Santa Barbara Talks with Josh Molina

Santa Barbara Talks: Goleta Mayoral Candidate Rich Foster Talks Old Town Restriping

Goleta resident Rich Foster is running for Goleta Mayor! Foster is a regular at government meetings and often-critic of the Goleta City Council and staff. In this podcast, Foster talks about his views on housing, the Old Town Goleta re-striping project, the spending for the new train station remodel, roads, and other Goleta issues. Foster is challenging incumbent Paula Perotte. Please check out this podcast and find more than 250 others ‪@santabarbaratalkswithJosh‬. Josh Molina creates dynamic conversations with individuals on the topics of housing, education, business, politics, culture and more. Molina also hosts The Josh Molina show where he offers analysis and commentary on the issues of the day.

Duration:: 54m
Broadcast on:: 15 Sep 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

>> Welcome to Santa Barbara Talks, a special Galita edition today. It's my pleasure to be with Rich Foster, who is very well known around Galita. Long-time community activist who is running for Galita Mayor. So I'm so excited to be here talking to him about his issues, everything going on in Galita and just give everybody an opportunity who doesn't know him to meet Rich, and learn about his candidacy. Welcome to the show, Rich. How are you doing today? >> Thanks a lot, Josh. It's a pleasure to be here. It's a great to have the opportunity. It's election year, it's great to have people focusing on the issues during throughout the year, but especially in election season. So great to be here. >> Well, thank you. Like I said, I'm so looking forward to this conversation. You are a Galita guy, you're Mr. Galita, anyone who pays attention to this stuff, has seen you in meetings for years, and you really have passionate views, and now you're stepping into the public eye, and I'm trying to make a difference officially, formally, on the council. So talk to me, what's making you run, Rich? Why are you taking this step? >> Well, I've gotten down to city council meetings, school board meetings over the years, and spoken up on a number of issues. And in the past, different council members have said, well, why don't you run? And I used to say, well, you do a lot of things that I'm not that interested in at this point. But as we move forward, especially over the last year or so, I've been looking at their capital improvement project, deficit of money that they don't have funded, I look at our roads, there was two reasons we became a city, I largely, is that people were very upset with the condition of our roads from the county, and they also felt that the county was becoming a dumping ground for housing, which we'll get to later. Unfortunately, the housing mandate has put some tremendous pressure on. I had some issues with how they went about selecting sites. And our roads are really terrible right now. They say they're spending $7 million this year, but just to stay at a mediocre level where we are, they'd have to spend $7.7 million. Five years ago, we spent nothing on roads. And so that's principally we come down to money. And that's why I'm running, because Luke Rayo, our city finance officer, has said we have a structurally solid strong city. Well, that's if you just look at the budget, but his agenda item also noted it didn't include the crib wall on outer Cathedral Oaks, which is 20 million or more. It didn't include the fact we're behind 65 million or more on roads. It didn't include that on the next five year CIP projects were underfunded by 140 million. And these need to be addressed. And for a year now, I've been saying, how are you going to address? And now they've come up with the idea of a joint powers agreement, vertical agreement to help fund these, which is in my view is just a way of passing the debt form off to the future, but. So that's what got me into the ring. Galita's a great city. Many great things have been done. But on the other hand, you can have a wish list of things you would like to have, which would be nice if we had everything paid for. I'm afraid that right now, we have a number of things that we can't afford and we need to learn where to drop some grants and stuff. - Yeah, so you were a numbers guy or a budget guy, you go to these meetings and you know it as well as the planners or of course the electives as well. - Right, maybe. - You know, you're able to ask really tough questions 'cause you do your research. Let's talk about Old Town Galita, which is obviously you're running for mayor. So everything in the city is your district. We've seen this old town re-stripping project planned. If you're on next door, people act like it's the end of the world. There's a lot of opposition to it. If you watch some of the social media from some of the elected officials on the Galita Council, it's less of a problem. There seems to be, in my general interactions with people, just as a Galita resident, a lot of people complain about it. They say that it creates more traffic and they aren't able to move the same way. And it's just like bad timing with all the roundabouts that are being created on the other end. There's a lot of buzz on this issue. And so people are talking about it. What's your view on the Old Town re-stripping? - Yeah, next door has been lit up with conversations about this. You know, 10 years ago, 10, 12 years ago, Rosemarie Gaglione, our former public works director said, they said we looked at this and this diagonal parking was a bad idea. And the whole thing gained life and kept going forward for a long time. And then the bids came in at like 5.2 million, I believe, but included a bunch of work, they eventually dropped. And so they dropped it and slid it over onto a being part of Project Connect. It was two separate projects. And they paid for it by taking $2 million of the project commit and connect money and sliding it to cover it. So we have a nicely repaved street. People are always gonna have trouble with change to the back end diagonal parking. So looking at, first of all, I have one thing in consideration we've been talking about lately is if you stop to back into a slot, you have a far greater chance of stopping traffic or slowing down traffic than if you just pull straight in. When you go to back out, you will have to wait until there's a break in traffic. So I think in terms of flow overall, probably had it been diagonal where you pulled in a normal way, it would have been less disruptive. One of the bigger problems, and I've talked to almost all the business people down there is towards the eastern end of town, the way that's been striped, there's 34 businesses that have parking lots that you can't turn into, you can't turn left into 'em. And you're not supposed to