Height fight opponents unite

BY COLBY FRAZIER
DAILY SOUND STAFF WRITER

Warring factions of Santa Barbara groups that have been at odds over plans to place an initiative on November’s General Election ballot that would change building height limits throughout the city announced yesterday a truce has been reached.
There’s only one hitch: The Santa Barbara City Council has to adopt an interim building regulation ordinance at its next meeting, or else, they say, efforts to move forward with the ballot initiative will continue.

The groups made the announcement on the steps of city hall and were joined by city council members Helene Schneider and Das Williams, who helped draft the interim ordinance. If approved, the ordinance would set the maximum building height throughout the city’s commercial zones that allow residential use at 40 feet — down 20 feet from the 60 feet currently allowed under the city’s charter.
“We all want to have a Santa Barbara that continues to be beautiful,” Williams said. “People stepped aside from pride and said ‘how can we make things best for Santa Barbara?’”
Rumblings about building height are nothing new in the city, which by most standards doesn’t have an abundance of tall buildings.
But many believe the ones it does have, 60 feet or not, are too tall. This talk got serious when the Save El Pueblo Viejo Committee announced in January its intent to place a height initiative on the ballot that would restrict commercial building heights to 45 feet in the majority of the city and 40 feet in the downtown historic district known as El Pueblo Viejo.
The drive for the initiative was fueled by a string of projects on Chapala Street that many said were too bulky for the area.
But criticism was quick to follow, and much of it came from Mickey Flacks, a local affordable housing advocate who belongs to the group Santa Barbara for All.
Flacks insisted that a more appropriate way to handle such an initiative was to go through city council, and voiced concern over how such a height restriction would promote urban sprawl and thwart affordable housing efforts.
Because the height initiative blossomed in the midst of an effort to amend the city’s General Plan, some argued that a better way to address issues like height would be at Plan Santa Barbara meetings.
One of these people was Santa Barbara Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Steve Cushman, who voiced his disapproval of a ballot initiative last month.
Bill Mahan, chair of Save El Pueblo Viejo, said he always agreed going through the General Plan and the city was the proper route, but said he addressed the city council about the idea last summer and there was no interest.
Now there is apparently plenty of interest from the council, or at least from Williams, Schneider and Councilwoman Iya Falcone, who agreed to place the item on next Tuesday’s council agenda.
When asked what changed between last summer and now, Williams said, “Nobody was quite ready for it [then].”
Williams and Schneider both said the tone at Plan Santa Barbara meetings about the size, bulk and scale of buildings points in the direction of further restriction, as does the roughly 4,000 signatures that Mahan said his group has gathered in favor of the height initiative in the past two months.
He speculated that by November, he could have as many as 12,000 signatures — a clear sign, he said, that many are ready for change.
To the pleasure of some, the interim ordinance does a lot more than limit height.
It would mandate 10 percent of a net lot area to remain open space on mixed-use projects and 5 percent on commercial projects.
Projects where at least 30 percent of the residential units are classified affordable will be allowed an additional 12 feet of height. The ordinance would also set limitations on maximum floor areas and mandate additional setbacks of up to five feet from the property line facing a public street.
By dealing with the height issues through the General Plan, Flacks said any permanent ordinance would require environmental review. A community driven ballot initiative would not.
Mahan said the 40-feet height limit would be calculated from the ground to the top of the wall, which means a buildings roof could be several feet higher than 40 feet.
Williams said a local architect, who was once opposed to such an ordinance, called the proposed ordinance a “masterpiece.”
“This tackles the biggest issues in Santa Barbara on one page,” he said. “That’s hard.”
If approved, the ordinance would not affect projects approved by the city prior to May 15, 2008 or those deemed a “community priority.”
The City Council will discuss the ordinance next Tuesday, where Williams and everyone else at yesterday’s meeting hopes it will be approved and sent to the city’s Ordinance Committee. If that occurs, the ordinance will then return to the City Council for approval.
Williams said the ordinance is a way to stave off larger developments while the General Plan is being updated, and if approved, it could provide a framework for Plan Santa Barbara discussions.
The ordinance could be voted on as an amendment to the city charter on Nov. 3 2009.
The motivation, according to some at the meeting, was simple. To gets something better out of the process and do it together.
Over the past couple of months, those involved in drafting the proposed ordinance said they looked at their friends and neighbors, many of whom were on opposing sides of the issues, and asked one another why they were fighting.
For Williams, the day came when he realized he was at odds with his mentor, former Santa Barbara City Mayor Sheila Lodge, who is on the Save El Pueblo Viejo Committee.
“We just looked up at each other one day and said, ‘this is weird. We’ve got to come up with a compromise,’” he said.
Brian Cearnal, a local architect who was opposed to the proposed ballot initiative, said he met with Mahan at the Coffee Cat, which is located in a building higher than 40 feet on the corner of Anapamu and Anacapa Streets.
Cearnal said he told Mahan that under the proposed initiative, the Coffee Cat building, which he believes is perfect example of good building, couldn’t be built.
“We really ought to see what works,” he said. “The chop them off at the knees height ordinance is draconian.”