City Council — February 12, 2026

All right, we will call this

And if we could please have roll call

Not tonight.

And any presentations? No presentations. All right, and so seeing that if there's anyone still looking to make public comment non-agendized make sure you have your speaker slip. If so then we will go ahead and open public comment for our non-agendized items and just not be accepting any further speaker slips.

We have two public comments We have John Roehner followed by Kevin

Little.

Good evening honorable mayor, council members, city staff and all others in attendance. All right my name is John Roehner and I wanted to introduce myself as a new public affairs manager for SoCal Gas. I cover San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara County. I like to say my coverage territory is Hearst Castle de Carpinteria, and it's the best, it's beautiful. I recently took on this role after Tim Mahoney retired about middle of the year last year. And he was in the role for about 27 years so very large shoes to fill.

My goal is to just get out and put a face to the name and let you know that anything that you would have reached out to Tim Mahoney please reach outs to me And I also wanted to state that SoCal Gas remains committed to supporting local governments and communities to provide safe, reliable and affordable energy delivery today ready for tomorrow. And please don't hesitate to reach out. I look forward to working with everybody here and thank you for your time.

Thank you very much. Is it possible to have you maybe leave your business card so we can get back the contact information? That'd be great.

Perfect. Thank you

very much.

Thank you

for coming

by. Okay, and then we have Mr. Kyle Levin.

Hello, City Council. Thank you for the time. I'm just going to take my two minutes of public comment to read aloud my letter that I sent 10 days ago to the city's council for the public record. Dear esteemed elected representatives of the great city of Buellton, thank you for your noble work executing the direction of our civic bureaucracy here in the beautiful geographic capital of Santa Barbara County.

Recently, during a November public meeting of this body I brought forward for the council's consideration ongoing concerns and issues I had regarding the behavior of management at Buellton's Community Garden. During my appeal to this body, I referenced the complaint I filed with the city on November 10th which outlines a series of increasingly alarming circumstances directly culminating in the targeted expulsion of a specific community gardener myself from Buellton's Public Garden.

At that time, I urge this council to make themselves familiar with the details of my formal complaint. I further urged action based on the details provided in that complaint to the city given the degree to which my family has suffered disenfranchisement of our rights as residents of the great City of Buellton to participate in all public forums Within our great metropolis, it is my opinion that the City of Buellton is required to formally revoke the Buellton Community Garden Organization's social license to operate in our city.

I see no alternative for the city given the non-profit entity's flagrant disregard for its stated purpose of providing a garden for the public's benefit. I have pointed out through specific documentation to the city's legal counsel, not only various specific violations of my personal rights as committed by the garden organization but also material ongoing harm being perpetrated against Buellton's community of gardeners, tangential organizations and the city itself. My official correspondence and documentation serve as notice to Buellton that the above referenced organization does not appear to be operating ethically or indeed legally within the borders of our great city. I ask this council weigh my appeals alongside the evidence I furnished, then move to deliberate a course of action to restore the city's public garden into the public domain.

As an active community gardener, community organizer, composting and seed-saving permaculture advocate, I avail myself and volunteer my services in support of all efforts the city makes towards accessibility for all residents to public gardening resources. Thank you for your attention and concern.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

And just to confirm, Councillor, you've received the documentation being referenced? Yes. Thank you very much. Is there any further public comment this time?

No more

at

this time.

Thank you. We will now move to the consent calendar we have available for us, items 1 through 7. Is there...

Yes before you approve I do want to note that agenda item number 5 has a typo on attachment one it should reference July 2025 to December 2025 report instead of through December 2026. Thank

you very much Before we look for a motion to approve the consent calendar, would any City Council member like to pull an item?

I want to say thank you for that.

Thank you. And it was something that I think the staff, especially for Senator Lamone, it was a little bit of... It was a new problem they had had. No one's really approached being like how do we help locals get housed? Like we don't usually have that level of nuanced conversation so I was glad to at least start that discussion going on with it. Something else I just wanted to bring up to make you aware is that the city of Lompoc in partnership with their law enforcement has done a lot of riverbed I just want to make everyone aware that as many people reported there's been a bit of an increase in unhoused people present within the valley.

