Toxic Tsunami returns after 5 years
by Bonnie Donovan
(In an effort to keep up with Santa Barbara City Council’s efforts to “protect” the public, I’ve updated the above column that I wrote for Santa Barbara News-Press five and a half years ago):
Imagine looking outside your window and seeing men in hazmat suits working right across the street from your home. You discover they were given directions to Cottage Hospital in case of contact with the dirt. Huh? Dirty dirt?
Don’t dismiss that as a bad joke.
The toxic dirt you've been breathing, and that you didn't know anything about, could be poisoning and even killing you and your neighbors.
Architect Gil Barry sounded alarms on a proposed project at 3139 Sea Cliff more than five years ago, and he did it again on Tuesday March 4, 2025. The carcinogenic dust spreading into the air and water is being ignored by city staff so they can issue a building permit.
Build Baby Build!
The former nursery at the location used DDT, then called Dieldrin, a pesticide designed to eat through cell membranes. Should you and Dieldrin dust meet, cells can turn cancerous on contact. Terrifying!
This toxic mess spans three acres, permeating the soil three feet down. There's more: wind spreads it.
Notice the rain? The sloping hill dumps toxins into Arroyo Burro Estuary, spilling into Hendry’s Beach a block away.
Would you approve that kind of project? Would you want to live next to it or plan recreational activities anywhere it impacted?
It's unbelievable that City Staff are excluding it from both environmental impact review and the coastal permitting process. They are perpetrating a city-sanctioned contamination of Hendry’s Beach. They and the county, knowing about this for decades, are trying to meet a housing quota from a state they claim is forcing Santa Barbara to build housing.
Have they forgotten that Santa Barbara is a charter city and that "Charter cities are granted supreme authority over ‘municipal affairs?’” In other words, a charter city's law concerning a “municipal affair” will take precedence over a state statute. Point is, they can't point fingers anywhere but at themselves. Heads should roll!
Not to worry, by the time a resident or residents develop cancer, those decision makers will be retired on their taxpayer-funded pensions; politicians who gave direction and/or approved the project will be long gone, and no one will be able to connect their cancer to the source. Grab your wetsuit and surfboard, go ride the cancer-causing waves. Enjoy the cycling, dog walking and sun while breathing that fresh ocean air, sprinkled with a few carcinogens.
One Man Notifying Everyone
This week I was notified again by Gil Barry that 3139 Sea Cliff will return to Single Family Design Board (SFDB) on Monday March 10, 2025, at 3pm.
Did some kind of miracle happen? It hasn’t been 100 years since Dieldrin was used on this site, right? (The contamination lasts 100 years.)
A Letter from Gil Barry
A massive 2240 cu. yd. toxic soil removal project at 3139 Sea Cliff is before the Single Family Design Board.
Decades of highly toxic pesticide Dieldrin, which stays in the soil 100 years, was used on the 3-acre Nursery.
City staff supports the massive toxic grading because two county agencies gave it a permit.
County Environmental Health gave it a routine permit without looking at the odds of neighbors getting sick from breathing toxic dust; they assumed the County Air Pollution Agency had done that.
Air Pollution Control District gave it the same routine permit it gives non-toxic dust projects, without looking at the odds of neighbors getting sick from breathing toxic dust; they assumed the County Environmental Health had done that!
City staff is wrongly assuming one or the other of the county agencies had somehow already taken care of the health impact.
Neither county agency, nor the city, looked at the significant adverse environmental impact of toxic runoff on the adjacent drainage creek or the ocean at nearby Arroyo Burro beach.
Decision makers can’t approve unless they make required grading findings that this project won’t cause a negative impact (which it clearly does).
An EIR is needed due to significant impacts to neighbors from breathing cancer-causing grading dust.
An EIR is also needed to inform decision makers of mitigation measures to reduce environmental impacts and environmentally superior alternatives, such as leaving the cancer-causing toxic soil in place and capping it with two feet of clean soil.
Gil Barry
Santa Barbara
You can email your letter to the SFDB
Address to send your letter: SFDBsecretary@SantaBarbaraCA.gov
Reference project at: 3139 Sea Cliff PLN2024-00398
This next letter is the one he sent to Heal The Ocean
Gil Barry, architect
Feb 27, 2025
Heal The Ocean
c/o: info@HealtheOcean.org
re: A project in the city at 3139 Sea Cliff located one block from Arroyo Burro Beach. City application no: PLN2024-00398
Dear Friends,
This is to inform you about how a new project on a 3-acre vacant lot on Sea Cliff that may have an extremely serious health impact on children swimming in the lagoon and ocean at Arroyo Burro beach.
