Montecito Country Club Makeover
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The ritzy Montecito Country Club (pictured) is getting a major facelift. Owned by Ty Warner’s luxury hotel chain — which also includes The Biltmore Four Seasons, Sandpiper golf course, San Ysidro Ranch, and more — the club will close for approximately 16 months later this year to complete the $30 million job. The project is pending final authorization from the Historic Landmarks Commission — the Spanish-style clubhouse and its surroundings have historic merit — which will review the plans again next week. Despite considerable changes, the remodel is a 7,200-square-foot downsize from an initial proposal that was approved in 2009 but delayed to cope with the economic slump. Much of the country club’s 118-acre property is made up of its 18-hole golf course, which will undergo landscape and irrigation-system improvements. The makeover will also include redoing the clubhouse façade, relocating the pool, planting 725 new trees (and removing or relocating 300 trees), and adding a pool pavilion, snack shop, splash pool, whirlpool, equipment room, and volleyball and bocce ball courts. Project manager Bill Medel said all the member areas will be renovated with the goal to make the location more of a “family-oriented club.” Currently, the club has 415 family memberships that cost a onetime amount of $150,000. Medel said the membership price tag after the remodel is still to be determined. Santa Barbara’s Planning Commission — the club is located within city limits — and the design and review board have already approved the project, and construction must begin by September to keep its city permits alive. Medel said the quality of construction and amenities for the new club are expected to match the 100-room makeover recently — Kelsey Brugger completed at The Biltmore.
FAMILY AFFAIR: Eli Parker, son of late DoubleTree owner Fess Parker, spoke to the council about the family’s plans for a second hotel.
help fund what is now Chase Palm Park and build a 100-bed hostel, slated to open this summer. Under the new 10-year agreement, the family would have four years to build the 150-room hotel; if a project involving other than 150 rooms — such as the concept for a 50-65–room hotel the family discussed in December — is wanted, the plans would be reviewed, and leftover rooms could possibly be transferred to another site. Two strategies for fixing the jumble of car, bike, and pedestrian lanes of the Mission Canyon corridor were presented at the Santa Barbara Woman’s Club on 4/22, when planners identified a series of changes that could be done in the short-term and others that would require more patience to implement. The long-term goal is to create a safe path for walkers and bikers from Laguna and Los Olivos streets, past the Santa Barbara Mission, and onto Foothill Road,
while also making a more streamlined route for vehicles. The quicker fixes included new paths on the mission side of the corridor and a new pedestrian bridge next to the historic sandstone bridge, which would be slightly altered. More challenging to implement, the presenting planners explained, would be a walking/biking path on the Riviera side of Mission Canyon Road, undergrounding utilities, replacing the existing pedestrian bridge, removing the sewer line over the creek, and fixing the intersection at Alameda Padre Serra and Mountain Drive.
COUNTY Environmentalists and the City of Goleta celebrated a victory on 4/23 when State Lands commissioners agreed that restarting a Venoco well on a pier off Ellwood required additional review. State Lands staff will now look into whether the oil could be processed at Las Flores Canyon instead, whether pressure is indeed building in the PRC 421 well or not, and the impact that processing oil at Ellwood — which is nonconforming to surrounding recreational uses — has on Goleta’s policies for the facility. The review and comment period should occur by the end of the year. The Chumash pulled their four-year sponsorship of the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team this week in the wake of racist remarks allegedly made by the team’s owner, Donald Sterling. Tribal chairman Vincent cont’d page 12
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NOW BANISHED: Grady Williams (left) speaks with Office of Emergency Management chief Michael Harris at a County Board of Supervisors meeting in January 2010.
Fired for Cancer or Just Cause? 11-Year Jail Manager Suing for Millions
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BY T Y L E R H AY D E N he longtime manager of Santa Barbara’s new jail project is suing the county and fighting to regain his job after he was fired last summer amid accusations of misconduct. Grady Williams, however, claims he was dismissed because he asked for a lighter work load to treat his advanced cancer and that the move was both politically motivated and shortsighted, leaving the biggest project in Santa Barbara history without a leader and with the possibility of unnecessarily costing taxpayers lots of money. He’s seeking upward of $5 million in lost wages and compensatory damages, and a decision on one of his two cases is due this Friday. Williams was ostensibly fired last June by General Services Department director Matthew Pontes (who’d been hired two months earlier) for misleading staff and the public by using the acronym “PE” (professional engineer) in his title. Williams is licensed as a professional engineer in Washington state, but not California, and has served in the 11 prior years as the county’s Capital Projects Manager, overseeing the construction of the Emergency Operations Center, Santa Maria’s new court facilities, and the Family Resource Center and Library in Cuyama. He partnered with Sheriff Bill Brown to secure an $80 million state grant for the new jail and was in charge of selecting and hiring architects, engineers, and other consultants to design and construct the massive building. When terminated during a long-awaited vacation, Williams appealed to the county’s Civil Service Commission, a five-member, quasijudicial body appointed by the Board of Supervisors that oversees employment matters. In November, the commission ruled that Williams should be reinstated “with full back pay, benefits, and interest, and should otherwise be made whole.” Among other findings, the commission determined that Williams “held a mistaken but good faith belief” that it was permissible to use PE in his title in California, that he never meant to misinform his department about his creden-
tials, that he never held a position or performed duties that required a California license, that he was cleared of any wrongdoing by the Board of Professional Engineers, and that he was never previously admonished to drop the PE from his title. (Williams asserts a prior boss actually told him to use them.) The commission also criticized Pontes’s motivation for the firing, finding that his concerns about liability and negative media attention “were unwarranted and unjustified.” Instead of complying, County Counsel is, in a very rare move, suing the Civil Service Commission for overstepping its authority and failing to offer proper reasons why Williams should be given his job back. Attorneys argue that even if Williams didn’t act in bad faith by using the acronym, he still committed a misdemeanor and a fireable offense. The February 14 filing asks the court to overturn the commission’s order and argues that if Williams is reinstated, the county will “have to move personnel around in the department and potentially initiate a layoff to create funding and a vacancy.” Judge Donna Geck denied County Counsel’s request in a preliminary ruling on April 18, noting that layoffs would not be necessary because the General Service Department is still advertising to fill Williams’s former jail-manager position. Geck will deliver her final decision this Friday, after months of delay-inducing motions filed by the county. County Counsel Mike Ghizzoni and Pontes said they couldn’t comment on pending litigation. At the time of his termination, Williams was both managing the jail plan and heading the Capital Projects division within the General Service Department. Those duties have since been split, and the Capital Projects job has been filled. Though Williams has been told to stay out of the office, the county continues to accrue the cost of his salary and benefits, which totals around $300,000 a year. The department had an operating budget last year of $41.3 million and employed the equivalent of 113 full-time positions. cont’d page 15 may 1, 2014
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