turn left out of them. If you turn to the west and go, you get down to the next street, it's no you turn. The next street's no you turn. So you're forcing traffic to go the direction opposite they want, turn into the neighborhood and turn around. I've proposed a simple fix to that, which is return the center lane roughly from, say, past a fuel depot out to the community center back into a regular left turn lane with yellow stripes with dashed lines where glina motors, when a truck comes to deliver has a place, they can park in the middle of the street and on load. If you're going to one of the businesses there, you can pull in, turn left, when you go to leave, you can pull out, wait for traffic break and pull out. I think in terms of, we heard from a number of business people at the city council a few weeks ago that they were hurting, that their sales were well down. I think the impact has been greater at that end of town, partially because of this, partially because it's closer to the road work. But I think that's one thing the city can look at on the October 1st meeting to fix it. I believe in one sense, it's called the Interim Striping Project and that went away for a while. Now they've resurrected that. Had they just instituted 90 minute parking on both sides of the street without doing anything, they probably would have found that they have a lot more parking on the street. Businesses, people, one woman, Mary's beauty salon said, this van's been in front of my business for a month. So what we gained there might have been obtainable for much simpler thing. Bikes certainly feel safer, our bike coalition's an incredibly powerful lobby. By why we're building a $50 million bike path. But they're an Equil Fowler. Equil is about two blocks south and it's going to connect Fairview to Kellogg. And it's going to have a class one bike path. It would have been a very viable way for fast, safe bike passage through Galita. But the project, they're not going to change what they're doing for six months at least. But I think in the short term, we can help the businesses by making it easier to get in and out of those businesses. And also by encouraging people to go down their shop, it's not traffic jammed all day. I've been down there, had some great meals and I encourage people to go down there. - Yeah, you mentioned sort of not being able to turn into parking lots because on the macro level, if we're being positive and wanting to see the best intentions, it doesn't seem like the end of the world, like it seems like a good thing. Let's make it safer for bikes. Let's streamline the traffic congestion's there and that's there. And let's figure out more parking, great, great idea. But there's these little things like operationally that have changed. For example, I'll go to the Yummy Thai place over there and you can turn left to get into the parking lot. But when you're coming out, you can't turn left, right? You can only go right. And so that's an impact. And then so like before, if you did try to turn left, you might be waiting a while and it could be kind of like a tough thing, but you could. And then also if you're turning right onto polyster, turning into one lane as opposed to two lanes is more difficult 'cause if you have two lanes, then the people who are going to go faster and straighter, they can go in that middle lane. Now it's just one lane and so you're at the mercy of anyone letting you turn right to go like a polyster and it's like harder to do and it takes longer and everything is backed up and everything is slow. And not being able to make left turns on a polyster from people who live in those houses and apartments over there behind 7-11 in those areas. Those are like real things that people who live there have to experience daily. So it seems as though even if they stick with this plan that there should be some changes to it, to allow people to be able to use it. And the diagonal back in parking, I mean, it just feels like a lot of people are avoiding old town now. It feels like there's like, I don't wanna deal with that and that's where the businesses are saying, people aren't from playing. When I go down there and I know it's anecdotally, but it seems like whenever I go down there, a lot of those diagonal spaces are open. Whereas before you could not find a parking space in all this stuff. - Part of that I think is playing whack-a-mole with parking that before people would, from the neighborhoods, would park on Hallister 'cause there was no restriction and they'd be there. So you'd go down there and go, wow, this is a booming place. To some degree, you go down there midday and there's quite a bit of parking. If you go there at night now, it fills up with residents who park there overnight and then move their car in the morning. I think there's things they could have addressed that would have been more important. For example, a week or so ago, they had a meeting about parking around Armito's Park. There's 20 spaces at Johnny Wallace. They took two of those away for the city vehicles and you have three high-density housing projects. There's really very little parking there. It's sort of an example of putting too much and too small in the area. But in January, they're gonna start enforcing the regulations that you can't park within 20 feet of a crosswalk or a curb return. And in the eastern end of Old Town in the residential area, just driving around quickly, I count about 37 places where they're gonna lose parking spaces. And on Hollister itself, if you go through there, there's corners which are currently yellow for unloading trucks and they're gonna lose those spaces. So unless trucks are gonna park you illegally, that we might have been better to be pursuing, and they did this up by Carson. They found some parking spaces up on the yardy property, but we might have been better off to take a couple million dollars and buy a home or two along the railroad tracks and level them and turn them into community parking down there for residents, as opposed to the business and made it 90-minute parking on Hollister. It's easy to back-engineer something, but in the future, there's gonna be more parking issues in Old Town, especially if they build 300 units at the yardy property, they're on Fairview, and another 79 over on Kellogg Avenue along Blackwell Avenue. We haven't beaten this yet. One of the biggest problems was, of course, the Caltrans is doing the bridges over the creek at the same time, both on the freeway and on Hollister. So people get backed up, I go in from out by DP. Many days, the freeway's backed up to Los Caneros or farther, so people get off and they try out Hollister and because the construction work is parked up there, so we get a feeling. A long-term, I have some questions about the traffic