences will be welcomed once they arrive. For unintended consequences, Chapala One has no match in Santa Barbara. No one expected the building, completed in July 2008, to have quite so many.
Chapala One is a mixed use, high-density development at 401 Chapala Street in which there is 7,700 square feet of commercial space, 1,200 square feet of office space, and 46 housing units. It was opened with a ribbon-cutting ceremony on July 9, 2008, but with the exception of an on-site residential manager, has stood empty ever since.
 Chapala One from across Mission Creek. During the permitting of the facility, people close to the development (who asked to remain nameless) said the project had no difficulty making it through the approval process. “No one had to twist any arms.” And that once it was built, “there was a lot of interest from buyers.”
Weiss remembers the approval process differently. The city “always felt it was overparked.” The project provided two parking spaces for each condo unit, while the city required only one, an increase to the completed structure of approximately 9200 square feet. “And we felt the [residential] units were too large.”
The last change made in the plans was a crucial one. The Planning Commission viewed the standard building setback from Mission Creek with unease. The building is squarely in the Mission Creek flood plain and the Commission wanted a larger setback from the stream. They reached an agreement with the developer that in exchange for a larger setback, the developer would be allowed to increase the building height. According to Weiss, Planning Commissioner Bill Mahan commented at the time, ‘I feel like this is a mistake.’
In general, the feeling now is that the building is too massive for the location. Sitting on the southwestern side of the street, the structure’s shadow is cast over the roadway most of the day. The larger, luxury condo units are the exact things no one in a planning role in Santa Barbara seems to want for the city. Weiss still wishes the residential units could be cut down in size and made more affordable. And as the building molders in foreclosure proceedings, the taped up windows on empty storefronts don’t help with downtown vitality, public acceptance, or project justification.
But, according to my source close to the developer, the timing of the development was poor. “If it had been completed two years earlier, it would be all filled up. The timing was just terrible.”
Chapala One was a direct consequence of the city’s stated desire to develop a denser, and yet more livable and vital downtown as expressed in the 1990 General Plan amendments, which in turn were an expression of voter sentiment as stated in 1989’s Measure E. The model most often referred to that supports such development, and one that has cropped up in Plan Santa Barbara in a big way, is the Mobility-Oriented Development Area, or MODA.
We walk the short block to State, the center of Santa Barbara’s proposed MODA.
‘I Think I Live in a MODA’
Mobility-Oriented Development Areas is a hot topic in modern planning. As cities have shifted away from traditional planning models which followed the car from one parking lot to the next, they have looked for models that help create or recreate vital, communal downtowns. Cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Manhattan have adopted MODA models.
MODAs are in many ways nostalgic. They hearken back to a time when cities were smaller, more social, less stretched and compartmentalized by the car. Santa Barbara already exemplifies MODAs to an extent.
Dayton stands at Chapala and Cota Streets in downtown, watching the light change and cars pass like a gaggle of flushed quail. “The downtown street system was laid out before there were cars.” The compactness, the assumption of personal contact in commerce, works better for people, and ironically for cars. “Upper State was designed specifically for the automobile. But it moves a lot less traffic a lot less effectively than the downtown system.”
Plan Santa Barbara introduced the MODA concept to Santa Barbara. But many people have responded negatively. Council member Frank Hotchkiss moved to remove MODA from the planning drafts. The Citizen’s Planning Association, Women’s League of Voters, and the All Neighborhood Association all recommended in writing that it be removed.
MODA on the Plan Santa Barbara draft land use map spread from Milpas to the Funk Zone below the freeway, and from the Funk Zone all the way up State Street to the 154 where city limits give out. The corridor is roughly a six-block strip centered on State Street with bulb-outs (excuse the misapplied term for the apt image) to include Milpas and a six-block square centered at Micheltorena and San Andres.
Weiss agrees that MODA created more heat than most other components of the new general plan. “We’ve removed the MODA boundary from the [draft] Land Use map. We’ll use the principles, not a special district.” During hearings, Weiss recalls, people from the public were saying, ‘I like this MODA concept.’ Or, ‘Hey, I think I live in a MODA.’