We are seeing because of the action taking place within the riverbed it usually displaces I just want to piggyback on that, too. I just want to piggyback and say a shout out and thank you ≫ Good morning, everyone. We are moving right along. So now we get into all the other meetings going on so I apologize how long this is going to take. We were able to get a meeting between Dr. Adam Bailey and Lieutenant Travis Henderson to start having a discussion in coordination of how to have emergency services prepared and normalized between the school district, I don't know what the proper grazing is, but when there's a suspicious person on line possibly with a weapon. I'm not sure what we call that these days, but that was discussed as well. So that took place and I'm grateful for them to follow up with that.

We had a meeting so there was a hub meeting that was called which was between the county's office with Joan Hartman solving the tribe and then the city of Buellton The reason for this was that earlier on we had a, it's called a CWPP, the Community Wildfire Prevention Plan. We all signed a letter trying to get this funding from the state to bring a grant funding for getting a valley-wide community wildfire prevention plan made.

Usually it's funded if there hasn't never been one who hasn't. We wrote a letter in support. It's about $280,000. The grant was denied. So we were contacted by the Firewise Council that this was denied, and they informed it. And I had pushed to say okay well we can't really say no to that necessarily these are things have to solve so I asked if it'd be possible to convene a meeting and I'm very grateful to Supervisor Hartman's office for helping facilitate bringing us all together to talk about We had a chance to talk about how maybe the tribe solving the county and Buellton could work together to either apply separately for grants, how we could talk about what type of funding is available within our own budgets at this time to make it happen.

But to really acknowledge that it's not really an option to not have a wildfire protection plan in place. If you get one of these in place, it allows a lot more state and federal funding for wildfire mitigation plans and wildfire. Most communities focus on an evacuation of their area. None of them had folks talked about the evacuation route goes directly through Buellton, and so we need to have a coordinated evacuation plan taking place for that. So we're having that. It allowed then for SBCAD to join for the River Trail conversation as well to talk about phase one and two. So there's a discussion First phase, work phase for that. So they have the funding secured and it does look like the 1.7 million that the tribe secured from the federal government is seeming to be able to be realized and received.

And that will help with getting some of the design pieces taken care of for the entire one but also it means that Buellton's design portion is looking to be fully funded to get that going so we can deal with our face first. There's no reason to wait for Buellton to move forward with it to get the other people in line. We have the luxury of the funding secured, the easements theoretically in place and we can get started on our design piece so Buellton is leading the charge for that one.

I'll pause, I assume, for

that. The luxury because the staffs could work right? That's it. Oh, yes, it has a luxury because stop was on the ball.

Yes. So there's that piece so that takes care of one. The next one we have is attended after the polar

It's been a while since we've had a staff report back. Oh, yeah.

So a CWPP is more of like an act as a plan that's more based on like regional so like we would have our cert program so they identify when in the CWPP it's like an objective third party that identifies here's your area here's your risks and then they would say your vulnerabilities and then cert would be the ones to like fill the gaps that we need to train our cert on evacuation procedures They're more of creating a data-based standard. So when we go out to grants for things, we have a community wide plan where CERT would be just for Buellton to solve for. So Buellton's CERT would execute plans within the CWP. Thank you.

Next up after the Polar Plunge, I went to Lompoc to the Communify event on their 211. There were 65 organizations there that range from mental health resources pop-up medical screening events for vision and diabetes and caretaker support for people who are for medical caretakers and things like that And I met with the CEO who is in talks about how to market more of these services to our Buellton and Valley residents since they haven't had a lot of opportunities to do so. But there were a lot of different organizations out there who can assist people in very specific ways. I know at one point, I went to find out what could help Buellton. I started shopping for myself like, I could use caretaker support, how lovely! So I just wanted to put it out there that Communify, if you go on their website, you can see all the organizations they have with it and they'll be coming back to follow up with us at some point to do outreach to let you know of ways that they could help serve people at Buellton.

Moving along, I would have had the luxury to go to the United Boys and Girls Club event on Friday. I just wanna acknowledge that we give all those gold cards but we had seven children receive their blue card. There will be a poster of those winners that'll be at the library if you'd like to go see the local kids who got their blue cards but we also have to celebrate that Sylvia Abara who is our assistant director for the Local Boys and Girls Club was named Assistant Director of the Year so it just kinda continues to show that Buellton small but punches above their weight for what they get going with them.

