Sponsored by the Buellton Chamber of Commerce at the Santa Ynez Valley Marriott, the forum featured incumbents Holly Sierra, Dave King and challenger Leo Elovitz, who are vying for two spots on the council. For the most part, the candidates appeared to be on the same page. But differences emerged, specifically over how the city should grow.
Sierra currently serves as mayor, and King as vice mayor, both rotating roles among council members. Elovitz, art director for the Santa Barbara-based Evans, Hardy and Young advertising agency, was chosen from eight applicants in November 2011 to temporarily fill the seat held by councilman John Connolly, who was in Florida for six months on military deployment.
Sierra, the city’s postmaster and a 14-year resident, and King, a retired California Highway Patrol officer and a 16-year resident, were elected to the council in November 2008.
Several issues have shaped the race, but none as much as the effort to revitalize downtown Buellton. Even as the city has grudgingly come to terms with the loss of about $6 million in municipal Redevelopment Agency funds (RDA), council candidates all want to move ahead with the long-awaited Vision Plan, a blueprint for creating a “vibrant” downtown district along the Avenue of Flags, and promoting economic development and tourism throughout the city.
The redevelopment funds, grabbed by the state this year to help balance its budget, had focused mostly on the Avenue of Flags, Industrial Way, and the nearly 24-acre Village property at the corner of Highway 246 and McMurray Road.
Although they sometimes disagreed on how, the candidates listed getting the city back on sound financial footing and drawing business to the area as their top priorities. Of course, the scope of development is limited. Under an initiative overwhelmingly passed by Buellton residents in 2008, voter approval is required for either expanding outside the city limits or developing sewer or water services outside the city limits.
Holly Sierra
Sierra has worked for the postal service for 27 years and has been postmaster for more than nine. She’s participated in several different groups, including the Parks & Recreation Commission, the Buellton Historical Society, the Buellton Chamber of Commerce, and represents the city on the Santa Barbara County Association of Governments.Although she has served only four years as a councilperson, she said she quickly overcame the learning curve and isn’t afraid of speaking her mind.
She wants to keep Buellton a “small-town community” but agrees there is “plenty of land and plenty of growth that’s still available.” She’s opposed to annexing land beyond city limits. Construction of the Juliette Walk condominiums at the corner of Highway 246 and La Lata Drive was one of the reasons why she entered the race. The buildings “stick out like a sore thumb” because they’re too close to the street and are nearly four stories tall, she stated.
Sierra said the city missed an opportunity over the proposed Village Project development. Last year, the city’s redevelopment agency rejected a request for a $2.4 million life-support infusion to the owners of the vacant Village property to build streets and other infrastructure “I believe if we’d spent money, there would be something across from Albertsons, businesses bringing money to the city,” she said.
But she also approves of the current council’s “nickel and diming” in the name of fiscal prudence. “Sometimes we were against public opinion,” she said. Two weeks after help for the Village Project was jettisoned, Sierra, acting as a member of the city’s former redevelopment agency, voted against extending a loan for a shaky plan to build a bowling alley on East Highway 246. Asked if the city should look toward planning for a high-tech business park to attract good-paying jobs, Sierra said yes and said the city has attracted a plethora of businesses in the past two years. “We’ve got industrial, we’ve got restaurants, we’ve got wineries, we’ve got a new Figueroa Mountain Brewing, and I think a high-tech business park is a wonderful idea.”
Sierra said that even with the loss of redevelopment funds, the city is fiscally sound because she and other leaders have made hard cuts. This past fiscal year saw the city close its books at $17,000 in the black. “Even though we have had a very conservative budget director, revenues are up,” she stated. Sales tax revenues were $1.6 million, a 3.5% increase from the 2010-11 fiscal year. Transient occupancy tax revenues were $1.2 million, a 3.9% increase, and property tax revenues were $1 million, 12.9% higher.
Still, the council has faced a net deficit to the general fund for the last five of the six years, starting in 2007. During the past few years, city officials have relied on reserve funds to prune down deficits, as anticipated expenditures exceeded projected revenues. Sierra and other candidates were asked if they would commit to modifying the existing budget for the current year to a non-deficit result, and absolutely commit to a balanced plan for the 2013-14 fiscal year.
“No,” she said, and explained that even though city officials anticipated a deficit this past year, what they saw was a modest surplus – an indication that forecasting what the budget will look like is as inexact as forecasting what the economy will look like. “Previous councils have used the general fund to make up deficits in the enterprise fund, and we have been losing more and more money,” she said. “We are slowly changing that.”
Enterprise funds provide services to the public and come from water and sewer charges, thereby making the entity self-supporting, whereas general fund dollars come from taxpayer money.
On the Visioning Plan, Sierra acknowledged that the process has “dragged on for a long time” but said there is a myriad of decisions that need thorough vetting. She said a 17-member steering committee of community residents will meet on Oct. 16 to discuss the plan’s costs and possibly move a recommendation to the city Planning Commission, who will in turn bump the matter up to the city council for adoption. She stressed short, medium and long-range goals and the need to lay down infrastructure.
Calling it “small and antiquated,” Sierra said she wanted to see the Buellton library upgraded to a state-of-the art facility. The issue has surfaced because Gov. Jerry Brown’s 2011 budget cut state funding for libraries in half. In response, the city council did not hesitate this year to grant the library’s request for an extra $4,318 over last year’s funding request.