circles, the bicycle coalition, loved the bike lanes, but they call the traffic circles meet grinders, and if you were heading east, going under 217, there's a lot of traffic that gets under the freeway right there at the freeway ramp. Well, if they're in the traffic circle, they're gonna have the right-of-way slowing down the traffic going west on Hollister, coming from Patterson Avenue, and that's two lanes, squeezing down to one. I think when we get this all done, we might find that we still have a choke point created by these traffic circles. That said, other ones work great. Los Caneros traffic circle, what's good, but Old Town merchants are definitely hurting. I was in a meeting with some of them the other day, and so the city needs to respond to those needs somehow or other, other than saying, "Well, let's see what we're gonna have in six months time." And there's not a one-all fix. Maybe someday we'll say, "Let's re-stripe it and go to diagonal pole straight in parking. Keep it one lane each way." One thing I'll say for public safety, the yellow flashing light at Orange Avenue, the drivers do not see it in the late afternoon. I've been twice, I've been crossing there, I've been halfway across when all of a sudden people rocketed right on through, so please be alert, don't be looking at one's cell phone crossing the street, which I've seen too. - Yeah, those are always tough, either crossing them or driving through them. I mean, I've done both, and when you're crossing, you're basically, "Please, I'm here," you know? Let everyone know, and then when you're driving, sometimes you're like, "Oh, wow, there's the light. Someone's crossing." It's a tough thing, depending on the time of the day. - I did have one thing on safety. For a long time, the human cries been that old towns are horribly dangerous place for bikes and pedestrians, and you can't cross the street safely, where they have five stoplights, they have two fully-signalled crosswalks. Kim Lee Horne did a study for the city, it was put out in 2023, and at the time, old town did not have any one of the top 10 bad intersections or top 10 bad road segments. So to some degree, the whole project connect, not the project connect, but the re-striping project is based upon a myth. A lot of the time they were looking at numbers from 2003 to 2013. Lectoring Avenue did have problems, it's a lie of sight problem, but there have an accidents, but there is a sort of a myth of just how horrible it's been, and in terms of safety, Kyrie All on the other side of the freeway is actually a more dangerous road segment. - Yeah, what would you do, Rich? If you were able to fix things there in old town with the re-striping, would you just put it back to the way it was, or would you keep certain things? What is the answer here from your perspective? - Well, just putting it back seems to beg the question, 'cause it hasn't been long enough, and we're still talking, the resurfacing, I think was a million, the painting was a million, something like that. I'd be reluctant to spend a million bucks quickly and unnecessarily. I would definitely right now, I would love to see the city go out there next week and re-striped the center lane up at the other end of town for a place for trucks, very, very low cost, and that way, in six months time, these businesses can say, "Well, yeah, I bounce back," or they can say, "No, I'm still hurting." I do think eventually it would be better to go ahead and re-strip those diagonal slots, the other direction, the majority of people are comfortable with that. Some of our council members have said they'd like to see old towns sort of like an outdoor mall. We have three major thoroughfares in Galita, it's gonna remain a thoroughfare, so safety's a thing, but we also have to plan for the volume through there, and so if you can speed traffic up by having them pull straight in, I think that'd be a choice, and those two things are very simple striping, and we saved the bike lanes for the bicyclists and for safety. In ideal world, they would have done Equival Avenue first and had a full bike lane there, so you wouldn't have the bikes being squeezed through there during construction. - Yeah, so Rich, let's pivot a little bit and talk about housing. There's been so much discussion about housing because of the Santa Barbara County Housing Element and the state demands, and we just finished the process, at least for now, regarding where to put housing, and a lot of it was on the edges of Galita. We know about the Big Glen Annie project, we know about rezoning an egg land on the other end of town. There's Kenwood Village. There is a lot of housing that is going to impact the city of Galita, even if it's not actually in the city of Galita. And so let's talk about that. I know this is one of your issues. What's going on from your perspective? What are we doing right with housing? What are we doing with what wrong about it? And what would you do differently if you were elected? - Well, the housing elements started to become the gorilla in the room, which took a lot of people by surprise. I'd like to say that if you look at the census figures and development from 2000 until 2020, Galita is one of the few jurisdictions that have actually built enough housing for their population growth. That said, the problem is we're not building economically affordable housing. The state defines affordable as 30 units per acre or more, but it really actually doesn't have anything to do with dollar value of rents and stuff. And I will be the first to say, there's no easy answer to this. We live in a highly desirable place. I think during the housing element, we had some mistakes. They, for a long time, had been, tell the state, we're going to rezone a little land here. We'll do something here and they weren't too picky. This time around at the 11th hour, they're going, no, we want to know positive places. You can do this. And so in a rush to get it done, the city pretty much just went to people with large hunks of land and said, are you interested in rezoning? And I was saying this last summer at the meetings, I wish they had gone to some places like, say churches. We have a number of churches in town that have extra land that they're not using. And church population has grown older. And another place has explored places where we could put 30 units on a prior soul instead of 200 parcel on a unit, spread the impact out across town. Those weren't really pursued. The state is now talking about working with churches to expediate building on surplus land. And in the future that could serve us well. Also this, to some degree, everything got dumped in Western Galita. The Kenwood villages got knocked down to 190, I think Mr. Alker's asking for about 220 on his current proposal with