The MODA principles envision a community where the need to travel outside the defined corridor is minimized. People live, work, shop, and get their entertainment and exercise close to home. When they do leave, transit nodes embedded in the corridor offer quick, easy, and relatively inexpensive options. As the town becomes more communal and enmeshed, more human and humane, the need for cars simply withers.
Randy Rowse, chair of the Downtown Organization’s Parking Committee, says he would love to see it. But he doesn’t see the rationale behind the vision in Santa Barbara.
“The housing model is about ownership,” Rowse says. At a certain point, he believes, the people the city is imagining moving into the downtown corridor “are going to have kids. And they’re going to want a yard and swings. A neighborhood.” In other words, MODA models which focus on dense settings with higher rental rates might best support a childless workforce, or possibly a larger one, in which a younger segment of the population flows through the MODA outwards towards single family tracts.
The result would not be the finished vision of Plan Santa Barbara, but simply a shift to a higher density downtown with pressure remaining on the community to support a widely spread net of vehicle trips to and from the populous centers.
One potential incarnation of a MODA is an urban mall, a downtown business area closed to vehicular traffic.
Closing State Street
At State Street, cars flow past. We wait for the light.
The notion of closing State Street has “been in the General Plan since 1964,” Weiss says. But there’s more to it than just closing the street.
Dayton picks up the thread. “You can’t just close a street and have it work.” Like round-abouts and Beany Babies, there was a time when everyone was doing it. Some hundred and seventy towns and cities across the United States closed streets and converted them to urban malls in the 1970s. The peak year was 1975. Most of these experiments failed.
“If you walk out on the street,” Dayton explains, “and there’s no one there, you think twice before you come back. There has to be a residential population downtown that supports the [closed] street from early in the morning to late at night.”
Rowse, participating in the Downtown Organization, has seen this proposal surface many times over the years. “If you talk to the merchants on Third Street,” he’s referring to Santa Monica’s Third Street mall, one of the few urban malls that took root and held, “I think a lot of them have regrets. They’re dealing with a homeless population there. They’re looking at a bench sleeping ordinance.”
Traffic Equals Vitality
To Rowse, revitalizing the downtown is not about shaping future development, which in his mind is where Plan Santa Barbara is putting their focus. “Plan Santa Barbara makes most sense in burgeoning times.” During good times, developers are more willing and likely to step up to the built-in disincentives in the city approval process. Development fees, drawn-out approval proceedings – “it can take nine months just to get a sign approved for a new business” – stand in the way of revitalization.
Most immediate in Rowse’s mind is the problem of the perceptions and realities of downtown. “We have a tourist population downtown, but we’re fighting to bring locals back. State Street has a reputation for being unsafe and unclean.”
He believes the reputation is undeserved, but recent parking rate increases and the opening of yet another shopping center – the Costco big-boxes in Goleta – with free parking, in-place security, and co-located stores has siphoned off downtown visitors much as the opening of La Cumbre Mall did in the late 1960s.
“The city deals with traffic through disincentives. They put in calming measures, higher priced parking.” All measures intended to reduce downtown traffic and make transit more attractive. “To me,” Rowse explains, “traffic equals vitality. I would love to see us go back to 90 minute parking.”
Dayton feels the existing parking models that have been in place for decades are functional. “The parking code now is extremely consistent with what’s been done with parking in the past. The first real focus on parking came in 1974, at which point, the code recognized that all parking is not the same. Parking is lavished on customers, restricted for employees, and adequate for residences.”
Around 1981, Dayton explains, most cities doubled their downtown parking requirements for new development. Santa Barbara kept their requirements the same.
“For employees, it adds a little bit of friction. It’s harder to handle cars [for workers in the downtown area]. They use alternate modes. We have a very high use of alternate modes in the downtown area, particularly from a commuter standpoint.”
Rowse agrees that Santa Barbara has a high per capita use of alternate modes of transportation downtown – bicycles, buses, trolleys, trains. “We’re in the top ten percent of cities our size.” But he’s beginning to doubt the friction model for employees. In his mind, once an employee is off work, they become a customer. The distinction between who is parking for what reasons tend to go away in hard economic times like these when Santa Barbara is experiencing a sizable daily inventory of open parking spaces.
