A variety of obstacles run throughout the meant bike-hike-roll pathway Santa Barbara County is constructing alongside Modoc Highway — timber, drains, water vaults, wetlands, and the residents of a nature protect: fox, skunk, ‘possum, bobcat, rabbit, monarch butterflies, and seasonal flowering crops. It’s for the Modoc Protect that the Board of Supervisors agreed on Tuesday, August 29, to spend $25,000 towards hiring an easement marketing consultant to barter right-of-away alongside the protect for a undertaking nonetheless in a preliminary design stage.
Town half of the bike-pedestrian path is accomplished via to By way of Senda — the little facet shoot to La Cumbre Highway from Modoc — and to the east reaches so far as the harbor and Montecito. The county’s portion of the 10-foot-wide Modoc Multi-Use Path, which runs alongside the south facet of the highway, heads west in three segments: two of them on county-owned land, and the center part abutting the Modoc Protect for 1,600 ft.
The protect is roughly 30 acres of personal property owned by La Cumbre Mutual Water Firm, however a conservation easement over many of the land is run by the Land Belief for Santa Barbara County. It additionally has a neighborhood throughout the highway with activists who love the unkempt protect and luxuriate in its pure magnificence proper on the base of Hope Ranch. They shaped the Group Affiliation for Modoc Protect, or CAMP, and succeeded in reining within the variety of timber to be minimize to about 20, from about 80, relying on who you discuss to. CAMP additionally filed a lawsuit arguing that points remained with the environmental research outcomes, a lawsuit that’s within the necessary settlement negotiation stage.
Of the pathway undertaking, the spokesperson for CAMP, Warren Thomas, stated that dropping one Canary Island palm was higher than dropping 29 of them, as was initially thought of. Except for the continued lawsuit, the sticking level for CAMP at the moment, in line with Thomas, is the fabric for use on the pathway alongside the protect. Asphalt, which the county generally makes use of, leaches hydrocarbons all through its lifetime, a chemical they don’t need seeping into the wetlands on the Modoc Protect or into Cieneguitas Creek, Thomas stated.
“Warren discovered a superb answer,” acknowledged Alex Rodriguez, who’s president of the Board of Administrators for La Cumbre water. Thomas situated a product referred to as GraniteCrete, which he stated had a superb monitor document at Golden Gate Park and in Monterey. It holds each the flexibility to resemble a path, somewhat than a highway, and to be permeable for the wetland surroundings.
It was the residents throughout Modoc Highway who had banded collectively to drive a vote on the water firm within the Nineteen Nineties to maintain the land that’s now the protect from being developed, stated Rodriguez. The realm is personal property, he emphasised: “We have now to be tremendous cautious that individuals don’t trample via there as a result of it’s native habitat, an ecologically delicate wetland.”
[Click to enlarge] A part of the mid-section of Santa Barbara County’s Modoc bike path idea. | Credit score: Courtesy
Lining the sting of Modoc Protect with a motorbike path may show problematic, as wheeled automobiles should not allowed inside the protect or on its dust trails. Chris Sneddon, who’s heading the undertaking for County Public Works, stated a fence was on the listing of doable additions to carry individuals again from going off-path. The pathway meanders via two rows of timber, and the equestrian portion of the path system is at the moment positioned to the south of the timber, he stated.
Meredith Hendricks, government director for the Land Belief, stated the conservation easement for the protect permits paths and trails, however with consideration to their cumulative impact. The Land Belief may contemplate a suitable floor and a suitable design — nothing that appeared like a mini-road, for example — that has the least influence on the protect. At current, nevertheless, “There’s no lively negotiations occurring as a result of the county continues to be working via the 35 p.c design,” she stated.
For Public Works’ Sneddon, it’s progress — incremental, however progress all the identical. A number of workshops on timber, path supplies, present trails, and pedestrian enhancements lie forward.
“It looks like we’re hopefully getting some good consensus,” Sneddon stated after Tuesday’s listening to. “We nonetheless have a methods to go in getting an easement,” he acknowledged. “We’ll nonetheless need to ask the water firm board and the Land Belief for his or her approval, however we’re hopeful all that stuff will work out.”