bonus density. On the other side of the freeway, we have, I think it's 300 by, been a while since I've looked at these numbers, right by Albertson, another 135 out at Wood Station Road. And not to mention the Glen Annie Monster of 800,000. All those people are gonna be using the Glen Annie Stork 101 interchange, which right now is 50 to 300% worse than any other interchange in the Galita area. So that in terms of housing, they had, we have to figure out a way where we're producing housing that actually helps people get into it. One of the proposals I had, which I was suggesting to the Sheriff's Association, is we, the city has, I think, a $60 million in investment funds, that we could take some of that money, give up a little bit of our return and use it as a short-term five-year down payment for people who can make a mortgage, but you can't pay rent and save money for a down, to help our local firefighters or police that we wanna living in our community get into a house after five years, they refi and they pay it back. The state's starting to pursue something like that, I saw recently. One thing I've suggested and then I was at a meeting the other day with the city and sort of tossed this out with Luc Rio and the other staff members, is that if we ADU, the idea of ADU's and bonus density, where a developer can go up to maybe 50% over and above what he's owned for, if 20% is affordable or very affordable, the idea of that was to increase our supply of economically affordable housing. I think it'd be worth looking at a concept of putting rent control on those for a certain period of time. I oppose rent control in general, I think it degrades housing markets, I think it guarantees everybody gets rent increase every year, but if I'm looking to put $60,000, $70,000 into an ADU in my backyard, I can look and say, well, it's gonna be rent cap for a while and it's gonna take me six years to get my money back instead of three years. I might build it, I might not, but if I'm just building and increasing housing without doing anything to increase the affordability, we're losing because every time we build a new house, actually, none of them provide the property tax it takes to provide the fire and police services. So same thing with bonus density and development to look and say, well, I could go up to so many more units, what's it gonna cost me to do this? If I have to take rent control on some of these units for five years or 10 years and it still pencils out, I'll do it or maybe I'll do half of that, but it's one way where it's increasing the amount on the very low side of opportunity. And the businesses have to step up to the plate. People working in your donut shops are not commuting to Santa Barbara to work and the more entry level jobs is a general thing. It's people working at the large engineering firms, the computer firms, the tech industry who are making a good way, but they prefer to live in San Maria 'cause you get more house. I think these companies need to do more in terms of either down payment loans out of their own welfare, out of their own budgets to attract people, just giving people higher pay, it's not necessarily gonna do it. But the idea would be if you wanna buy here, then we will help you with the down payment to get in. And I know that there's a, I was talking to Kristen Miller from the Chamber and she was talking about a plan that some people, I'm not actually sure it was behind it putting forward to get businesses to invest in real estate property. I'm not sure that's the answer. We don't wanna go back to the company town, but it's gonna be a continuing problem. We are never gonna build our way out of that. If building was the answer, New York City would have the lowest rentals in the country, Orange County would. And I mean, it's probably not popular to say not everybody can live here who wants to live here. And our people make the choice to live here and sacrifice a lot. I mean, they're paying 50, 60% because to them it's worth it. And so it's gonna be an ongoing battle. - Yeah, and I haven't heard anyone say what you said, which is that very, you know, like a nuanced, specific, you know, rent controlled type of housing where it does more to ensure that people who actually need it or would be using those units. You know, mostly it's just like, you know, if you build more than you create more inventory, which lowers the rents, which, you know, it may work some places, but I've not seen it work here. - I haven't seen it work anyplace yet. It's like, the only place that worked was when the World Trade Center went down, went up originally in Lord Rentson, New York City for commercial for two years, because it was so much at once. But I don't think we want to build the World Trade Center in Galita. - Yeah, and also I wish somebody would be talking about ways to keep locals who grow up here, allow them to stay here, because I think so much, and you see this from the activist class too, who largely came from outside of the area and now are taking a housing here and then talking about how we need more housing. We need to also preserve the kids who went to our local schools, who went to high school here, and who want to be able to live in this community, because not everybody can live with their parents forever, not everybody's parent owns a house, I know some people's parents rented, and I don't think there's enough discussion on the locals, the local people who grew up here, because if you grew up here, you have a understanding of things that, if you didn't, you just wouldn't know. I mean, you know where things are at, you know where the impacts are, you know where the traffic, if you're getting off on Glen Annie and Stork every day, and if you've been getting off on it, like your whole life, 'cause you've been going to DP or something, you know, that's dangerous. It's at like four or 30, five o'clock, depending on the time of the year, and then you're gonna put more housing out there. It's like accidents, just waiting to happen, and it backs up, you know? And so, I think I'd love to hear more people talking about, not just the high-paying, like sort of tech workers, but keeping like the local kids be able to stay here. A lot of my friends, you know, living in Tura, Oxnard, Longpo, Santa Maria, or Oregon, or Seattle, or Washington, you know, they just let go further for Arizona, and, you know, it's a tough thing. Let me ask you about the Glen Annie rezone. Okay, so, that's a big one. What do you think of that? I mean, is there anything there that you like, 800 to 1,000 units? - No, actually, what do you think? - Actually, if I had my drathers, the city would have annexed it and turned it into a city hall, and we would have had a city hall with a fabulous terrace and built an office building