“We’re the only shopping district that has paid parking for miles. With Camino Real and La Cumbre Plaza, we’re at a competitive disadvantage. I’d love to see free parking downtown but it will never happen. We’re still amortizing the lots we built.”
“We could really reprioritize the shuttles,” Rowse is talking now about tourists. “Coordinate with the hotels to pick people up regularly and drop them right here on State.” These are the people that don’t need cars in town, not the locals.
Security is another of Rowse’s hot buttons. The Downtown Organization recently helped fund retired police officer Bob Casey’s return to a State Street beat. “State Street is perceived as unsafe. We needed some feet on the ground.” He looks at the new police station with some doubt. “A couple substations on State Street – there are a lot of empty storefronts – would go a long way toward resolving the problems.”
The Public Services and Safety Element of the Plan Santa Barbara drafts addresses water supply, solid waste, recycling and emergency preparedness. Police focus is absent.
The Way to the Future
 Santa Barbara from the bird's eye. BWe ended the walk in front of the city offices on Garden Street. Before Weiss goes back inside, she reiterates her belief in the process and guiding principles. She anticipates a hard pull between now and targeted plan approval in October. “Most of what’s in the [draft] plan will remain. There will be changes. Possibly some significant ones. But this council has a lot of experience with the planning process.”
“I appreciate what they’re doing,” Rowse says of City Planning. “They were here before this council and they’ll probably be here long after.” But City Planning has the role of defining regulations based on Council direction. One of the stated objectives that Weiss gave me at the start of our walk is to “ensure a strong economy that provides the revenue base necessary for essential services and community enhancements.”
Rowse said, “Bettie [Weiss] and Rob [Dayton] did talk about economic vitality at one of the [Plan Santa Barbara] workshops. But the next day at the council meeting, there was nothing mentioned.”
The economic incentives in the Policy Preferences draft are limited to unspecified encouragement, promotion, priority, and in a few instances, “start-up license fee rebates.”
“The economy has traditionally been pretty stable in Santa Barbara,” Rowse explains. “But this [economic downturn] is real.” Rowse believes, the economic strength and vitality of Santa Barbara, is where Plan Santa Barbara should be focused. Rowse would like to see fewer disincentives to development and traffic flow, none of which are specified in the draft plan, and more leadership in practical business development. He’s even willing to consider yet a position added to the city’s staff, a business ombudsman to streamline and foster business development in town.
“The city sees developers as a piggy bank they can hit with fees. [Developers] are supposed to see fifteen percent” – Plan Santa Barbara assumes a 15% profit on development projects to calculate returns on investment for residential housing projects – “but we keep transferring the planning costs to the developers in the form of increased fees.” Which raises prices and decreases potential margins. “I don’t think you’ll find an architect who has made money on a Santa Barbara project. Their time gets eaten up in meetings” and the resulting plan changes.
Future Tense
The city will release the draft Environmental Impact Report and the revised supporting documents for Plan Santa Barbara on March 18. They have booked the Faulkner Gallery downtown at the Public Library all day, from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., for presentations and open discussions with the public.
In June, City Council will discuss the plan updates and provide direction to the staff.
Between June and October staff will make the needed adjustments and develop a final set of updates to the General Plan.
In October, the plan will likely be voted into law.
Out of this plan will come the city’s objectives and philosophy for every land use and infrastructure decision for the next twenty years. The hope is that, looking back from 2030, the consequences will have been both intended, and welcome.
Big Step in Replacing The Spirit of the Ocean Fountain
by David Petry
The two sandstone figures, a nude male and female divided by a fish, who keep watch out in front of the Santa Barbara Courthouse, lead troubled lives. One might think, given the detailed body scans they were receiving Monday and Tuesday nights this week, that they had turned to crime.
