The Gaviota Coast: Southern California's Last Wild Coastland

During my senior year at UCSB I completed a nine-month long internship with the County of Santa Barbara, Long Range Planning Division. I worked under professional planners and was tasked with composing bits and pieces of real planning documents, including the Cumulative Impact Report for both the Gaviota Coast and Eastern Goleta Valley Community Plans, and the Gaviota Coast Future Buildout Calculations. I also helped with writing webpages, compiling notes, and writing memos for the Isla Vista Parking Program, the Winery Ordinance, the Smart Build Santa Barbara Update, and the Housing Element Update.

While I enjoyed every moment of my time working as a Planning Intern for the County, my first project was the most special to my heart: The Gaviota Coast Plan is a program-level plan that will, for now and into the future, protect one of southern California's last remaining swaths of pristine coast land.

The Gaviota Coast, credit

I was thrilled when I first learned I would be working on this Plan. After all, I could have been tasked with more humanitarian projects, like the housing for low-income families (a worthy cause, surely, but not entirely about the environment). I was excited to see that government really was working towards the presevation of our land.

The Gaviota Coast is 158 square miles of coast land west of the city of Goleta near Santa Barbara, CA. This land is almost entirely marked as rural, from its sheer cliffs and ocean at the south to the Santa Ynez Mountains at the north. Several communities of riparian, grassland, and woodland species dominate. The land is traversed by the Highway 101 and the Union Pacific Rail Road, which unfortunatly cut off both animal movement and human beach access.

The Gaviota Coast Plan area contains 1,006 Acessor's Parcel Numbers (APNs), the majority of which are owned by private entities. A minority of these APNs are owned by the state, the federal government, or by the Railroad.

Isn't it lovely? credit

If the land of Gaviota is all parceled up to private owners, they why hasn't it been developed like the cities to it's east? Coastal properties go for top dollar and would create a good economic boost.

The truth is, some of the land in the pristine, undeveloped coast is developed. Hollister Ranch is one of these private developments where around 133 parcels host ranchette style homes within a private community. Other such communities include the Zacara Ranch, though there are still more smaller individually owned "ranches" as well.

A Hollister Ranch ranchette, credit

The rest of Gaviota is open space, the pasture where cattle may or may not still exist. This is the land that the Gaviota Coast Plan is working to preserve forever. While privately owned, this land is defined in the Plan as agricultural, whether AgI, AgII or some other level (these levels of agriculture simply describe what kind of operation may occur. Think in the terms of a small family dairy versus a factory farm operation). The Gaviota Coast Plan proposes to keep these parcels in the agricultural zoning, or to even turn some parcels zoned for "open space", which is more easily turned to "residential" or "commercial", into "recreational". The zoning of recreational preserves land in much the same way that the "open space" zoning would, but it makes developing the parcels nearly impossible.

Parcels in the Gaviota Coast Plan area. Credit

The agricultural zoning that I mentioned above does allow for a certain level of development. Usually an Ag parcel may contain a main housing unit, a smaller secondary unit, and four farm-hand units. The secondary and farm worker units are all limited to some extent by the building code to avoid any development loopholes. Smaller structure such as pools, horse riding arenas, and greenhouses. While this level of development may occur, it is tightly regulated via the County's permitting system to ensure that no extra development does occur and that the Coast keeps the open, rural feel that we all know and love. In other words, a highly dense neighborhood could not occur in Gaviota because of the zoning restrictions. It is interesting to note that there is also an attitude of preservation in Gaviota. The owners of these million dollar homes do not want their views and peace interrupted by crowding!


For this project, I was tasked with creating the Cumulative Impact List (CIL) and the Future Buildout Calculations (FB). Both of these documents are somewhat difficult to understand at first because they both deal with a good bit of predicting the future. One must look at what projects and plans are occurring within and surrounding the Plan area, and then extrapolate that out. For the CIL I gathered ever project, plan, and permit that had been submitted or approved within the last three to four years within the Gaviota Plan area and in surrounding communities. I then divided these into four categories by criteria that I composed myself. Categories one and three were "county policy projects, programs, or initiatives or amendments to ordinances that have an overarching effect into the Plan area" and those that do not, respectively. Categories two and four were "substantial discretionary or ministerial projects within the plan area and major pending and potential projects spatially proximate to, but not necessarily inside the plan area including land annexations or large urban developments" and those that did not qualify, respectively. The CIL is a systematic way to compile these past, present, and future projects to assess how a project (the Gaviota Coast Plan) will impact the Plan area and all other relevant projects. It's a tricky task, but very important to assessing if a Plan should be accepted or rejected. 

The FB has similar intentions, to look at past buildout (or the total amount of all types of development) and extrapolate out how future development might look. FB allows us to understand if the project is appropriate for the environment and other landuses in the vicinity. We decided to use a "worse case scenario" in our FB, meaning that I was to calculate 100% buildout that could occur if this Plan were to be implemented. Using the data of currently developed parcels, and total parcels, I compiled an Excel spreadsheet that detailed how many units each parcel could legally build under the new zoning. Luckily for me, there are no industrial or commercial zoning in Gaviota. The Plan area contains only agricultural, residential, open space, and recreational, which helped to cut down the amount of calculations needed. 

In all, this internship taught me several valuable skills. I became very comfortable with local zoning laws, building codes, CEQA, and even NEPA. I was able to master the computer programs Photomapper and Dreamweaver. I learned to approach my superiors when I needed help but to also work independently and figure out my own difficulties. I had my first experience working in an office setting, and go practice with answering emails and phone calls in a professional manner. I really enjoyed this internship and hope to someday work in government again.