Next up, I also wanted to piggyback on the Annie musical. Thank you to Alison Fiery for everything she did. We had over 100 kids auditioning for it and a lot of staff volunteered. I know Candace Signa was there and others to make it happen. It was a really well done production. It felt very American Idol like the first episodes before you kind of get bored on this season but it was really neat to see all these kids come out but the number one thing I heard from it was parents saying how excited they were to have this opportunity for their kids and so I just want to thank this Council for Arts and Culture Thank you for everyone supporting that.

There's still more to go, so I apologize on this how many we're going to talk about. The Village Senior Apartments have opened and thank you for also Vice Mayor Mead who was in attendance for the ribbon cutting with me during that. At the time there were 22 units currently leased and they are working through that as well so there are more people moving in at the time.

If anyone hasn't had a chance to go by, you can stop by and there's the front office woman named Carla can speak with you if you'd like to be able to see one of the unoccupied units. You could see what they look like but that is available for you and thank you for everyone who came out to make that possible. We need to give a thank you to the Rotary Club who did the trash cleanup on McMurray Road. I was not able to attend, but they removed a dumpster worth of trash on McMurray, so thank you to everyone who made that happen and to the Rotary Club for bringing that together.

There's also a brainstorming meeting at the library to talk about how better to serve, so I think we owe former Mayor Holly Sierra and that entire Friends of the Library are doing more outreach of what the community wants to see in the library space. Thank you for everyone who attended that to bring ideas to that one. I was able to attend, I just did it myself, a door knocking on the avenue for Buellton Garden Apartments. So I went through every person living on the avenue with a paper and hand flyer in Spanish and English so I thank city staff who got that together and translated it just to make them aware that applications were available.

They did close that, they extended it one week but Buellton Garden Apartments accepted And they'll start scheduling interviews, but I did try and get at least a paper out to every person living on the avenue to help facilitate them getting their applications if they wanted to. Finally, I just want to check from public comment tonight. I just wanted to confirm with our councilor with what was brought up as a concern you had all the information documentation needed to respond to the concern by the resident this evening? Yes sir yes we did perfect And then finally, I just wanted to thank the council. I know Vice Mayor Meade, Council Member Sanchez, myself and Council Member Lewis were able to attend. Council Member Hornick was there in email spirit for the special meeting we all did for that and it was a Saturday given up on city staff time too as well so thank you guys for that to update our priorities or update our agenda but also to establish our priorities for the year which has been continued to next meeting so we can talk about more but I just want to thank you all for giving up your Saturday morning to do that and I think with that I can stop talking for a moment Great.

Is there any written communication tonight?

No written communications.

All right, any committee reports? Council Member Hornick? I

don't think so. Trying to remember what the last time we had a meeting was.

While you ponder, Council Member Sanchez do you have anything?

We did, I did have a CCWA meeting and we are getting a new director over at CCWA and he'll be coming in for the next meeting. There's a meeting at the end of this month and I'm gonna miss in April I'm going to be out of town I think for the The second meeting, so I think my alternative was Carla. And so we'll try to get you in the loop and we only do 2% of the water but we still have a vote.

Anyway and then I think that's it.

Were you going to join by Zoom John?

Yes.

You are okay. We just need the address

right

thanks that's April 23rd meeting

Vice Mayor Mead, any committee meetings?

So this meeting focused on some legislative updates, the potential federal impacts of medical and homelessness services and the adoption of a 2026 work plan. so the committee's priority for this year are going to be seniors and aging parks in open space and early learning and child care with homelessness and behavioral health integrated across all those 3 topics.

As a comment in the meeting, essentially homelessness and behavioral health are two really big themes that people mentioned that kind of bleed into everything else. And so that is why they're being worked into the other basically the three main topics. And then the committee also renewed statewide advocacy priorities and the proposed state budget that includes 500 million for homelessness programs now tied to new accountability measures.

It was my first meeting. It was very interesting. The next meeting will be in person in March on the 26th, so I will be attending that and I'll just keep the council posted on the fact that as legislature comes up that this particular committee wants us to lobby for or talk about,

So back to me again for a longer update. So first off was Air Pollution Control District, there was a fine that was placed on a local grower for a pollution violation And part of the agreement they have with that is in the funds received from a settlement, part of it goes to the community that was impacted negatively from the pollution. It ended up awarding $60,000 and two grants partially for the Buellton Union School District to do air filter replacement And then part of it was actually for the Children's Museum to do an air based exhibit so they, the $60,000 I think it was like 1545 I'm not exactly sure but 60k was approved both to the school district and the children's museum. So that was something that was approved by the AP CD board.

