Our 164th Year
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W E DN E S DAY, M AY 2 0 , 2 0 2 0
RAFAEL MALDONADO/NEWS-PRESS
Starbucks employees serve the public outside the De la Guerra Street shop. Santa Barbara County is anticipating various stages of reopening.
SB County seeks more reopenings Supervisors vote to start process toward Stage 2B By JOSH GREGA RAFAEL MALDONADO/NEWS-PRESS PHOTOS
Repaving work is being done at State and Ortega streets.
SB improves streets Crews move into phase 2 of city-wide street improvement project
By CHRISTIAN WHITTLE NEWS-PRESS STAFF WRITER
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s the coronavirus lockdown continues into its second month, Santa Barbara is moving into phase 2 of its 2020-A Pavement Maintenance Project. The project seeks to meet high priority pavement maintenance needs throughout the city. The work involves city crews and contractors replacing failed sections of asphalt pavement followed by crack sealing and slurry sealing. Currently the city has completed concrete repair and replacement of select access ramps, sidewalks, curbs and gutters on 32 streets around the city, predominantly in the Laguna and Mesa areas. The second half of the project, applying a slurry seal, is set to begin next week and be completed over the next month. The seal will be applied to extend the life of existing pavements by protecting the undersurface from the effects of aging and the environment, including water intrusion, and will improve roadway aesthetics with its bright black appearance. City crews and contractors are currently crack sealing and micromilling streets in preparation for slurry seal work. “The slurry contractors are mobilizing basically next week.
Tuesday’s work included State Street between Ortega and Carrillo streets.
They’re doing a little test strip on Anacapa (today) on the 1700 block, then they’ll be paving the Harbor and East and West (Cabrillo, later in the day),” said Adam Ziets, acting project engineer for the city’s Engineering Division. Anacapa Street from Micheltorena Street to Constance Avenue will be paved with a slurry seal all of the week after Memorial Day, and will be finished June 1, according to Mr. Ziets. From there, crews will move from street to street. The city’s Public Works Department is expected to receive a three-week schedule for the remaining streets today.
“We’ll know more about how these other streets will start to fall into the framework of (crew’s) operations,” said Mr. Ziets. The project was approved by the City Council in November 2019, and uses Measure C funds for its approximately $6 million budget. The outbreak of the COVID19 pandemic has not thrown the project off schedule. “In general, it’s helped having less problems on the road. Normally you’d have more delays on these projects, and we’ve had good weather and no traffic,” said Mr. Ziets. “It has presented some issues because of the parking. I believe
people are at home more, so it’s harder to get them to comply with no parking signs. It makes the scheduling more difficult, because if you tell a neighborhood you can’t park here on this week and then the work’s all over town, so it’s hard to know when you’re going to be exactly on which street.” To efficiently complete the Pavement Delivery Program for 2020, the city split the project into two parts, 2020-A Pavement Maintenance Project and 2020-B. Although there have been no delays for part A, part B, which involves grinding off deteriorated pavement and overlaying new asphalt on high-priority streets, has been pushed back to July, with work expected to begin in August. Part B was originally scheduled to begin during part A some time in May. “We’ve taken a step back and pushed it out a little bit so the two projects aren’t overlapping. Had we gone forward with the schedule, we would have had these two contracts under way at the same time. They’re two different contractors and then we would have had a lot more of the city under construction,” said Mr. Ziets. The project is expected to be completed by the end of 2020. Additional work may be added to utilize remaining funding. email: cwhittle@newspress.com
Mayor launches weekly State of the City address By CHRISTIAN WHITTLE NEWS-PRESS STAFF WRITER
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ver the next five weeks, Santa Barbara Mayor Cathy Murillo will present a series of weekly State of the City addresses related to the COVID-19 crisis. The addresses will be 12minutes and aired on KEYT News Now, Cox Cable channel 13. A bilingual written version will be distributed for the hearingimpared, and Spanish versions of the address will be aired later in the week on Radio Bronco FM 107.7 and La Musical FM 94.5. The address can also be viewed on YouTube at https://youtu.be/ Tmf4y_lU6TE.
