Tom Schultz’s report on the State of the County summit (Nov. 6) has Melissa James of REACH telling more than 300 guests at the Ritz-Carlton Bacara, “This is not a tourism economy with a university attached. It is a technology economy with ocean views.” This framing was pitched as the future, but in Santa Barbara it is indeed a rerun from 1969.
The technology of January 1969 was offshore drilling. On Jan. 28, Union Oil’s Platform A blew out six miles off the coast, some 80,000 to 100,000 barrels of crude poured into the channel and onto the beaches from Goleta to Carpinteria, and the outrage helped give the country Earth Day. For a season, Santa Barbara was thrust into a technology economy with oil views. The technology of November 1969 was quieter. The Culler-Fried Interactive Mathematics Center at UCSB became the third site on the ARPANET, the network that grew into the internet. It reached Los Angeles without oiling a single seagull.
The newer technology prospered. More than 25 Santa Barbara companies were spun out of Glen Culler’s visionary work, which makes the “technology economy” a 57-year-old with ocean views.
The summit also took its measure: county costs growing faster than revenues, a reduced $1.66 billion budget with layoffs, and up to 47,000 residents who must soon prove their Medi-Cal eligibility every six months, with employers asked to give them time to fill in the forms. In 1969 this county helped a computer at UCSB find one at UCLA across a hundred miles of telephone line. Next year, a worker in Goleta will need time off to persuade the county that she still qualifies.
Kristen Miller urged the room to learn the argot of economic development. Santa Barbara contributed a word to it in 1969: GOO, for Get Oil Out, the citizens’ group that responded to the spill with 100,000 signatures against offshore drilling. Chancellor Dennis Assanis then asked everyone to put the past behind them, in a hotel that gazes out on the very channel where that past was spilled. The county has already watched this rerun to the end. The ocean views always win.
David Woodard
Tampere, Finland