End of an Era: Sheila Lodge, 95, Steps Down from City Planning Commission

Santa Barbara’s First Female Mayor Brings Her 36 Years of Service to an End

Planning Commissioner Sheila Lodge | Credit: Paul Wellman (file)

Sheila Lodge may not be confused any day soon for baseball legends Nolan Ryan or Cal Ripken — famous for their longevity and durability among other things — but around Santa Barbara City Hall she’s easily the next best thing. After serving 36 years — either as mayor, city councilmember, or planning commissioner — the 95-year-old Lodge hung up her cleats last Thursday, announcing from the city Planning Commission dais that the day’s meeting would be her last. Nothing of particular note was on the agenda before a tearful Lodge took the opportunity to thank everyone she’d worked with over the years for “the opportunity, the honor, and the privilege of serving this wonderful community.”

Lodge was first appointed to the Planning Commission in 1973, served six and a half years on the council from 1975 to 1981, and then three terms as mayor from 1981 to 1993 — making her not only the first woman ever to hold that office in Santa Barbara but also the longest-serving mayor in city history — before she returned after a sizable hiatus to the Planning Commission in 2009. All in all, Lodge spent 18 years on the Planning Commission, bringing to bear a focused and sustained no-nonsense dedication to preserving Santa Barbara’s unique and historic sense of place.

Lodge — who moved to town in1952 — was appointed to the commission in the early 1970s when slow-growth environmentalists were first wrestling political control from the more pro-growth and business-minded interests then calling the shots politically. At that time, the battle cry was over “rampant development” and “quality of life.”

Over the years, Lodge would come to personify this political mind-set. As such, she was stubborn, determined, and an adversary to reckon with. But Lodge was not nearly as doctrinaire as her smart-growth critics made her out to be. She helped craft the city’s Average Unit-Size Density (AUD) program that gave developers a high-density incentive to build smaller and hopefully cheaper rental housing units under the rubric, “affordable by design.”

While the program generated hundreds of new rental housing units that would have otherwise never been built, precious few could be construed as affordable. Lodge was not shy about expressing her disappointment in this.

During her tenure, Lodge never stinted on preparation or homework. She always visited the sites of proposed developments, and typically expressed a keen sense of what places would look and feel like to live in when built.

To remind new arrivals just how hard many generations of Santa Barbarans fought to fuse a human-scaled, historically themed architectural style with the region’s stunning natural settings, Lodge wrote a small book a few years ago, Santa Barbara: An Uncommonplace American Town.

Lodge will be replaced on the commission by Ben Peterson, who has spent the past five years specializing on housing policy for State Senator Monique Limón.