 The bands of light are read by the scanning device to establish points in space. The scanners on the scene were David Bassett and Lisa Federici, CTO and CEO respectively, of Scansite, a firm that does art restoration scans. Bassett and Federici travel the world evaluating the health of many such figures, clothed, draped, or nude. “It’s good we’re doing this now. Another year and this may not even be here.” Federici was lightly placing sticky registry dots on the sculpture on Monday before the scans started and the slight pressure to stick one on created a three inch wide divot in the stone.
The Spirit of the Ocean, Santa Barbara’s iconic and apparently robust fountain, has been crumbling for decades and is on the verge of complete collapse. The chosen remedy, after years of discussions and planning, is to replace the sculpture. The money for the project is accumulating. The process determined. The sculptor selected. The stone found.
(I’ve written extensively about the history of the sculpture, the project and the sculptors involved, and have provided links at the end of this piece for the related articles.)
The next big step in the replacement process was to obtain a 3-D scan of the existing sculpture and Federici and Bassett were in town to complete that step. “It creates a model the sculptor can use to create the replacement, but it also creates a record for the County.” Bassett talks while he’s operating the scanner and monitoring the build up of overlapping scans in the software.
 David Bassett of Scansite works in the dark of night on The Spirit of the Ocean fountain. The scanning process creates a three-dimensional point cloud or polychrome of the surface in the modeling software. The task, finished Tuesday night an hour before midnight, required two late evenings. Bassett and Federici placed evenly-spaced registry dots on the sculpture and then proceeded to scan, section-by-section, the entire accessible surface of the sculpture. They performed approximately 30 scans, each scan taking 10 to 15 minutes.
 A partial point cloud or polychrome for The Spirit of the Ocean. The successive images Bassett shoots are lined up in the software with the registry dots. “We start in the center and work out.” Bassett sets up the next scan, the light from the scanner providing markers for the corners and center of the target scan directly on the sculpture. “It reduces the margin of error as you move outwards.” Essentially, the greater distance one scan is from another, the greater chance that slight errors will accumulate into misrepresentations in the final composite image. Starting at one corner on the Spirit of the Ocean places the far opposite corner up to six scans away. The same corner is just three scans from the center.
Sculptors have turned to technology to simplify and clarify their tasks for centuries. In a recent article on the Spirit project, I described the sculptor’s pointing machine invented in the 1750s that allows a sculptor to build a small clay model, and with the pointing machine (and typically using apprentices), create a larger version in stone or bronze.
The scanner Bassett and Federici employ is a modern, more accurate, and far less cumbersome pointing machine. Prior to digital scanning, x-rays were used with some success, but were more limited to evaluating a sculpture’s integrity. One of the first uses of x-rays to evaluate a sculpture gained world press in 1964. I found the event had a family connection.
My mother-in-law, Carol Hauer, neé Corney, remembered the 1964 New York’s World Fair both because she went with her children, and because of her Uncle George. “Uncle George x-rayed Michelangelo’s Pieta. The Vatican gave permission for the World’s Fair to ship the Pieta to New York, but they asked that the sculpture be x-rayed before and after the trip to make sure nothing happened to it.”
Uncle George was physicist George M. Corney, employed by Eastman-Kodak. He made global front-page news in April of 1964 when his team released x-ray images showing that the Madonna’s hand had been broken some hundred years earlier and then repaired. Carol recalled that “he sent us a copy of the x-ray of her head. It was beautiful.”
 The male nymph’s abdomen from The Spirit of the Ocean showing the registry dots, the seam between two sandstone blocks, and evidence of surface decay. At the fair, my mother-in-law recalled being disappointed. “You could only see [the Pieta] from a conveyor belt that moved a line of people past it.” According to the papers, there were three moving walkways available at three different levels, and a fourth, “a walkway for those who wish to view the sculpture at their own pace.” For convenience, it was unmatched for the times; at least one patron bragged of being able to see it on her way to a Mets game with her son.
Permission to send the sculpture to the World’s Fair had been granted by Pope John XXIII. It was the first time any Vatican artwork had been shipped for public viewing. In certain terms, the trip was a success. Over a million people viewed the sculpture during its visit. But Romans were not happy. A year after its return, Pope John in his grave, Pope Paul issued a decree stating that banned any future loans of Vatican artwork.
