Modoc Multi-Use Path Project Inches Forward

A number of obstacles run across the intended bike-hike-roll pathway Santa Barbara County is building along Modoc Road — trees, drains, water vaults, wetlands, and the residents of a nature preserve: foxes, skunks, opossums, bobcats, rabbits, monarch butterflies, and seasonal flowering plants. It is for the Modoc Preserve that the Board of Supervisors agreed on Tuesday, August 29, to spend $25,000 toward hiring an easement consultant to negotiate right-of-away along the preserve for a project still in a preliminary design stage.

The city half of the bike-pedestrian path is completed through to Via Senda — the little side shoot to La Cumbre Road from Modoc — and to the east reaches as far as the harbor and Montecito. The county’s portion of the 10-foot-wide Modoc Multi-Use Path, which runs along the south side of the road, heads west in three segments: two of them on county-owned land, and the middle section abutting the Modoc Preserve for 1,600 feet.

The preserve is roughly 30 acres of private property owned by La Cumbre Mutual Water Company, but a conservation easement over most of the land is administered by the Land Trust for Santa Barbara County. It also has a neighborhood across the road with activists who love the unkempt preserve and enjoy its natural beauty right at the base of Hope Ranch. They formed the Community Association for Modoc Preserve, or CAMP, and succeeded in reining in the number of trees to be cut to about 20 from about 80, depending on who you talk to. CAMP also filed a lawsuit arguing that issues remained with the environmental study results, a lawsuit that is in the mandatory settlement negotiation stage.

Of the pathway project, the spokesperson for CAMP, Warren Thomas, said that losing one Canary Island palm was better than losing 29 of them, as was originally considered. Aside from the ongoing lawsuit, the sticking point for CAMP currently, according to Thomas, is the material to be used on the pathway alongside the preserve. Asphalt, which the county commonly uses, leaches hydrocarbons throughout its lifetime, a chemical they don’t want seeping into the wetlands at the Modoc Preserve or into Cieneguitas Creek, Thomas said.

“Warren found a good solution,” acknowledged Alex Rodriguez, who is president of the Board of Directors for La Cumbre water. Thomas located a product called GraniteCrete, which he said had a good track record at Golden Gate Park and in Monterey. It holds both the ability to resemble a path, rather than a road, and to be permeable for the wetland environment.

It was the residents across Modoc Road who had banded together to force a vote at the water company in the 1990s to keep the land that is now the preserve from being developed, said Rodriguez. The area is private property, he emphasized: “We have to be super careful that people don’t trample through there because it’s native habitat, an ecologically sensitive wetland.”

[Click to enlarge] A map showing the county’s preferred placement for the multi-use path along Modoc Road | Credit: County of Santa Barbara

Lining the edge of Modoc Preserve with a bike path could prove problematic, as wheeled vehicles are not allowed within the preserve or on its dirt trails. Chris Sneddon, who is heading the project for County Public Works, said a fence was on the list of possible additions to hold people back from going off-path. The pathway meanders through two rows of trees, and the equestrian portion of the trail system is currently placed to the south of the trees, he said.

Meredith Hendricks, executive director for the Land Trust, said the conservation easement for the preserve allows paths and trails, but with consideration to their cumulative effect. The Land Trust could consider an acceptable surface and an acceptable design — nothing that looked like a mini-road, for instance — that has the least impact on the preserve. At present, however, “There’s no active negotiations going on because the county is still working through the 35 percent design,” she said.

For Public Works’ Sneddon, it’s progress — incremental, but progress all the same. Several workshops on trees, path materials, existing trails, and pedestrian improvements lie ahead.

“It feels like we’re hopefully getting some good consensus,” Sneddon said after Tuesday’s hearing. “We still have a ways to go in getting an easement,” he recognized. “We will still have to ask the water company board and the Land Trust for their approval, but we’re hopeful all that stuff will work out.”