Shadow Government in Santa Barbara

Does this subcommittee’s meeting violate the Brown Act for open meeting laws?

Adaptive Management Plan (AMP) subcommittee is “newspeak” for shadow government. George Orwell’s book 1984 coined “newspeak” to mean new, approved terms to make bad, old ideas sound acceptable. When citizens were ripe to reject Plan Santa Barbara, City Council created a shadow government in the form of an ad hoc committee called AMP to manage citizen’s outrage and adapt the will of the people to the committee’s thinking. The committee is to address the “more controversial items” such as high-density zoning or increased parking allowance. Increased parking allowance is a perfect example of newspeak because it sounds like there will be more parking, but in actuality, there will be fewer spaces than currently required by law. The committee is to “monitor the effectiveness of elements such as high-density zoning and parking allowance on a small scale and adapt the plan based on the approved experiments.” This means approval of some projects and not others as a way to assess effectiveness; that means zoning laws that vary from project to project. This is totally illegal and ripe for corruption.

The subcommittee should have the members named (I suspect they are our high-density trio and bike enthusiasts). This is a shadow government just like the Traffic Planning Department that created the bulb-outs and curb extensions against the will of the people.

A grand jury investigation should be called to investigate the corrupt process of subcommittees’ approval of illegal projects and zoning laws that vary on the whim of special interests.