The Pieta serves as a telling example of the spectrum of stresses we place on masterpieces. We want them shared and seen and in the case of great public fountains like The Spirit of the Ocean, even touchable.
Exempt from any future trips off Vatican property, The Pieta, was not finished serving as an example. In 1972, Lazlo Toth “Hungarian-born Australian geologist” leapt over the rope barriers surrounding the statue and delivered 15 blows with his geologist’s hammer before he was restrained. He removed the Virgin’s arm at the elbow, chunked away part of her nose, and chipped an eyelid. He shouted at the time, “I am Jesus Christ, risen from the dead.”
Toth was never indicted. He spent a couple years in a mental institution in Italy and was then deported to Australia. According to Wikipedia, Toth, born in 1940 “resides in a nursing home in Strathfield, NSW, Australia.”
Forty-four years after my mother-in-law visited The Pieta at the New York World’s Fair, my wife and step-daughter visited the piece at the Vatican. She echoed her mother’s disappointment of the sculpture’s presentation because it now resides behind a dense wall of bullet-proof glass. “It was like looking through a thick pair of someone else’s glasses.”
One way around this is to create replicas of great masterpieces.
“They used to do molds to create replicas,” Bassett explains. “But you can’t do that anymore because you’re impacting the surface of the original in some way.” This is what Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale did with Michelangelo’s David. In June 1939, the cemetery unveiled a full-sized replica of the statue, bringing the masterpiece to American masses for the first time. That statue was toppled and shattered in the 1971 Sylmar earthquake, and was duly replaced. If that happens again, they could scan the original and create an even closer replication.
But such scans are not just done. You need Papal permission.
According to Bassett, in recent years, the Vatican gave permission for one agency to replicate The Pieta. Twelve copies were to be allowed. To date, seven have been made. One of the copies, a bronze valued at $12 million, sits in a remote barn in Oregon. Bassett and Federici know because they were brought in to scan it.
Scansite is the only company they know of using the high-end equipment they use for art restorations. The device they use is a $200,000 unit built by GOM in Germany. “We attend the user conferences occasionally and the companies there are Northrop, Boeing, Honda…” The company website lists every automotive and aeronautic company I could think of.
“They’re scanning every thousandth unit and validating it against the original model. They’re scanning entire 747s.” Such scans verify everything is where it’s supposed to be with an extremely low margin of error.
Scanning a 747, it turns out, is easier than scanning a sculpture the size of a Hummer like The Spirit of the Ocean. The registry dots they stick to the 747’s fuselage have more information on them, allowing a special camera to snap away quickly. The scanner is then run over much larger areas; the software uses the camera registry dots to line up the scanned image.
 Cast objects on the front doors of Our Lady of Angels. In art restoration, detailed scanning and computer numeric control (CNC) mills have also almost completely replaced pointing and other methods as artists now develop small models in clay or wax, scan the finished item, and have it cut out in foam by a mill. The foam model is used to create a full-sized plaster cast, which in turn is used to cast the full-sized item in bronze in a forge. Scansite performed the scans for the highly-detailed bronze doorways of Our Lady of Angels in Los Angeles, working from small models provided by the artist.
On another job, one of four statues on King Ferdinand of Spain’s tomb had been sold by the Spanish government in a period of economic strife. Eventually, the statue ended up at the British National Museum and Spain wanted to get it back. The museum declined to return it, but they allowed Spain to scan the statue and build a full-sized replica which now stands in its proper place on the tomb.
Bassett flips through Scansite’s dossier of projects maintained in a large 3-ring binder. “Sometimes museums want us to scan a masterpiece so they can create scale replicas in plaster for their gift shops.”
County Architect Robert Ooley has been nursing this and several projects at the Courthouse along for several years. “We want the public involved. So much restoration work happens behind the scenes and then one day its just there and no one knows what happened. Or how.”
A large portion of The Spirit of the Ocean replacement will happen in the public eye. Not the whole process, but an unprecedented amount.