We're going to move on to SB CAG. It's the last portion. I have to check the final segment of it, but it gets you up to where it needed to go into around the zoo area. That does not mean the project is done. Of course we just now have the money to do the project. I think they are still planning for it to be completed by 2028, but the 101 widening has been completed for funding securing.

With that in mind, the SPCAG is starting to look I'm going to go ahead and get started. I know the 166 corridor is being brought up quite a bit between Santa Maria and Guadalupe as a priority that has been not dealt with very much. As part of their already funding plan, I think it's a $15 million project that they're looking for. That's on the books in planned for it.

That seems like pretty wide range ranging piece that that's just the maintenance and updating of it. Councilmember Hornick. I think it's important to note that the corridor study that we had asked for from a city standpoint is being worked through within Caltrans staff and should be getting back to us soon. I just think of it as a different context that was at the top of mind that you need to report back to us, so that's a promise element with it. That did open up a conversation though that it might be worthwhile though as we look at the skinning I'm going to go ahead and get started.

The top, the agreed upon numbers to do forecast population that then bleeds into arena numbers. So with that in mind, the big takeaway was for turret sounds weird to have to say this but fertility rates are down and mortality rates are up so that was a weird. ≫ Good morning, everyone. I'm going to ask them to do a breakdown of expected economic impact for these industries because if health care is going to be the fastest growing one, it might be good for us to plan accordingly that if that's also going to be the main economic driver. Most of Santa Barbara County has historically been viewed as ag being one of the great pillars but healthcare might be competing with that now in terms of jobs and economic pieces. It also allows us to have a discussion about how most of SBCAG's thoughts have been focused on commuters but not dealing with senior mobility, ADA mobility as we see that as the highest growing population.

So how will those services be able to accommodate the growing need of our senior population that is seen to overtake our workforce population in the next? Thank you, Mr. Chair. So do we get any hint at what our RINA numbers might look like next cycle? There is no RINA number predictions for that. It is just to say, what they have to agree upon is when using any kind of figures for RINA these have to be established as the numbers used for that so they give the numbers and then the decisions are made from them And then finally, nope that was SPCAG piece there. Oh the only other one I wanted to say is thank you to those who helped us get the 300 responses to our survey for the Williamson Green.

Staff will be synthesizing the data to be ready to present at the next ad hoc meeting for the 100 Hills site Williamson Green site which will be Wednesday February 18th from 6 to 8 p.m. at the library and so myself and council member Hornick will be there to discuss I'm going to be out of town that day. More to come. It's always, we're doing it live here, so

great. All

right, so we will follow up on that offline. Okay! And now time for business items. As a reminder of how we're handling business items, if anyone's looking to make public comment, we do ask that you submit public comment before opening public comment for each item and so I will turn it over to our... Are we going with Deputy City Manager tonight since you're sitting in that role or just plan? Do you want to be Finance Director? Just

Finance Director.

Okay, that

works. Okay.

Finance Director, please take it away.

Business item number eight, approval of transportation impact analysis TIA guidelines February 2026. And the staff contact is Irma Tucker contract city planner.

Thank you and good evening Mayor Silva and members of the City Council. As Ms. Zamora introduced the item this is the approval of a transportation impact analysis Also referred to for short as TIA guidelines. Just a little bit of background to start earlier this year, the council authorized the scope of work with ATE, the city's transportation engineers to assist with updating the interim TIA guidelines.

Which had been previously developed in conjunction with the draft land use and circulation element update, which was undertaken back in 2020-2021. The prior guidelines were intended to be interim with the goal of updating them when more accurate and appropriate usable thresholds were developed as part of the comprehensive general plan update, which is currently taking place. So this resulted in some proposed revisions to the interim TIA guidelines with the intent of making them the actual official TIA guidelines And these are set forth in the attachment to the staff report, which is part of the agenda packet.

The updated TIA guidelines represent a more user-friendly and implementable tool for traffic impact evaluation with standards that address the specific current traffic circulation and mobility concerns with the city. The guidelines address the following key issues. Alignment with the goals, policies and programs currently being developed for the city's Comprehensive General Plan update.