Dave King
King worked for the California Highway Patrol for 25 years, mostly in Los Angeles. He said working in a large, congested city drove him to move to Santa Barbara County in 1996. He arrived in Buellton and ran for city council, adamant that keeping the area from turning into Isla Vista was his top priority. Like Sierra, he was similarly alarmed by construction of the Juliette Walk condominiums. And he joined the council in achieving shorter building height-limitations included in a change to the city’s mixed-use regulations.“I fought for three years to get shorter buildings here,” he said. “I worked in Isla Vista, and that’s not a place where I’d want to raise my children. I came to a smaller town to have the face and name recognition of the people I live with.”
While recognizing that business was the mainstay for the city’s economic prosperity, King differed with other council members in his response to the question of whether the city should plan for a high-tech business park.
“We have some high-tech businesses here. Can more come here? Sure they can,” he said. “But do we want to live in San Jose? I don’t.” He warned that overdeveloping the area would drive residents away. San Jose, he said, is overdeveloped, over-peopled, overtaxed and Buellton should not follow that lead.
“I’m not an anti-business person,” he explained. “Some people may think that. But I am an anti-overdevelopment person. I just don’t want to change the character of this town.”
King said the city should initiate “creative development” by partnering with certain businesses. He broached the Bach Hotel, which has proposed putting in a hotel on Avenue of Flags. But marching toward high-scale development would be a mistake in the current economy, even if revenue to the city doubled, he said. “We’re encouraging businesses to come here, but they’re going to have to be the type of businesses that keeps this town small,” he added.
For the same reason, he cautioned against moving too fast with Buellton’s visioning plan. In implementing the plan for Avenue of Flags, the city could start with basic infrastructure work, such as sidewalks, hard benches and new lighting. The loss of redevelopment funds, he said, has forced the city to take a restrained approach.
“Everybody wants something,” he said. “I want a Porsche, but I can’t afford one, so I’m going to drive the car I have.”
King said the city has for the most part not squandered money, and ended the 2011-12 fiscal year with a $517,000 general fund surplus. He disputed the claim that the general fund has been facing back-to-back deficits, contending that the enterprise fund has been short. These shortfalls will be projected to be backfilled with incremental increases in water bills, he said. He also said the city needs to find creative ways to snag higher revenues and continue to spend conservatively.
“For us to go out and spend a bunch of taxpayer dollars on some project right now, without any glimpse of us getting any return on that, well that’s exactly what (bankrupt) Stockton did,” he stated.
He said it was lamentable that the council passed over a $7,000 bid by Tom Armor to rebuild a patio covering at Zaca Creek Golf Course. He said the decision wasted staff time on requests for proposals, engineering surveys, and other paperwork. For King, it was an example of unnecessary work costing the city. “The engineering cost for that patio cover is $13,200, almost double the cost of what Tom wanted to put that up for,” he said.
On the library, he said he supports modernizing and adding computers, as well as offering Kindle books and books on tape. “Libraries aren’t just books on a shelf,” he said.
On decision-making, King said his practice, stemming from his investigative skills as a law enforcement officer, is to solicit advice from city staff, who may have more information than he does, and then “make an intelligent decision based on factual information and common sense.”
Leo Elovitz
Elovitz came to Buellton 18 years ago with his wife, Anita, whose grandparents settled in the early 1900s to run a dairy farm. He said his temporary service on city council opened up his eyes to the city’s full potential. He stated his goal is enhancing Buellton’s small-town character and quality of life, and increasing the community’s voice in local decisions.He said the council has kicked the visioning can down the road and has failed to develop a coherent plan to realize the community’s vision.
“We have numerous plans on the shelf that have recommended economic development for the city, but none of those have been implemented,” he said. “The motivation has kind of dried out. People put a lot of energy into this, and it came to an end. Why? I think as a city council, we have a responsibility to pick that up and move with it.”
“We just need to come up with a good plan and then developers will know if they want to make investments in the downtown area,” he added. “I think a lot of it will have to be developer capital at this point, but we can lay the groundwork for plans that will attract businesses.”
Elovitz has held several neighborhood gatherings during his campaign, and said the common complaint is that the area doesn’t have enough jobs and businesses that offer amenities and entertainment that could raise revenues for city services, including an upgrade to the library, he said.
“We’re not just talking thousands of dollars, but millions of lost capital,” he contended. “We need to be something other than a bedroom community.”
On tourism, Elovitz said the city could do a better job promoting the city and said he would parlay his experience working for an advertising agency into achieving that end.
He embraced the idea of planning for a high-tech business park to attract jobs. “Clean light industry is perfect for this city,” he said. “We are in a great location. We have great access with the highway 101-246 intersection. We have great weather. We have one of the nicest parks on the West Coast. Of course business would like to come here. We can court them, and we should be more aggressive about identifying those high-tech businesses.”
This would not come about by “dumping building codes,” but by laying down the infrastructure that would make the area more attractive to business.
Elovitz, along with the other candidates, voted to approve the current budget, which reduced the Buellton Sheriff Station’s office hours and cut the community resource deputy position to stave off a nearly $1 million shortfall. He said on top of moving ahead with an economic development strategy to raise more revenue, the council should consider assessing its financial status more frequently.
Elovitz said one impediment to moving ahead on the Vision Plan was a failure to get the public more involved. At a June meeting, Elovitz, joined by councilman Ed Andrisek, voted for spending $7,900 on a single-camera operation that would have allowed the city to stream meetings over the Internet. He has also broached the idea, which has been met with little council support, of establishing a public relations office that would make it easier for residents to know what’s going on and would survey the public on the city’s topical issues.
“If you don’t’ have a way of dispensing information to the public and getting feedback from them, how do you know what the majority thinks?” he said. “It’s one thing to say you’re going to consider what the majority thinks, but you have to do the work to find out what they think.”
The election is scheduled for Tuesday, Nov. 6. jfoster@syvjournal.com