The never ending project, You Plan Santa Barbara, is back on the Santa Barbara City Council docket today. In addition to a Historic Resources Element, the council will look at Subcommittee recommendations on; open space, parks and recreation, economy and fiscal health, environmental resources and public services and safety.
According to Santa Barbara’s Community Environmental Council (CEC), “key decisions relating to energy, climate change and the environment will occur, and the impacts will be felt for decades. ” The CEC, is encouraging residents to send the following letter:
Dear Santa Barbara City Council:
I support new technologies that allow people to choose from a range of options in transportation, housing, and business. I support the PlanSB Subcommittee recommendations but would like to see several of the implementation actions strengthened or clarified. Specifically:
- ER6.5 Facilitate Renewable Energy Technologies.
The City has an exemplary over-the-counter permit process for rooftop solar. Unfortunately this process does not apply to historic structures or structures in historic areas. ER6.5 should specifically highlight the intent to facilitate use of renewable energy on historic structures and in historic areas. It should also lay out a plan for how such a plan might be implemented. - ER6.6 Solar Energy
I support all new construction and significant remodel projects installing solar energy and ask that any residential projects of three units or greater be required to install a minimum of 2kW of solar photovoltaic per unit. If 2kW per unit will not fit onto the property then the maximum physically feasible should be required. While it is often easiest to install solar on the residential roof, solar may also be installed over a parking structure or on the ground. All types of installation should be encouraged through this implementation element. - ER9.1 Electric Vehicles
Southern California Edison has identified the City of Santa Barbara as the fourth largest electric vehicle market out of 183 cities in their service territory. This means that they expect Santa Barbara residents to adopt this new technology faster than almost every other city in Southern California. Specifically they expect to see 450,000 to 1,000,000 electric vehicles in their territory by 2020, with Santa Barbara making up a substantial chunk. ER9.1 is vital if Santa Barbara residents are going to embrace options that move them away from the gasoline pump. Please leave it in the PlanSB update.
Public review of the Plan Santa Barbara documents and associated maps, along with the final Council adoption hearing, is still months away.
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Just put a fork in Plan Santa Barbara and call it a day.
I don’t know where to even start with this stuff. You can’t put a sandwich board sign out in front of your business without the SWAT team showing up but these guys want to put solar panels on the Mission? Require people to install solar on new construction? If it’s so easy to spend other people’s money, how about you just require they rent the units for nothing? Here’s my letter:
Dear Santa Barbara City Council,
Please get your noses out of everyone’s business. Unless you are building solar powered graffiti removal trucks and all electric homeless busses out of town, how about worrying about your own budget problems and not burdening already struggling taxpayers with more social engineering nonsense.
Experience the General Plan’s intentions in action any afternoon in the parking lot at Trader Joe’s on De LaVina.The perfect storm of “shared parking,” no access for trucks that have to back up into the loading dock, which results in the loss of a lane and no safe walkways for pedestrians, and checkers who have to add directing traffic to their job duties. But let’s focus on plastic bags instead of this kind of land use disaster coming out of the smart growth brains in the City offices. Holding the line on this expensive waste of resources should be the biggest campaign issue of all.