A lot of Goleta folks recently received an email from the Ty Warner Group asking us to tell the City Council to expedite their process in order to get the Sandpiper golf course remodel done quickly. It’s not often that I agree with a developer, and probably even the Chamber of Commerce on this one.
While the act of using a historic asset as a bargaining chip is less than an honorable practice, it is often an effective one. As a non-golfer, I probably wouldn’t care if the Sandpiper golf course got remodeled or not, if it weren’t for the inclusion of one of Goleta’s most famous and recognizable buildings. And from what I’ve seen in the presentations, they are offering to do a lot of other good things on this project. Not just for golfers, but for the environment and the citizens of Goleta. So I am very much in favor of this project getting done sooner than later. Not because I’m worried about Mr. Warner’s busy schedule, but because the Barnsdall-Rio Grande station is getting tired of standing, waiting for salvation.
I recently had to write about an old wooden tower that collapsed in the wind. The POW camp tower was a very important and unique part of local history that is forever gone because preserving it never fit into the ranch owner’s budget. A few months before that I wrote about the death of the historic palm trees at Refugio that were planted nearly 100 years ago by a pioneer Goleta family. A valuable asset supposedly protected by the California State Parks, one by one they fell into the surf and floated out to sea. So paralyzed by their own bureaucratic quagmire, the state could never even give a straight answer as to why they couldn’t have been saved, but everyone assumed it had to do with their budget. For the past decade we have been waiting for the City of Santa Barbara to figure out how to save the two original hangars at our airport. Despite their acknowledgement that they are a valuable historic asset, they just can’t fit them into their budget.
There are plenty more examples, but I think you can see the pattern forming.
When Ty Warner made the generous offer to donate the Barnsdall station to the city a few years back, some fine print on the deed forced the city to refuse. If they had accepted the donation, would the city of Goleta ever have found the funds to restore the station in their budget? Pretty doubtful.
So now here we are, with a developer offering to make a 1970s era golf course more modern and more environmentally friendly while also providing a list of other public amenities. But besides all that, they have the restoration of a historic building actually in the budget.
Obviously, any reasonable human would want our elected officials to make sure that there is nothing bad for Goleta in their plan, so Ty Warner Hotels and Resorts should have to go through the same process as everyone else. But maybe the city could really focus their efforts on this one, not for the good of the developer, but for the good of the future generations of Goleta. Maybe make sure this project doesn’t get tangled up in that bureaucratic quagmire that the state is so tied up in. This could be a huge win for a Goleta City Council that is kind of waning in the public opinion polls lately. A lot of people really hope you can do it this time, before it’s too late.
This could be a win-win situation for a change. Good for the local government, good for the golf course and most importantly, good for the people of Goleta. We don’t want to read another historic building’s obituary this year.
Tom Modugno is the author of GoletaHistory.com.