attached, we would have had the parking lot, we would have a lovely park or golf course, and we could have been the only city with a full bar already in it for when things could test you at meetings. No, I mean, it was available for like five, six million dollars. It would have been a great investment. You know, the county told us years ago that Galita wanted to incorporate it, to bring it into the city, and the county said, "Oh, no, no, if it becomes part of Galita, you're gonna urbanize it." And they've changed their tune conveniently. There's a few things, on the most broad level, I think we need to have a South Coast-wide discussion of the urban boundary, because Glen Annie is a bite into the urban boundary line. Down in Carpundria, there's one or two, I forget exactly places where they've moved into the urban boundary line with it. If we want to start eating up agricultural spaces, we should have a discussion say, where are we willing to move into those areas, where are we not, and let's establish that? And that said, and I'm getting to Glen Annie, but once you decide that, you're also gonna have to look within your community, to go in where are we willing to take higher density or taller buildings, such as in Santa Barbara, where they're talking six stories at LeCumber Plaza, although that's starting below ground. So that's another discussion that's following. Glen Annie itself, the county does everything in Western Galita, 'cause that's where the most land is, but then they promptly started going, "Well, if we can't mitigate everything, we can wave it." And that's, unfortunately, that idea got voted down at this point, but the amount of congestion that's coming from it is gonna be horrendous. I think they should have done some traffic studies before they rezoned, because basically rezoning is a gigantic transfer of wealth. Yet of golf course, it was worth maybe five or six million, and now with a lot of homes, it's worth a lot more. There's a few other things, and there's probably not time to get in at all, but it's very complicated, 'cause there's actually three parcels. And what got rezoned was the 95 acres that the golf course owners from Boston actually own. And then there was two parcels on either side, 40 acres that were part of the golf course under an illegal agreement. And when they showed their drawings, they just happily included all this as part of their golf course, and they showed improvements like community centers and swimming pools on a 40-acre parcel that was zoned for ag, and a still zone for ag. And so there was a certain degree of deception on the whole sales point. At this point, they've gotten the rezoned. They could actually go ahead and bring forward a project on just that 95 acres. That's the middle part of the course. The other portion, it's sold ownership. I think there was the article last week on the lawsuit that's taking place where people stop it, I understand. My understanding was there was another lawsuit that's a sequel one saying you can't daisy chain your rezones. So I don't expect to see any dirt being turned on the golf course anytime soon. One question I would have is in that it's been rezoned, is it legal to still operate a golf course there? But a lot of people in the community want to see that stay a golf course, but something else has to be profitable. But it's probably way too much to the wrong location. And that back in December, I organized in conjunction with with John Hartman's office, we had a meeting where neighbors could come and talk about it. Unfortunately, it turned more into sort of a sales pitch for the developers. And a lot of people went away frustrated. But there was a lot of interest. There was about 110 people there. And it's a lovely site. Would have been a great city hall, but it's going to be tied up for a while now. And, but there's no, and this includes Kenwood. Now, there's no simple solution to the traffic congestion in Glen Annie. 'Cause Caltrans has a 600 foot right away along Storke Road going north. You know, in an ideal world, if you want to put Chi Real through Bishop Ranch and tie in, you might alleviate some of the congestion, but as soon as you put Chi Real through, somebody's going to want to do a shopping center on Bishop Ranch. And we have the, you know, the Goodland Coalition thing about preserving our Ag space is up for renewables here. And I support that and hope to see it move forward. - Oh, yeah. I'm gone if they, I did not say that 'cause then they'll build it, but like that Bishop Ranch opens space. I mean, that's so important, you know, like it's, it's so part of our city. If they ever develop that, I mean, it's just going to be the end, you know, it's just going to be too much. - Well, it's beautiful because we have that. Then you go on down the road, you get to Lake Los Caneros, you know, have open space there. And so it's two great open spaces for Galita and Plusker's Park. - Yeah. So let me ask you about Kenwood Village. I have not reported on that as much as the Glen Anything and some of the other rezones. What is the problem there? It's too dense, wrong spot, traffic. I know you've had some choice words about the project publicly. What does it mean? - Who me? Choice words. - Yeah, Kenwood, there's a lot of resistance to it for a variety of reasons. One is that Kyriele is fairly narrow there. There's not a bike lane. There's not, unless you're going to do parking like they do by blue skies where you're parked on the sort of the shoulder of the road, there's probably not going to be enough parking for it. Kyle Richards says it's a dangerous strip of road. I don't like to bike there. And yet they want to put a couple hundred more units coming out onto it. The Mr. Ralker had a proposal in for '65, I think it was '63 or '65 units. He probably would have been better off sticking with that. You could actually be building right now with the rezone. Now you're committed to going to 30 units per acre. The biggest issues are the congestion at Glen Annie Stork and the 101 that you're throwing more people into that. It's incredibly high density. We've never actually built a high density project in the city of Galita, which is like 30 to 40 units per acre. But we're talking something similar to John Price's project there at Kritaunal Point, the very nice white ones as you go down Glen Annie. Something comparable to that on that Kenwood property, right next to all single family homes, duplexes next door. And so the general fan of people in the neighborhood was way too much, too high, too tall. And that the congestion is, I think it's probably the biggest congestion. I personally put together a 36 page document that I took up to HCD who, as far as I can tell, they're fairly tone deaf and thank you very much. But it showed that