The proposed site of one of five or six separate communities that would be built at North Hills, a proposed town of 7,500 homes. Photo by Alexios Monopolis.

The trip was organized by the county to provide the commission and the public with a firsthand view of the town site, which lies between highways 101 and 135 on the south side of the Solomon Hills.

As the caravan of buses wound slowly along dirt roads, passing through abandoned oil fields, vacant pastures and dense oak woodlands, representatives for the developers, Randy Wheeler and Jack Washburn, pointed out where each of five or six separate communities, called “villages” or “enclaves,” would be built.

Randy Wheeler. Photo by Alexios Monopolis

North Hills is the largest housing project ever to be proposed in Santa Barbara  County by a single developer. On Tuesday, meeting in Santa Maria, the commission will decide whether to recommend that the county begin reviewing a general plan amendment for the project, the first step toward rezoning the property from agricultural to residential use. Under the present zoning, only 40 homes could be built.

The county planning and development staff is urging the commission to vote “yes.” And Wheeler says he will have a surprise guest, a well-known environmentalist, on hand Tuesday to speak in favor of the proposal. In addition, he said, the project designer, Peter Calthorpe, an innovator in urban planning, will make a presentation.

Map by Mary Koenig / SBN

The county Board of Supervisors will have the final say on July 10 whether to kick off the study. Earlier this year, invoking the pastoral countryside of Tuscany, the board said it wanted to consider the “village center/rural retreat” concept as a way of addressing local demands for new housing. North Hills would supply about 1,500 homes for low- and moderate-income workers, more than meeting state mandates for this decade.

Some of the residents who took the tour on Tuesday said they liked the idea but wondered where the water would come from for a new town with a population of about 17,000.

“I’m just very aware in California, with our cyclical droughts, that the year you need the water is the year you can’t deliver it,” said Mary Hintz, a member of the Orcutt Area Advisory Group and the local chapter of the League of Women Voters.

Jack Washburn is president of BreitBurn Land. Photo by Alexios Monopolis

The price for Santa Maria’s water would be $113 million, Ness said, and North Hills would be responsible for building the wells and pumping the water out of the ground. The developers, he said, must first sign off on the draft letter, and then the council would vote on it in a public hearing, most likely within six months.

Oil field safety

Another topic of Thursday’s tour was oil development, and there were many signs of it, past and present, as the buses passed miles of pipelines draped across the land. At one point, the drivers had to negotiate a hairpin turn around a crew of workers lowering a heavy crane over an active oil well.

The North Hills property is comprised of two oil fields. Photo by Alexios Monopolis.

The other oil field, where the homes would go, is operated by a separate company, the report states. The surface rights to this land are owned by Orcutt Fee LLC, represented by Washburn, the president of BreitBurn Land. Any study of a general plan amendment to allow 7,500 homes would investigate potential safety hazards from present and past oil development and assess all past and future cleanup activities, the report notes.

“This has been a very clean and well-run oil field,” Chris Lee, a consulting planner for the developers, told the tour participants on Thursday. “There was not a gusher up here.”

Lee tried to get visitors to look beyond the debris of oil development and imagine village centers connected by trails — pedestrian-friendly and eco-friendly, drawing on solar and wind energy with a “low carbon footprint.”

“The whole idea is a village concept, putting densities into pockets as opposed to spread and sprawl, as in Tuscany, Umbria and Brittany,” Lee said. “These hills have a lot of inspiration in them. If you can save some of these oaks and tuck houses back in here, it’s a real advantage. These oaks can save thousands of dollars in landscape. It’s hard to even put a value on that.”

But for Darlene Chirman, a tour participant and president of the Santa Barbara Audubon Society, the thick oak woodlands on the North Hills property are valuable for other reasons.

“It’s a very interesting habitat area, full of native species of plants,” she said. “It’s relatively pristine.”