OPINION: Stone walls and stonewalling

BY CHERI RAE
DAILY SOUND COLUMNIST
The trees fell. The birds flew. The neighbors complained. Again and again and again. Finally, when the stone wall was bulldozed, neighbors contacted the City. That’s when things got very interesting.
When the 99-unit, 63,000-square foot, three-story apartment complex, known as Villa Flores, was sold this spring, BDC (Bermant Development Company) took over management. The ugly buildings were only partially hidden by the mature trees on the property; the project is universally regarded as an out-of-place eyesore.

Ironically, the property was originally owned by horticulturist Dr. Augustus Boyd Doremus, who in the late 1800s established a huge nursery on Anapamu Street, adjacent to the extant famed stone pines he planted there. But history doesn’t mean much in Santa Barbara, these days.
When deafening chainsaws unexpectedly began demolishing a half-century’s worth of urban forest — with no advance notice to the surrounding neighborhood — neighbors from blocks around contacted BDC representative Karen Quinn. Although she repeatedly claimed that all work was permitted she did offer an indicator of what was to come, “We are under no obligation to the neighborhood,” she told me. “It’s private property and we can do anything we want.”
Well not exactly anything. But the City inexplicably did allow the removal of virtually every tree that was not on the original landscaping plan from fifty years ago. This, in Santa Barbara, a city that hired its first “tree-warden” in 1911 and has been designated a “Tree City USA” for the past 25 years.
It wasn’t until several weeks later, during the second round of tree-toppling — and more — that neighbors realized they’d been had.
A bulldozer began demolition of an attractive rock wall and stairway made of huge, original sandstone blocks, an historic hitching post disappeared from the City-owned parkway.
Urban Historian Jake Jacobus drove over to see for himself, and immediately summoned a building inspector who issued a Stop Work order for numerous life-safety issues and unpermitted work.
Neighbors are left to cope with an extensively altered streetscape. Mature specimen trees that once softened the property have been reduced to sawdust.
Huge tree stumps and exposed roots loom precariously above the sidewalk; the bulldozed and broken wall entices children to scramble over the unstable stones, and enter the now-exposed pool area; the historic hitching post has been appropriated onto the private property, re-purposed as a fence post. One long-term resident stated, “The quality of my life is now less than it was. The apartment complex looks like a combination army barracks and disaster area; it’s a visual blight.”
Neighbors are also shocked that somehow, someway, someone at BDC, an organization (according to its website) “driven by honesty, integrity and hard work,” calculated that proceeding with unpermitted demolition, destruction and removal of cultural resources, without an approved landscape plan in place was appropriate.
Then neighbors got a clue: Included in the official summary written up by the planning department’s Bettie Weiss, is the statement “The status of the project in terms of ABR is that the full review process and final approvals have not yet been granted, as the ABR requested that the plan return with more tree mitigation.”
Actually, the full ABR never has reviewed this matter; the preliminary plan received only cursory review as a consent item. Only now, because of the wide public outcry, ABR members will have the opportunity to examine the mess — and figure out what to do about it.

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