Public Safety Top Priority in Santa Maria

Santa Maria Mayor Alice Patino and City Manager Rick Haydon delivered the annual State of the City to dozens of business owners, residents and other stakeholders in the city at the Santa Maria Fairpark Wednesday.

At Arrow Camera on East Main Street in downtown Santa Maria, business is pointed in the right direction.

“Business is good, really can’t complain”, says owner Margrit Holmes,”its a great city, wonderful, don’t have any complaints.”

“A lot of people think we are doing a pretty good job”, said Mayor Alice Patino in her State of the City address, “there’s some that don’t, and they come to the City Council and let us know about that.”

Mayor Patino said the city is moving in the right direction.

“Back in January the City Council got together and decided what our goals are going to be, we met with the department heads and we may have goals that we think are important but sometimes they aren’t reasonable”, Patino said, “but the goals that we put down for 2014-2016, because government takes a long time to get anything accomplished, we’re going to continue to focus on the fundamentals of the city government, improve community aesthetics, code compliance activities in neighborhoods, we’re getting more and more calls from people to do more code compliance especially from businesses.”

“We’ve got people who park their cars on their front lawns, leave their trash cans out until the next week when the trash truck comes again, and so all these things we need to do at the city and we are trying to be very proactive in this, not just proactive but we want to educate people”, Patino said, “we’ve been going around doing the walk and talks, which came out of the town hall meetings that we started over a year ago, so that we could find out what people really wanted from the city and where the direction was to go, I believe its important to go into the communities and ask people what they want not tell them what they want.”

The Mayor said the city’s soon to be opened new police headquarters at the corner of Blosser and Betteravia Roads is a major investment in the future of public safety in Santa Maria and the region.

“This will be a state of the art building, 72,000 square feet”, Patino said, “if any of you have been into our police department right now, you’ll notice people are practically sitting on each others laps to get the job done, boxes, files are stacked all over the place.”

“We purchased the building for $13.7 million, so right now we have about $27 million dollars into that facility”, said City Manager Rick Haydon, “70,000 square foot, to put it in perspective, the City of Santa Barbara is taking a look at a 40,000 square foot facility and they are spending an estimated, upwards of $65 million dollars, half the size of our facility, almost twice as much as what we were able to do.”

“Why is that?”, Haydon said, “that’s the Santa Maria way, we tried to be creative in what we did rather than purchasing and starting from the ground up, getting the land, building the facility, we looked to see what was existing, and the inventory and we took advantage of that facility, we purchased it from Lockheed Martin.”

Haydon said Santa Maria remains one of the leanest, more efficient cities on the Central Coast in terms of the number of its employees and how it spends the majority of its annual budget on public safety and utility services like water, trash collection and maintenance.

He said the new SMPD Headquarters will also help generate revenue for the city.

“We anticipate moving in probably in the Spring, early Summer, Phase 3 will be when our dispatchers move in which will be in the Fall, and the new facility comes with a lot of possibilities for the city”, Haydon said.

“First off, we purchased a new radio communication system which will be an inter-operable system, it will basically allow us to link this region by radio communication, there’s only two other areas in the State of California that has a radio communication system that is inter-operable, one is in LA and the other one is up in the Bay Area, we will be the only one in the central San Joaquin Valley, Central Coast area that will have that capability”, Haydon said about the new headquarters building.

“Since the Police Department will be one of the most fortified buildings in the City of Santa Maria, and its going to be operated 24 hours a day, and we have to move all of our infrastructure from a telecommunications standpoint and a computer standpoint to that facility, we built a room to hold all of our servers”, Haydon said, “the room is large enough that we can contract with other outside entities and we can be a server farm for them, we already have interest from about three other companies in Santa Maria that would like to start putting their servers in our facility, so we see that as another way to generate additional revenue, thinking outside the box, in order to make our tax dollars go further.”

What happens to the decades old police headquarters building on Cook Street in downtown next to City Hall?

“We are currently in discussions with the County of Santa Barbara to see if they would like to take that facility from us to either relocate the County Probation Office downtown or to extend their (adjacent) court facility”, Haydon said.

Mayor Patino says she hears more complaints about the homeless and panhandling in the city, pointing out many of those with their hands out are not homeless and come from out of town knowing how generous people in Santa Maria are.

Patino also addressed the issue of water and the ongoing severe drought across the state.

“There’s people in the southern part of our county that talk about conservation all the time, we do a really good job here in Santa Maria conserving water, we have the annual demand of 14,000 acre feet and you can see we get State Water, plus a mix of the groundwater, we come up with 14,000 acre feet”, Patino told those in attendance, “we’re sitting on an aquifer that is about two and a half to three million acre feet of water, so that is a lot of water, and that doesn’t mean we can waste it, but I think its really important for you to know that.”

“About a month and a half ago, at City Council, we passed a resolution saying that we would do all these things that the Governor wanted us to do to conserve water, and that’s fine and we don’t mind doing that”, Patino said, “but people I know in the Santa Maria Valley are getting mixed messages on water, and so we are not Lompoc, we’re not Santa Barbara, we’re not Montecito, we’re Santa Maria, and we know how to manage our water just like we know how to manage a lot of other things, but we are sitting on a very large aquifer.”

The Mayor said the city has a plan in place to revitalize the downtown area, now its up to private investors and property owners to take advantage of the zoning changes.

Patino says the city’s finances are on more solid footing thanks to the ongoing economic recovery.

“We’ve always needed to have more money coming in and I’m certainly someone who doesn’t want more taxes”, Patino said, “so we have to develop and be more creative with more revenue sources.”

As for small business owner Margrit Holmes at Arrow Camera on East Main Street, “perhaps morefoot traffic that would be my wish list, its always good to have more business so if we can do anything to promote more business that would be great.”