Consistency with new state CEQA guidelines such as VMT reduction that's VMT stands for Vehicle Miles Traveled Reduction which is a method to evaluate traffic impacts under CEQAs The guidelines also propose circulation assessment tools that are tailored to reflect Buellton's unique small town nature and its location at the crossroads of two regional highways.

We are implementing, I have already started to implement more early interface with Caltrans in conversations regarding development projects and the guidelines address better interface with Caltrans district policies regarding circulation impacts and needed infrastructure improvements to address growth not only in Buellton The project is being developed in Buellton, but also the growth in the surrounding regional area. Some of which some of the traffic funnels through the city and finally the TIA guidelines are proposing refinements to the criteria used to evaluate development project based traffic and circulation impacts.

And these would be projects that are in the pipeline and anticipated in the future. So just a quick review of the TIA guidelines, quick overview. There are two parts to the TIA guidelines. The first part is the local transportation study and this includes procedures to identify potential operational issues when evaluated against the city's circulation and transportation policies. So basically these are the local standards that we will use to evaluate Development proposed development projects and part 2 is the VMT analysis, and this includes procedures to determine if a proposed project has significant impact under CEQA based on VMT.

All projects applying for a development permit or other applicable land use permit will undergo initial screening by public works and planning staff to determine if an LTS, or VMT, or other focused analysis is required. The most major development projects would be required to do a local transportation study. This is the most sensitive to local circumstances and consistency with city policies, and this gives the City the most control over how impacts are mitigated.

Some projects would be subject to the vehicle miles traveled analysis particularly if CEQA is involved. And vehicle miles traveled measures the per person or per employee number of vehicle trips generated by a project and distances the vehicles will travel to and from a project. Rather than congestion levels at intersections, which we are used to seeing as evaluating as LOS. So we're trying to balance out the length of vehicle travel as well as local congestion and the local congestion on local streets will still be addressed under the Local Transportation Study portion of the guidelines.

And I would like to note here that Not all projects will require a VMT analysis. There are several types of projects that can be presumed to have less than significant impact, and generally smaller projects and local serving projects would typically be screened out. So the total fiscal impact on the city budget would be minimal There would be some additional routine staff time involved in screening potential project applications to determine the extent to which TIA studies are required.

However, once permit applications are submitted and fees are paid, staff time and other expenditures would be passed through to the project applicant. So the recommendation before the council tonight is that the council adopt the draft transportation impact analysis guidelines dated February 2026 and set forth in attachment one to the staff report. And thank you very much, that ends my presentation I'm available to answer any questions of the council.

Thank you very much. Do we have any questions for staff before we go to public comment?

Yeah I have a couple questions. How much is Caltrans involved in, I mean they have their own departments if somebody wants to put a driveway on Highway 246 does that have to go through Caltrans or do we deal with it? If we have a project do we deal with Caltrans and say this is where we want to put a driveway and how many trips in and out?

So typically as we have done in the past Encroachment permits from Caltrans are required for any type of improvements along Highway 246, including new driveways. And what we are doing and we've implemented this already is the city is actually reaching out to Caltrans early on to have the conversation in terms of what standards they would be looking at, rather than simply conditioning a project to apply for conditional use permits. So we are working more closely with Caltrans on that.

And did they have the final word on that or if we ask for something and then the Caltrans guy comes out says, we don't allow this big a driveway here. Or is this too close to the center section? Or

is that Caltrans has standards for how the driveways are designed Um, the width and distances in typical distances between driveways. But they are looking more and more to the city for policies that guide the location of those driveways And we're working together on how to minimize potential traffic conflicts coming in and out of the driveways, particularly along busy stretches of Highway 246. So they are looking to us for policy guidance on placement of ideal placement of driveways as well.

We would check with them first before we submit something that's out of the question. I don't want to waste a lot of time I just want to make a comment on something. If they have the standards and we can read the plans, is that I just don't want to have some dream of something and then come tell us you wasted all your time and you got to move your driveway this way or that way because it's there. So I just wanted like a streamlined report together.

Yes, that's exactly the objective And they're, we've been able to get meetings with them early on and have early on discussions about those types of issues.

Thank you very much. Any questions Vice Mayor

Mead? No questions at this time thank you.

Any questions Council Member Hornick? Yeah a couple thank you so