Music Academy Plans for More Students and Events Approved

Santa Barbara County Supervisors Approve Despite Neighbors’ Strong Opposition

When the Music Academy of the West — shown here surrounded by serrated lines — announced it wanted to increase the number of students that could enroll there and hold up to 15 weddings a year, neighbors became unglued. There was already too much traffic, they complained; this would make things worse. The Montecito Planning Commission saw it otherwise and so did the county supervisors this Tuesday. | Credit: Courtesy

Residents of Montecito’s sylvan woodlands have fallen to feuding over operational changes proposed by the Music Academy of the West to allow the school to bump its enrollments by 25 students per semester and to hold as many as 15 weddings a year on the campus’s sprawling grounds.

Neighbors complained to the county supervisors this Tuesday — showing up en masse — that the proposed changes would create hazardous traffic conditions on the neighborhood’s narrow winding roads, that the noise generated would disrupt the ambient tranquility for which the neighborhood is known, and that the changes would violate the 2004 conditional-use permit that’s kept a tight lid on academy events for the past 20 years.

The supervisors unanimously rejected the neighbors’ appeal, finding that all the changes proposed comply with the operational limits established back in 2004. The changes allow the music school to increase the number of students at any given time from 150 to 175, to allow up to 15 weddings to count among the 41 “significant life events” — non-music events — that the school is allowed to hold, and to allow greater-use amplified spoken-word and non-amplified music outdoors.

Initially the school sought to increase its enrollments by 60 students at any given time, increase the number of participants of seminars from 175 to 350 and to eliminate the total summer attendance cap of 22,000 and, for other times, 25,000. These proposals were withdrawn in the face of stiff neighborhood opposition.

All the many attendance caps established in 2004, county planners insisted, will remain firmly in place. If anything, they argued, traffic impacts might be reduced because of the school has vowed to increase shuttle transport and to encourage ride sharing and bike commuting by staff.

These changes were approved by the Montecito Planning Commission earlier in the year and the neighbors hoped to get a more sympathetic response from the supervisors. They got sympathy, but they did not get the votes.