using their own guidelines for what was a good selection for affordable housing, because part of Kenwood is 20% inclusionary. It didn't mean in terms of local services, unless you think that low income people are going to shop at 7/11 in the liquor store. It wasn't that close to schools. There wasn't really good safe sidewalks to get to places. If you were handicapped, there's I figure what is nine street crossings between Kenwood and getting up to 101. There's no real bus service. There is one bus that loops through the neighborhood. And it failed on every single point that HCD said it was important for this. And they went ahead and said, "Yeah, it's great. Let's approve this housing element." So to some degree, I think the state is taking this view. We don't really care about quality. We just didn't care about getting the numbers in. I think Kenwood's still too big. James Carrioco helped knock it down. It was proposed at 290. He didn't knock it down to 190. And like I said, bonus density can go up. But there were still ways out on that. And then of course, the city not to change subjects, but has just recently changed is changing speed limits by five to 10 miles an hour on a lot of arterials. And that is one road that could benefit from it. But there's a lot of other ones that's not necessary. But Kenwood's still going to be a ventralic thing. I know Ethan Whittle is very opposed to it. Jenn Smith, who's running Lips in District 3.2. She was on the planning commission voting for it. So there's probably going to be some lively discussion between them about it. That my personal view is it's too much unless they come up with a mitigation impact for the freeway. So, and of course, we had money set aside with SB KAG for a Western Galita over crossing that would have gone from Ellwood Station Road over to San Rosano. At SB KAG, the city basically lied and said you'd have to tear down 14 houses. And we'd have to condemn a bunch of commercial buildings. And so they convinced SB KAG to take that 8.4 million and give it to Old Town Galita for Project Connect because it was underfunded. So, and now they rezoned the Ellwood Station Road Property that Alistair Winnoons. So, you're never going to see a Western Galita over crossing which could have created a much more safe passage for pedestrians, for bicycles in Western Galita and for cars. So, I'm sorry to see that go. So we're going to have lockdown problems at Storklin, Annie. - So one of the things that people who are running, you know, against you and against Ethan and others, you know, they'll say things like these are anti-housing people, right? They'll portray you and others as being against housing. So can you just kind of like clarify your point just take a minute. I don't hear you sounding like somebody who says, you know, we don't want to build for people who need housing. I don't hear you saying that you like, I keep everybody out of Galita, we're stuck in time. I don't hear that from you. So can you sort of clarify, like, like, I mean, you want housing, you just want housing that is affordable for the people who need it. And what do you say to people who say, you know, rich just doesn't want out, he's an envy, or didn't want housing anywhere near him? How do you, how do you respond to that, yeah? - I haven't actually heard that from anybody. So it may be being said someplace and stuff. And I would like to say, you know, I don't think it's that much adversarial between people running for office, generally, as just like we have different visions or we have different things. And the housing issue, my biggest point is it does us no good to build housing if once it's finished, it's unaffordable. Hollister Village by Smart and Final. If you don't have a lease, a three bedroom right now, $6,913 a month, you need to make three times that to apply and they don't take cosigners. And when that was first going in, there was talk about how all we need, we need workforce housing. And to her credit, Paula Prody voted against that project. My opponent voted against that. So the answer is just, is not just more. And when people hear the state saying, we want to build affordable housing, they think that that actually means it's more economic affordable for people who grew up here or for police, fire, nurses and teachers. And that's not necessarily the case. Some of them are, but historically, we've had say 20% inclusionary policy. You build 100 units, 20% inclusionary. The developer could buy out of half of that. And so if you looked at the number of people it took to maintain the other ones you built, you were always forever going backwards. So I think that when it comes to housing, I don't like what the housing element is done right now, hacking everybody right around one end. On the upside, I think if you can keep your density up along the Hollister corridor, we could then start running bus service that saved one every 15 minutes, which meets our goals of alternative transportation. But in my neighborhood over here by DP, I think it's an hour between buses and then you go on this long circuitous route to get any place. One of our planning commissioners said, you can't commute anywhere from north of the freeway. So I think part of it is a matter of urban planning, looking at areas where we may want to go taller. We have certain some restrictions. We've got an airport smack dab in the middle of the city, which limits where we can build. It limits height on a number of properties. So yeah, if you say you're just a nimby, I would say no, I will say this. I do think people who saved their money and bought a single family home to some degree, just suddenly say now we've rezoned your whole neighborhood to dual density through ADUs is not necessarily fair to those people, five of your neighbors decide to build an ADU. They don't have to add any extra parking and you didn't. They're bringing in $3,000, $5,000 a month in rent and you're not, somehow that seems like a poor plan. Maybe we just need to zone for smaller units that we don't need. Everybody doesn't need a 3,000 square foot house. But it's a matter of making sure we spread it out across the community. There's some parcels out in Otter End of Hollister that didn't wanna participate in the housing element that I think long term could be placed and that would be on the Hollister traffic corridor. So, but I will say we are not gonna build enough housing for anybody who wants to live here. And the telecommuting has compounded that. I was speaking to a realtor who was selling condos for a million one. I said, who's buying this? He says there are people from San Francisco coming down from the tech, they can work from here. And so, as long as you can telecommute, people with more money are gonna want to work here and push