Community Pushback Intensifies Against Plan to Remove Murals at Santa Barbara’s Ortega Park
Activists, artists and others hold a forum and call on city leaders to reconsider the plan, saying the artwork is central to the area s culture and history
Santa Barbara City Councilwoman Alejandra Gutierrez is among a group of residents who want the city to preserve the murals at Ortega Park. “It’s one of the parks that really represents the Mexican-American culture,” she says. “It’s history.” (Joshua Molina / Noozhawk photo) By Joshua Molina, Noozhawk Staff Writer | @JECMolina
February 6, 2021
| 10:03 p.m.
The effort to save the murals at Santa Barbara s Ortega Park intensified on Saturday when a group of activists, educators and artists spoke at a virtual forum and called on the city to listen to the community instead of barging ahead with its controversial plan.
By Randy Rowse
| 10:00 a.m.
“Equity” is a word that gets tossed about frequently, sometimes a little too lightly, as a conceptual argument. At the Santa Barbara City Council on Tuesday night, the word came up as a justification to allow a bike rental company to install 9-foot plastic kiosks in an area that has always been considered “sensitive” in aesthetic terms.
Randy Rowse (Noozhawk file photo)
These “payment stations” allow customers to pay with cash or credit cards as opposed to Apple Pay or website-type methods. The reasoning is that lower income people may not possess an iPhone and thus be less likely to access the $7 per 30 minute bike rides. Fair enough.
By Joshua Molina, Noozhawk Staff Writer | @JECMolina
January 26, 2021
| 9:30 p.m.
The Santa Barbara City Council on Tuesday evening voted 6-1 to approve a controversial project labor agreement that would require some contractors who do business with the city to use union laborers.
The PLA, as it is known, would require the city to use unionized labor on construction projects valued at $5 million or more.
Project labor agreements are pre-hire collective-bargaining documents that establish standard terms and conditions for construction projects. They are typically negotiated between the project owner and the local building trade unions council and individual construction trade unions. The agreements are negotiated before any advertisement for bids. The contractor and all subcontractors of any tier must sign onto the agreement before performing any covered work.
By Jade Martinez-Pogue, Noozhawk Staff Writer | @MartinezPogue
December 9, 2020
| 6:49 p.m.
Collaborators and leaders from SB Act gathered the public for a virtual webinar on Wednesday to discuss their various efforts to tackle homelessness in Santa Barbara before bringing the ideas to the City Council.
“I’m here because, for the very first time, I see a light at the end of the tunnel,” said Marguerite Sanchez, interim executive director for Doctors Without Walls-Santa Barbara Street Medicine. “For the first time in 14 years, I actually believe we can resolve this problem.”
A recent count by SB Act, in partnership with City Net, found 340 homeless individuals in the State Street, Eastside and waterfront neighborhoods at the end of September. Additionally, Doctors Without Walls served 3,093 unsheltered homeless individuals in 2019, Sanchez said, with 525 of those individuals unique to Santa Barbara.