I am actively opposing this project due to its serious health impacts, and I know a lot about it.
This lot used to be a big orchid nursery for 40 years and they used a whole lot of cancer causing toxic pesticides like DDT and Dieldrin (before they were discovered to cause cancer by the Environmental Protection Agency).
It stays in the soil for 100 years.
The project involves a split into 3 lots (to build 3 houses) and they are asking the city to approve the excavation and removal of a massive amount (around 2500 cu yards; 250 dump trucks full) of cancer-causing toxic soil and haul it to a toxic waste dump. They plan on removing about 2 feet deep on much of site.
This two-month toxic soil excavation and the extensive watering of the soil that goes with it (and possible stockpiling) will cause a lot of cancer-causing silt, and water runoff into the existing drainage creek which flows directly into the lagoon just 1 block away.
It’s impossible for silt fences or wattles to catch all the runoff water.
Children swimming in toxic water at this lagoon or the beach may get very, very, sick, or even die.
I’m hoping Heal The Ocean will write a brief letter of concern to the city of Santa Barbara asking them to require an EIR to inform the decision makers of the health risk to children at the beach.
Address and send your letter to: SFDBsecretary@SantaBarbaraCA.gov
And reference project at: 3139 Sea Cliff PLN2024-00398
If you want to attend a public hearing and speak your concern (or your organization’s concern) or send a letter of your concern to the city, contact me and I can help you do that. I will always know the date and time of all public hearings. The next SFDB public hearing is 3pm Monday March 10.
Best,
Gil Barry architect
gilbarry1@cox.net
Check This Out:
After voting herself a 48.8% raise last month, Laura Capps is now concerned about spending money.
Illegal Street Vendors starts at 1:43 minutes
Pictures start at 1:53
As Reported by Noozhawk
“The supervisors expressed interest in the task force during questioning but seemed cautious about approving it. One of the issues brought up by Supervisor Laura Capps was the lack of an end date for the task force and the cost of funding the project.
“I just want to put some boundaries on creating a new entity that could, as government tends to do, create like a life of its own, and more bureaucracy, more funding and more work for people,” Capps said.
She added that she was concerned about the cost of running the task force. Ventura County was running a pilot program for a similar task force that had cost $2 million, staff said.”
In The Independent
“Supervisor Laura Capps worried about runaway costs — Ventura County has already spent $2 million trying to solve the problem — and adding to the growing sense of fear experienced by many in the county’s immigrant communities caused by the aggressive enforcement posture pursued by the Trump White House.”
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Santa Barbara Orchid Show Starts Today. Click here for details!
The Bottom Line is both the City of Santa Barbara and the County openly ignore what they want to ignore.
How about this?
CAB stated they are narrowing upper State Street, making it very dangerous to
drive. For what? Their 40 year failed bikes as alternative to auto use. City of SB designated De la Vina 2 decades ago as an efficient bike route to Mission and then cut over to State.
How does this happen? Simple the City acknowledged their legal responsibility under CEQA to do a City wide EIR for bike use. In Nov. 2023 the City changed the rules kicking in the CEQA demand.
It was the 2023 Westside Capital Improvement plan, and was was not, properly noticed which was a Brown Act violation which coincidentally includdc the "advisory" bike master plan as a hard plan (no longer advisory) they needed a CEQA required EIR.
A CAB Public Records request about the Cliff Dr. Las Positas Roundabout uncovered blatant CEQA and CCC violations over major changes to Cliff Dr. How did they get away with it? Delay, not answering, and waiting out the process until the former $650,000 project was completed for the ~$4.3 million.
So when you re-read Donovan's article think about how the Council and other government agencies Flip Off the public and then consider how you vote.
The irony does not escape me when Heal the Ocean/Channel Keepers and the local Big Mean Green Machine demands zero tolerance against cruise ships and potential oil spills.
Since their refusal to deal with vagrant camps along the same local creeks and waterways also creates toxic waste zones which even requires beach closures after storms; all in direct contradiction of their stated public mission.