The scan was not conducted in the dead of night to hide the process. Dark is just the obvious and best time to gather data that relies on controlled light sources. A plywood platform was built for the scanner equipment and personnel. The protective plastic sheet that has shielded the sculpture from this season’s weather was removed. Several palm-sized shards from the dolphin-fish head, knocked off by a child climbing on the statue last June, were set aside. The scanning started Monday night and finished Tuesday night at 11 p.m. Wednesday morning, Bassett and Federici headed back to their Woodacre, California offices.
 Bassett scans a section. Bassett anticipates up to ten days of further manipulation of the scanned images in the software. He traverses the images “patch-by-patch, spline-by-spline,” ensuring a file that can be used as both an archival record of the sculpture and as the basis for creating a new model for the sculptors to work from.
For The Spirit of the Ocean, the process is not simple. The massive piece will be broken down into the four component blocks of the original sculpture. On each of these blocks, there are the numerous surface defects on the sculpture due to excessive stone rot and weathering that must be fixed. Then there are the effects of decades of patching and shaping on the surface to correct earlier defects. Combined, these have made the existing sculpture larger and heavier – and substantively different – than the original.
Scansite’s target with the project is to provide an image as close to the original sculpture as possible. One version of the file will go on record with the County for future reference. One will be sent to Satellite Models of Belmont, California. Satellite will take the scan file, feed it into a CNC milling machine, load the machine with appropriate-sized foam blanks, and set the machine in motion.
The resulting carved foam is not perfect. To reach the level of detail retained in the scan file and on the original sculpture, smaller and smaller cutting tools would have to be used – akin to using finer and finer grit sandpapers on a wood piece. Each step to achieve greater detail takes time and money, and sculptors have learned this is not the place to gain the required level of perfection. Instead the sculptor, who in this case is English-trained sculptor Nick Blantern, tools the foam model directly, working in conjunction with Scansite and a sculpture restoration expert to get the foam model exactly right.
Once the model is perfected, Blantern will begin using the old-fashioned pointing method to carve four large blanks of stone into something close to the original. At some point, when the level of noise, dust, and accuracy is deemed appropriate for public display, the partially carved stones will be moved to the Courthouse lawn, out in front of the existing sculpture, where the work will be finished.
 The scanned image begins to take shape. Gabe, the Courthouse night watchman wanders into the small halo of light around the fountain where Scansite is working. “I’m so glad to see this getting done. The last architect here didn’t spend a lot of time on the Courthouse. [Ooley’s team] is just finishing the ceiling in the mural room” smoke-damaged during the recent fire at the Courthouse, “and they’re starting to get all these light fixtures working again. Some of them, they can’t even figure out where the electrical for them is. Some, they put in a new light bulb and they work.”
Another David Bassett surfaced in the news last year in relation to three-dimensional scanning. Bassett is the TSA Security Director at Denver International Airport. In his role, he was introducing the first full-body scans at airport security checkpoints in the country. The technology is a cross between x-rays and scanners, converting human beings to point clouds and polychromes, and giving security officers a snapshot of our obesity epidemic.
The two models for The Spirit of the Ocean posed nude for three hours a day, three days a week, over a period of six months in 1927. Paid fifty cents an hour at first, their sitting fee was raised to seventy-five cents when the family learned that sculptor Cadorin was being paid roughly $5,000 to complete the piece.
If the sculpture was being launched from scratch today, those models might be scanned, expanded some 20% or so in size, cut in foam, and then carved in sandstone. Or maybe cast in bronze. A bronze would have lasted centuries and would have removed any need for this process.
But the process, like the scuplture, turns out to be a gift.
Related stories
A detailed history of the fountain, the project, and sculptor Ettore Cadorin
The unveiling of the sandstone boulders that will be used for the replacement
The story of the chosen sculptor, Englishman Nick Blantern
“I’m a collector,” Jeff Richman, historian at the famous Green-Wood Cemetery of Brooklyn, says. “I was into stereo-opticons. I would go to these sales and auctions to buy the images, and they would have these pictures of Green-Wood Cemetery. And I would think, ‘That looks like a nice place.’