stuff up. And part of its perception, I bought my house back around 2000, I was in my 40s before I did. And it sounds ridiculously cheap, it was like 359. But it's probably worth a mill, two, a mill, three day. That's actually a 6% growth rate. If I got 6% on the stock market, nobody's, you know, people are going like, well jeez, it should be seven. The part of it is we have these cycles where prices go way up that to people want again, and I'm saying do their best to save some money now. You know, my place went up to whatever 800 or so in 2008, it dropped down to probably 550. So, those people who were able to set some money aside and get ready to pounce when interest rates drop. So, part of it is long-term planning. You're not gonna be able to necessarily buy a house as soon as you're 25. Businesses have to do more to help those people that they are bringing in to get into the market. And like I said, I think if we're gonna force higher density, we need to make the rules on bonus density somehow to make it more economically affordable. - So, Rich, let's talk a little bit about you and your background, your history, people when they vote, right? A lot of them just kind of vote on who they like, who seems like an interesting person or who knocks on their door. And if they're kind of in step with their values, then you know, that might win them over. A lot of people voted at the last minute. Like, oh, Galita, who are the candidates kind of thing? You know, who's Rich Foster? Can you talk a little bit about how long you've lived here and the types of things that you've been doing that have, you know, created a platform and a reason for you to run? - Yeah, I grew up in the Chicago suburbs basically. And then when I was, I came to the West Coast for the first time from Japan, 'cause I was going around the world with my brother when I was 20 and visiting a lot of places. I ended up out in Santa Barbara in '74. My brother and I set up a bookstore at Magnolia Shopping Center for my parents. And I went back to school after a while and he ran for a year that folks came out there. Eventually, they were all here and now they've all left. It's just me left in the area. I've been a contractor for about 40 years before that. I had majored in psychology, worked in counseling programs where you deal with people, spent a couple of years crewing yachts, which is a great opportunity to learn how to get along with people and negotiate. Back right after I moved out to Galita, which would have been 2000, they were closing El Rancho school or trying to close out to school. We had a long, bitter fight about closing that, got used to speaking to the Galita school board at the time. They went ahead and closed the school. Unfortunately, it was one of their best for socially, economically disadvantaged. But the Galita schools overall are really good, but was doing that. And then I had a long, serious fight with the school district over at Dos Pueblos High School when they were building their auditorium and redoing their bleachers and stuff because they had the negative declaration of impact statements and it was about a 40 page document that they promptly and systematically violated every agreement they had ever promised the community, whether about starting times, noise levels, dust control. Long and short, they ended up with a lovely project, but I spent a lot of time going down to the school board saying, wait, you said you weren't going to have anything on Thursday nights and now you have games go until 10 o'clock. That kind of thing, a lot of practice public speaking there and about the same time, started going to city council meetings. We had the discussions about Bishop Branch when Mr. Testin was trying to get it rezoned again and that had very wide participation. And over the last 12, 13, 14 years, at least, there's consistently been issues I've gone down to address that, followed the politics in the city. I think early on, we had two councils. The first, the one that would be probably labeled no slow growth and the second one was more pro growth. They were a group of people who had a vision of what they wanted to see done. And their view was pretty much tell staff, this is what we want and make it happen. I think to some degree, and people can argue with me on this, but we've fallen to a thing where the council looks more at, you're the specialist, tell us what we should do. And so staff, to some degree, sets the agenda rather than, here's what we want you to deliver. And that, I think, is not as healthy in terms of making, getting argumentative points. So like I said earlier, I got to running this time around 'cause I'm concerned about money long term. I don't think that recently they just started voted to have a joint powers agreement, which is a way the city can issue bonds and borrow money largely without a lot of local pushback. And that's kind of a way of pushing the debts for maintaining what we didn't maintain today on to the next generation. And so we wanted to become a city to take care of our roads. That's got me out there. The more I drove around the roads, the more I wanted to do something about it. And the more I heard about capital improvement projects that they have, we have, I think, 16 capital improvement projects just on hold completely. And sooner or later, you got to deliver on that or give the money back. The argument is we start giving money back, we'll never get another grant. Well, to the degree of which we're so far in the hole on grants right now, that may not be the worst thing. Today, we're opening, celebrating the starting of the Galita train station, a $32 million thing. I think originally it was $10 million in grants and $2 million from the city. And it morphed into this thing where you've got showers and you've got this, and we average 100 riders a day. It's a little bit, the theory, if you build it, they will come, but Amtrak controls, whether they come or not, and they're starting a trial period of for $4.4 million to increase a train service one each way each day. And that's, we're paying $44 per passenger to get 50 riders off the road. I think we would have been better off taking that money and putting it into the fire station 10, where we've rezoned for all these new projects. Plus, we've done a lot of growth over the years. Fire station 10 has been languishing for probably close to 20 years because when the hideaway was built, they wrote a check for a million and a half dollars towards the train station, and now it's 2024, and they're still just talking about getting going on it. So I think priority wise, we can do better things. And that's, that's what I meant. So I will say, I think everybody that's on council right now, I disagree with them on things, but they all do love Galita. I