Three Longtime Incumbents Have Been Ousted

••• “Judicial race challenger Luis Esparza has officially defeated incumbent Judge Thomas Adams, who has served on the bench for 50 years.” (Adams is the Santa Barbara Superior Court judge who, after being publicly admonished by state’s Commission on Judicial Performance, told the commission that he’d be retiring—and then didn’t.) In other election results, Kyle Slattery is the county’s new auditor-controller, and Melinda Greene beat incumbent Joseph Holland (who hadn’t appeared at the office in 18 months) in the race for county clerk, recorder, and assessor. —Independent

••• “Aiming to make the short term vacation rental process more difficult, the city of Santa Barbara is looking to create an ordinance that will increase regulation, and decrease the commercialization of local neighborhoods via a costly permit process.” —Santa Barbara News-Press

••• “New Grand Jury Raises More Questions About Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Overtime Spending [….] Sheriff’s Office Is Projected to Spend $19 Million in OT This Year [….] Between 2019 and 2025, the number of sheriff’s employees claiming overtime hours increased from 609 to 667, but the number of overtime hours claimed jumped from 180,486 to 298,740. During that same time, the average number of overtime hours claimed increased from 296 to 448.” —Independent

••• “A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit alleging that a state law illegally targets a single housing development behind the Santa Barbara Mission. In his June 2 ruling, District Judge Hernán D. Vera said that while the law in question, Senate Bill 158, raises ‘serious constitutional questions,’ the case itself is unripe and does not provide a legitimate exemption to the state’s sovereign immunity. The ruling allows the housing developers to modify their complaint.” —Independent

••• “Under threat of shutdown, Carpinteria pot growers rush to install new odor-control technology,” reports the Santa Barbara News-Press. “But will it work? Residents say hot spots in the valley still stink.” At the crux of the matter:

Many growers are passing over a state-of-the-art carbon filtration system that was developed for valley growers by the Envinity Group of the Netherlands in 2021. […] The Envinity units, called “scrubbers,” cost $21,000 each and employ five stages of filtration, ionization and ultraviolet light to clean the air. In recent years, they have been installed on 41 acres of cannabis greenhouses in the valley, chiefly by members of the Van Wingerden family, at a ratio of up to 10 units per acre. But this year, the record shows, valley growers are buying much cheaper odor-control technology, with units ranging from as low as $230 to $13,000 each.

••• “UCSB Arts & Lectures has announced its 67th season, a sweeping lineup of more than 50 events featuring major artistic commissions, historic farewell tours, and conversations with some of the most influential cultural figures of our time.” Including Bernadette Peters in concert! —Edhat

••• Coastal View News profiled “The Cheeky Peach Club, a cloth diaper pickup and delivery service serving Santa Barbara, Carpinteria and points beyond. The business provides families with clean cloth diapers each week while handling all the laundering and sanitation behind the scenes.”

••• Noozhawk has more on Casa Iglesia, the former church turned into a 37-room “contactless” hotel*—i.e., no staff on the premises—on Chapala Street between Mission and Pedregosa. “At the center of the […] hotel, part of the roof was removed to create an open air atrium,” also known as a courtyard. It’s rare for this style of accommodations, which tend not to have spaces for guests to congregate. (*Any ideas for a better word for this kind of thing?)

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