There’s a New McAdoo in Town

If Kelly McAdoo was alarmed by news that four underground storage tanks had just accidentally been unearthed by city work crews three feet underground during a routine sidewalk inspection by Chapala and Carrillo streets, she wasn’t showing it. McAdoo is Santa Barbara’s newest city administrator, and Monday was her first day on the job. Underground storage tanks are never good news.

Even under the most benign of circumstances, they’re costly and cumbersome to clean up. Rarely are the contaminants involved sufficiently inert to be allowed to remain where they are. No fewer than four regulatory agencies have to sign off on whatever happens next. And all that collective decision-making can chew up time. 

And in this case, there’s not much time to spare. 

The $64 million question is what effect — if any — this will have on long-incubating plans to relocate Santa Barbara’s intensely popular farmers’ market from its current digs at the city parking lot by Cota and Santa Barbara streets to its new home at the intersection of State and Carrillo. Come September 7, vendors will assemble there and spread out their stalls into the shape of a big cross. One end of that cross will extend right up to the cusp of ground zero for the newly discovered underground tanks. 

The big fear at City Hall — if soil remediation is required — is that this will impinge on the operational footprint of the new farmers’ market. And there’s no delaying the market’s September 7 relocation date. It has to vacate the Cota Street lot to make way for construction crews slated to transform the site into Santa Barbara’s brand-new $80 million police station. 

McAdoo just moved to Santa Barbara two weeks ago from Hayward, where she spent the last 14 years in an executive capacity for that city’s government. She just rented a sweet place on the Eastside. She can walk pretty much anywhere in 15 minutes. Looking for housing, she said, wasn’t “as terrible as it could have been.” But even by Bay Area standards, she conceded, Santa Barbara housing is really expensive. 

The old tanks are about 100 years old, ossified remnants of a former Standard Oil gas station that once occupied the site. Because of how old those tanks are, City Hall is asking that the tanks be allowed to stay in the ground. Ultimately, that decision rests with the Regional Water Quality Control Board. Few people expect the water board to say yes. And that means hauling massive quantities of soil away. More permits. Lots of trucks. For the time being, however, McAdoo isn’t sweating it. Whatever happens, she said, “The farmers’ market should be able to still move on September 7 as planned.” 

Welcome to Santa Barbara. 

In person, McAdoo radiates an open and congenial competence. She happens to be distantly related to William Gibbs McAdoo, the onetime U.S. senator who lived in Santa Barbara in the 1930s and was married to Woodrow Wilson’s daughter. He also palled around politically with Santa Barbara News-Press owner and publisher TM Storke — with whom he also helped develop much of what is today’s Riviera. Together, they helped swing the California delegation in favor of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1932 Democratic National Convention, thus securing FDR’s nomination that year and his eventual election to the White House. Not surprisingly, Santa Barbara fared exceptionally well in the disposition of the political spoils throughout the New Deal. And when McAdoo — the cousin of the new city administrator’s great-grandmother — stepped down early from his Senate seat, it would be TM Storke who served out the remainder of his term.

Welcome back to Santa Barbara. But it’s a very different town now, with power far more diffuse and consensus — on pretty much anything — far more elusive. Back then, Storke may have defined the center of political gravity; today, it’s not clear any center exists.

The new city administrator finds herself confronting a budget deficit of $7 million. The only plug big enough to fix it, she said, is a proposed sales tax. Although city polls suggest that support for such a measure hovers at 60 percent, opposition to sales tax increases are one of the few things capable of uniting the left and the right. A bed tax, while much easier to pass, McAdoo said, can’t generate the funds necessary to put City Hall finances on a sustainably even keel. “The sales tax puts us where we need to go,” she explained.

Then, of course, there’s State Street, which — with the removal of many parklets — now appears more desolate than the actual number of vacancies would suggest it actually is. While the council itself is less polarized than in years before, it is likewise also less united on anything when it comes to State Street other than their weariness from “State Street fatigue.”

To the extent councilmembers have weighed in yet on the new administrator, they’re gushingly effusive with their praise. They’re also greatly relieved to have someone at the helm who’s serving in more than a placeholder capacity. That has been the prevailing reality since 2021, when former City Administrator Paul Casey stepped down amid much tumult and criticism. McAdoo, even if descended from one of the ultimate political insiders ever, is the first person from outside City Hall to be elevated to the city’s top spot since Jim Armstrong held the position from 2001 to 2014. And that’s different.

McAdoo said she plans to embark upon a meet-and-greet campaign with the city’s divergent, sometimes-vocal stakeholder community to get a better sense of the perspectives at play. “I see that as my role,” she explained. She wants to acquaint herself with the major players, noting that the loudest don’t necessarily have the most to say. 

In the meantime, McAdoo said she’s loving being here and enjoying the Santa Barbara community. But it’s been two just weeks. “I know,” she laughed. “I’m still in the honeymoon phase.”