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Mayor Murillo gave her first address Monday at 4 p.m. In it she acknowledged the widespread hardship caused by the coronavirus crisis and responded to calls to reopen the city immediately. “The city is not in a position to willfully disregard California’s order. That’s not who we are—and surely that does not align with our value system as Santa Barbarans. Education, Public health, and public safety must rule the day. COVID-19 is not going away,” said Mayor Murillo. Mayor Murillo shared that the city was at the beginning of a modified phase two reopening strategy that aligns with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s four-phased strategy, but that the COVID-19
outbreak at Lompoc Prison skews the county’s data and prevents it from meeting Gov. Newsom’s mandate requiring there be no COVID-related deaths in the last two weeks before opening businesses further. “The City Council and I are supportive of the Board of Supervisors’ letter to the governor asking his office to reevaluate the benchmark and exclude Lompoc prison from our local COVIDcount,” said Mayor Murillo. Mayor Murillo ended her address explaining the city’s fourpronged strategy to make up for its projected $12.3 million budget shortfall in 2020 and $9.7 million shortfall in 2021. The strategy for 2020 includes holding vacant more than 100
city positions, deferring capital expenditures, slowing nonessential spending and tapping into available financial reserves. Mayor Murillo also explained the city’s four-pronged strategy for Fiscal Year 2021, which begins July 1. The city will make service reductions at the department level, defer capital expenditures and available contracts, will meet with labor partners, negotiate concessions and will continue to draw on the city’s rainy day fund. “There is no sugarcoating our future. This hurts, but with each passing day, we get closer to a time when we can tell a distant story of how we survived the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Mayor Murillo. email: cwhittle@newspress.com
NEWS-PRESS STAFF WRITER
Eager to accelerate the reopening of businesses that have been closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the County Board of Supervisors unanimously voted to send documents for attestation to the California Department of Public Health on Tuesday. If ultimately approved in the attestation process, Santa Barbara County would move into the second half of Stage 2 in the state’s four-step Resilience Roadmap. This would allow for
the reopening of shopping malls, swap meets, tanning facilities, school and childcare facilities, and dine-in restaurants. Santa Barbara County cannot move into Stage 3 until Gov. Gavin Newsom decides to move the state as a whole into the next phase. During Tuesday’s meeting, Van Do-Reynoso, director of the Santa Barbara County Public Health Department, delineated how the county now meets all of the required variance criteria for Please see riSe on A8
NEWS-PRESS FILE PHOTO
The ACLU has filed a federal class-action lawsuit on behalf of Lompoc Federal Prison inmates.
Federal prisons bureau sued ACLU files suit on behalf of Lompoc Federal Prison inmates; one inmate’s mother speaks out By PAUL GONZALEZ NEWS-PRESS STAFF WRITER
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n Saturday, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal class-action lawsuit on behalf of prisoners at the federal prison complex in Lompoc. The lawsuit claims prison administrators mishandled the coronavirus outbreak. The Lompoc prison complex includes a medium security penitentiary, called United States Penitentiary, Lompoc, and an adjacent low security satellite camp called Federal Correctional Institution Lompoc. Prison Warden Louis Milusnic and Federal Bureau of Prisons director Michael Carvajal are
personally named in the lawsuit. ACLU attorneys filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. It includes a petition for writ of habeas corpus, which argues that the prisoners should be released because the conditions of their detention are illegal. “Because of the unlawful conduct of Respondents, Petitioners and the Class are threatened with imminent physical injury, pain and suffering, emotional distress, humiliation, and death,” the lawsuit read. As of May 14, the complex housed 2,680 inmates. The lawsuit claims 60% of the inmate population has tested positive Please see Suit on A8
Error made with comics Because of a production error, Monday’s comics were repeated in Tuesday’s News-Press. We apologize for the mistake. You can find the correct comics in Tuesday’s virtual edition at newspress.com.
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L O t t e rY r e S uLt S
Comics................. A6 Local ................ A 2-8 Obituaries ............ A8
Saturday’s SUPER LOTTO: 3-9-23-27-35 Meganumber: 16
Tuesday’s DAILY 4: 7-0-8-1
Friday’s MEGA MILLIONS: 11-17-32-33-46 Meganumber: 25
Tuesday’s FANTASY 5: 18-23-28-36-37
Saturday’s DAILY DERBY: 12-08-01 Time: 1:42.32
Saturday’s POWERBALL: 8-12-26-39-42 Meganumber: 11
Soduku ................ A5 Weather ............... A8
Tuesday’s DAILY 3: 6-7-1 / Evening 0-0-5