“Then one day in 1986, I saw that a professional photographer was giving a tour out there. This was when Green-Wood did not allow you to shoot pictures on the grounds, so I went. The next day, I think it was, I was back and I convinced them to give me a pass. I guess I convinced them I was crazy enough.”
Richman talks as we descend through the Central section at the Santa Barbara Cemetery. “I started looking around, and there was a lot of misinformation about who people were, and missing information. I thought maybe I could put together a book.
 Sue Ramsey and Jeff Richman at the Santa Barbara Cemetery (Yes, he's holding my history of the Santa Barbara Cemetery, The Best Last Place.) “Not long after, the cemetery approached me and said they’d been thinking about doing a book themselves. ‘Let’s see what you’ve got.’”
The result was Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery: New York’s Buried Treasure, published in 1998. He subsequently released two books detailing walking tours of the cemetery.
Since then, Richman dropped his law practice and became a fulltime cemetery historian. “We’ve done 4300 Civil War veteran bios,” obtaining hundreds of stones for those whose markers are missing. “I also manage the Friends of the Cemetery. They give tours out there.” He met his partner Joan, who is walking the Santa Barbara Cemetery with us, through the Friends. “She’s one of the volunteers.”
Richman is in town today and tomorrow at the invitation of Sue Ramsey and the Santa Barbara Genealogical Society. He’s giving two talks at the Society’s monthly presentation tomorrow. From 9:30 a.m. to Noon, he’ll be presenting ‘No Longer Forgotten: The Search for Civil War Veterans at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery.’
His introduction to Sue Ramsey came through their shared interest in one particular Civil War veteran at Green-Wood, Capt. Samuel H. Sims, Company G, of the 51st New York State Volunteer Regiment. Ramsey, through a friend, was holding a treasure trove of personal letters from Capt. Sims. The friend had rescued the letters from an overflowing Montecito trash bin as a home was emptied out following the death of the owners. The letters were heart-felt and poignant and created an immediate connection across the decades. Ramsey launched into a research project to find out more about this man and his offspring.
 Richman at the Grand Army of the Republic cannon at the Santa Barbara Cemetery. Cannon is one of a pair of cannons dedicated by the GAR in 1900. The cannons both saw action during the war. Green-Wood, in close collaboration with Richman, had embarked on a project to restore their Civil War Soldiers Monument in 2002. The project was more than refurbished the stonework, however. Richman, initially had assumed there were roughly 500 Civil War vets at the cemetery. As part of the project, Richman determined to identify all the Civil War veterans he could at the cemetery, replace any unreadable stones, acquire new stones for any that were missing, and compile a book of the veteran’s letters, unfolding in sequence through the battles of the war. The project was planned for a rededication of the Monument, the new veteran’s markers, and of the book, on Memorial Day, 2007.
Sue Ramsey learned of the project in 2005. She sent Richman copies and transcriptions of Sim’s letters. They dovetailed perfectly with his work and for her part, she was determined, “by hook or by crook, I was going to go Brooklyn for that ceremony. ”
She made it.
By the time the event rolled around, Richman and his volunteer researchers had identified over 4300 Civil War vets in the grounds of Green-Wood. The book with transcriptions of the soldier’s letterswas released as Final Camping Ground: Civil War Veterans at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery.
His second talk this Saturday will be Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery: Unearthing New York’s Buried Treasures, a more general overview of the cemetery and it’s population.
The talks will be held at the First Presbyterian Church, 21 N. Constance at State. You can read Jeff’s Green-Wood Cemetery blog at http://greenwooddiscovery.org/.
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The Best Last Place – Founded in 1867, The Santa Barbara Cemetery is unique. It has not only passed through the five distinctive stages of cemetery development in the United States, but has melded these eras into the remarkably beautiful, functioning “Best Last Place.” Author David Petry spent eight years researching, while traveling to over 1,000 cemeteries around the country and around the world.
He has given tours of the local cemetery since 1996, covering it development as well as some of the many notables buried there including many Santa Barbara business, political, and arts leaders; captains of industry, writers, screen actors, and a princess.
