New Community Resource Deputy in Carpinteria
The Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office is has announced a new Community Resource Deputy for the City of Carpinteria: Senior Deputy James Carovano was selected to fill the position and has been on the job since July 1, 2019. Senior Deputy Carovano is a five-year veteran of the Sheriff’s Office and is currently assigned to the Coastal Patrol Bureau. He is a military veteran, having served with the United States Coast Guard and was previously employed as a Federal Law Enforcement Officer assigned to Yosemite National Park.
Sr. Deputy Carovano is a certified Field Training Officer and has completed several courses that will assist him in his new role. His tasks will include patrolling various parts of the City of Carpinteria on foot as well as on bicycle, in addition to availing himself to local schools to provide the necessary relationship between students, staff, and parents with local law enforcement.
Sr. Deputy Carovano says he is very much looking forward to taking the restored position of Community Resource Deputy for the City of Carpinteria to new heights and enhancing the relationship between the community and law enforcement. The City of Carpinteria contracts with the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Office for law enforcement services.
Sheffield Interchange Discussed at MBAR
Earlier this month, SBCAG and Caltrans representatives were in front of the Montecito Board of Architectural Review for conceptual review of the rebuild of the Sheffield Drive interchange, which is part of the larger project of widening Highway 101 from Carpinteria to the City of Santa Barbara.
MBAR members first saw conceptual plans back in November of last year; the plans seen on July 11 showed an overview of the design of the bridge, railing, columns, paving, retaining walls, sound walls, and landscaping. The project will remove the left-hand exit and entrance on the southbound side of the freeway, and reconfigure the bridge to allow for the traditional right-hand exit and entrance; the bridge will also allow for the widening of the freeway to three lanes in both directions.
The design team on the project explained that when the bridge was originally built in the 1950s, it was not built to be aesthetically pleasing. The new project will have design elements found in nearby Spanish-style buildings, with muted colors, decorative accents, and appropriate landscaping. The design is intended to retain the ocean vistas from the freeway, while adding skyline palm trees and other landscaping on the exterior borders of the lanes; the median landscaping, including the iconic cypress trees as one approaches Montecito, is slated for removal to accommodate the third lanes.
Members of MBAR voiced concern over the landscaping and the visual impact to the “entrance to Montecito.” “It’s lipstick on a pig,” said MBAR member John Watson. “I think it’s a nice shade of lipstick, and it’s well applied, but it’s still lipstick on a pig. What we’re getting is, left to right, solid concrete,” he said. Member Sam Maphis agreed, voicing concern over the use of palm trees instead of cypress and eucalyptus trees.
Kellam de Forest, whose father Lockwood de Forest was the landscape architect on what used to be known as the Montecito Parkway, wrote in a letter to MBAR that in 1927, Montecito resident John Jameson led a crusade to raise funds to buy land contiguous to the highway in order to assist the State in creating California’s first scenic parkway using planted center dividers and landscaped edges, including frontage roads, where all billboards and commercial structures were banned. “The Montecito Parkway became a model for cities from coast to coast, and was the genesis of California’s freeway system. The segment between San Ysidro and Olive Mill Roads was completed by 1937. After the hiatus of World War II, the parkway was extended to Sheffield Drive in 1949, to form one of the most beautiful approaches to a city found anywhere,” de Forest wrote in his letter. “Kindly make sure that the proposed widened highway retains its parkway ambiance and is adequately screened with plant material,” he wrote. “Remember its historic roots.”
Fred Luna with SBCAG told the board that there is flexibility in the design and landscaping choices, and that the design team plans to be back to MBAR in August, at which point revised renderings will be presented.
