Capps’s Mantra: Results, Not Rules
Big Issues Confront New Santa Barbara Board of Supervisors
It was Supervisor Laura Capps’s moment to shine. On Tuesday morning, January 7, Capps took the ceremonial gavel befitting her new role as the board’s chair. Her mother — former Congressmember Lois Capps — was in the audience, taking it all in. And her son Oscar (Oskar), playing keyboards with the La Colina Jazz Band, delivered a respectable solo on a lesser-known jazz number, “The Lady Knows Her Cheese.” No wonder Laura Capps was smiling.
Capps, who was born and raised in Santa Barbara, initially cut her teeth politically working for Bill Clinton’s White House back when her father, Walter Capps, and then her mother represented the district in Congress. When returning to Santa Barbara, she served two terms on the Santa Barbara Unified School Board, and this year marks her second year representing voters of the 2nd Supervisorial District.
It’s a very different board than the one Capps joined a year ago. Gone is Supervisor Das Williams, a 21-year veteran of regional politics and standard bearer for environmental and progressive issues. He was defeated in a major upset by Roy Lee, a Carpinteria restaurant owner who served four years on the Carpinteria City Council.
Lee is not one for speechifying and loud chest thumping, so what kind of supervisor he will be remains very much to be seen. But who Lee is not is Das Williams, which means the cannabis industry — long reviled in Carpinteria for its chronic and intrusive odors — is in for much tougher restrictions than Williams, a stalwart champion of the industry, would ever support. Capps, not Lee, announced that she would be introducing new such restrictions next week.
Capps contrasted the harmonious and constructive congeniality of the county supervisors with the take-no-prisoners school of partisan politics practiced in Washington, D.C. She spoke about “results, not rules.” An excessive fealty to rules and process at the expensive of constructive results, Capps argued, undermined trust in government. Where rules got in the way, she vowed, she would move to change or eliminate them.
“Children are my North Star,” she declared, adding that kids feel the pinch of the affordable housing crisis more acutely because their parents have to commute such long distances and they, as a result, experience longer periods of familial separation. With that in mind, Capps argued the county needed to do more to maximize the housing potential of undeveloped land the county currently owns for its own employees.
The county’s Housing Element, she noted, calls for the construction of 320 units of affordable units for county employees. She suggested the county could be more aggressive in achieving these goals. Independent of the Housing Element, the county has examined 20 sites where it owns the land and analyzed them for housing suitability. The supervisors will consider a report looking at the viability and ranking of these sites for housing opportunities sometime this February.
Capps mentioned DignityMoves, which has built more than 300 units of temporary tiny homes for homeless people living in the rough over the past few years, but only because it figured out how to “hack” the county’s rules and regulations. In this case, she said, DignityMoves got around the red tape by proposing temporary housing units instead of permanent units.
Capps may wield the gavel, but she is still one of five votes, and housing is only one of many major challenges now confronting the Board of Supervisors.
Right around the corner, on February 25, the supervisors are scheduled to address Sable Offshore Oil’s proposal to reactivate Exxon’s massive oil production facility off the Gaviota Coast. Closed down for the past 10 years after the Refugio pipeline spill of 2015, its new owner, Sable, is pressing to restart the flow of oil. While the supervisors’ legal authority is narrowly circumscribed, the energy of Santa Barbara’s environmental opposition is anything but. Whatever happens will be intense.
The medical care contract for the county jail — long a festering problem with no obvious solutions in sight — comes up soon, as do massively expensive plans to build new inmate housing pods at the North County Jail while downsizing and streamlining the existing main jail, an improvised hodgepodge of dysfunctional design that most everyone agrees is beyond the pale of repair.
In other words, it’s a new board facing the same old problems. And none of them have gotten easier.
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