We haven’t actually asked him this, but Newsmakers feels safe speculating that there are days – a lot of days – when Santa Barbara Mayor Randy Rowse keeps asking himself, “Now why did I want to come back to this, again?”
To his credit, Hizzoner, who walked away from City Hall in 2019 only to return two years later, endured yet another ape dance City Council meeting this week: His colleagues frittered away four hours which, alas, none of us will ever recover, yammering about the apparently impenetrable cosmic mystery of how to move the 97 per cent of the population bereft of an electric bike up and down long stretches of State Street.
“I am sitting here listening to us spin ourselves into a tizzy, trying our best not to do the simplest thing on the planet,” said Rowse, an advocate of re-opening to traffic at least some of the nine blocks closed as an emergency Covid measure in (checks notes) 2020.
On this week’s edition of Newsmakers TV, Josh Molina recounts the hijinks and low drama in the latest chapter of Santa Barbara’s longest running civic soap opera, in which our elected worthies did manage to come to at least one actual decision -- painting bike lanes on the street, at the low-low cost of only $10K per block, in a modest bid to protect pedestrians who cheat death, inflicted by the two-wheel mafia, each time they successfully venture onto State Street.
Melinda Burns joins the gang to set the stage for next week’s first meeting in the controversial bankruptcy proceedings of the city’s defunct historic daily paper, which owes at least $5 million to a long list of creditors, not least a host of former employees.
Among those on the list of those owed (more than $75,000) was longtime features writer Marilyn McMahon, the grande dame of local journalism, who died last week at 93, a great Santa Barbara character and community treasure, about whom the panel shares some fond remembrances.
The trio also recall the life and times of David Pritchett, a hard-charging environmental activist, who also passed away in recent days, and whom former Community Development Director Dave Davis aptly recalled as a “brilliant bumblebee underneath your shirt.”
All this and more, right here, right now on Newsmakers TV.
JR
You can watch the latest episode via YouTube below or by clicking through this link. The podcast version is here. TVSB, Cox Cable Channel 17, airs the show at 8 p.m. on weeknights, and at 9 a.m. Saturday and Sunday. KCSB, 91-9 FM, broadcasts the program at 5:30 p.m. on Monday.
Image: Separated at birth? Booking mug shot of the 45th President of the United States and Vigo, aka Prince Vigo Von Homburg Deutschendorf, Scourge of Carpathia, Sorrow of Moldavia, Vigo the Carpathian, Vigo the Cruel, Vigo the Torturer, Vigo the Despised and Vigo the Unholy Carpathian, the main antagonist of Ghostbusters II (Twitter).
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