mean, people don't run for office 'cause they are trying to enrich themselves or get a platform generally speaking, maybe sometimes. But we do definitely have differences of opinions on what's gonna be best long-term. - Yeah, well, you know, we're talking about Galita, but you know, Galita is a good land, you know? I love Galita, people who aren't from here and they wanna compare Santa Barbara to Galita. It's like, Galita's great, you know? We have great schools, and we have great places to shop, and we have a sense of community, you know? Even though we disagree on, you know, some of these things that come up, but we still have a lot of people who care passionately. And if you gotta go to the Camino Real marketplace, like that place is like, you know, so busy and you go out to Fairview, it's busy, and Old Town, Galita is busy. It's just, there's so many great things about Galita, and we do have our, like our Elwood and our Lake Los Caneros, you know? We have their great public areas where, you know, you can do a lot of stuff, and we have a great beach, you know? I mean, we should have more park space and all that, and it wasn't always under construction. I know that's county, but still Galita-ish, you know? So Rich, let me just sort of, as we wrap up here, we got a few more minutes, just kind of talk to me. If you're a Galita voter, right? You're hearing all this messaging. You've got, you know, several, three races. You've got a mayor's race, two council district races. You might be on next door. You might be somebody who is, you know, just kind of like, I don't care too much about the partisan stuff. You know, I just want the right people in office. Why should somebody vote for you? Make a change over Paula Perotti, who's a very nice person, you know? She's been around a long time. You know, it's hard for anyone to, like, not like Paula, you know, like she's a good person. Why should they make a change? Why should they go with Rich? - A while back, I was down on Cathedral, I was talking to Paula about some green waste, and at the time we had a chuckle, that anybody driving by is probably going like, isn't that rich in Paula both standing there? What's that all about? And so, you know, that I'm losing track which way I'm going here, but (laughing) - Why should anyone vote for Rich Foster or what? - No, that I, the big thing is money, I think, that there's, you can say, wouldn't it be nice if we had this? Wouldn't it be nice if we had that? Wouldn't it be a nice set? But long term for me and for my kid's future, we need to be better disciplined about it. The crib wall and outer galita, which is 20 million, 30 million depends. So you ask, you know, FEMA refused to give us any money because they called it a failure to maintain it. And that it was not a matter of just the storms, it was neglect. And so that's, you know, that's one of the strongest things I feel is that we need to get back to maintain our infrastructure. That if each year your roads are a little worse, one of the meetings, Stuart Kazin, suggests we just lower our standard for roads. And that that's not the answer. We need to put the money into where we need to do it. And if that means giving up something else, then that's what we need to do at this time. That's what would be my message. I'm aiming for the middle of the road. I mean, I've spoken to a lot of Republican groups. The Democrats are, it's kind of closed 'cause they're locked in on the incumbents. And I've told everybody I've talked to. I said, look, you get on the outer edges of the spectrum. I got problems with both sides. Fortunately, most of the social agenda items aren't a matter of city politics. City politics are the basics of, you know, employees meeting what the citizens want in the community and taking care of our infrastructure. And so that's my message is that vote for me 'cause I'm looking at infrastructure and vote for candidates who are talking about that. I mean, I don't wanna start pitching for people, but look for people, or if they have the same message that this is what we wanna do. - And one of the thing you love about Galita is, you know, we have these district elections now. You see it in Santa Barbara too is, it's a different like sort of angle in Galita, but, you know, people who care, who live in the community, who interact with it, who aren't necessarily endorsed by all the powerful groups in town can run, you know, and they can have a platform and they can be viable. You're running that large contest, but, you know, you are a Galita guy, right? You live Galita. This is your life. You've raised kids here going to public schools, and it's good to see someone like you be able to run and have a platform, and the voters will decide who it is, you know, and, you know, I like Paula too, you know, she's a good person, so. - No, we've always got along very well, so. - And then you have an event coming up. I know you wanted to talk about that. - Yeah, I was organized an event as a private citizen, although people look at it suspect, I guess, and think you're a candidate. On September 21st, which is a week from this Saturday, from six o'clock to eight o'clock at the Galita Community Center. We're having an open and mic event. All the candidates have been invited, and the idea is not to give speeches. It's not to have people write down questions where they can be vetted before they get asked. It would be go up to the microphone, ask your question. If you have comments as a citizen, email them in. It's to move the meeting along to get as many questions answered by candidates. Not everybody says they're gonna go, but I still have hopes that everybody eventually will decide they wanna go. It's an opportunity for the public to just come down and say, "I wanna know why we're not doing blah, blah, blah." And the candidate can say this, or they could say, "Why should I vote for you?" And, but we don't want people to come down and think they're gonna start lecturing about something, write it down, send it in. I hope they have a great turnout for it. And that, 'cause there's a limited number of forums. You know, Santa Barbara League of Voters is gonna have theirs in October 10th, I think. I don't know of any other forums right now. And this would be a forum that would be unvetted questions. And with the only caveat being abuse insults and whatever will not be tolerated by the moderator. So that's the pitch for that. - Okay, well, great, Rich. I really appreciate your time. And I respect everything you do in the community and all your activism. And we wish everyone would be informed on all these issues and care enough. - As you do. So good luck out there. And I'll see you around. So thanks a lot, Rich for your time. - Great talking, Josh. Thanks. - All right. Take care. [BLANK_AUDIO]