Dave Alley
ORCUTT, Calif. (KEYT) – A months-long project designed to help clean-up and beautify Orcutt is now underway in the community.
Work has been taking place along several Orcutt roadways the past six weeks with the goal to help enhance and improve the overall appearance of the unincorporated Northern Santa Barbara County community.
“I would call it a beautiful project, where we’re making the community look a little bit better, getting rid of some of the blight,” said Santa Barbara County Fourth District Supervisor Bob Nelson. “I’ve been with the County for almost 15 years and we’ve never done anything like this. I’ve lived in Orcutt all my life, and there’s never been somebody pulling it all together to get these types of these projects done. Our office as the county supervisor felt like that was necessary for us to kind of step up, seeing that there was a void there to close that gap.”
Workers have been in action since July, including on Monday at the busy intersection of Union Valley Parkway and South Bradley Road, an area in where several mismatched colored barrier walls could be seen in the past.
“It was really kind of a patchwork of paint throughout the community, where someone would cover up something in the past (with paint), and then somebody else would come use another paint (color) down the line,” said Nelson. “We want to create uniformity because uniformity looks nicer. It’s more esthetically pleasing. If something looks bad, it’s a lot easier for somebody to do some graffiti or to do some type of vandalism. When something looks nice, you typically get a better treatment of that. It’s kind of the broken window theory. If somebody breaks one window, then it’s easier to break the second window and then it goes downhill from there.”
Now, after several weeks of beautification, people who pass along the work-zone areas will notice a much improved look.
“We’ve been pressure washing walls, painting walls, clearing weeds,” said project manager Hunter Hall. “It’s a pretty common sight in Orcutt to see weeds up to the hips, so we’re tackling that and making sure that we’re clearing the right of ways, making sure that our sidewalks are clean, that there is no dirt on them, that the weeds are taken down. We’re painting about five miles of walls. It’s the biggest, in terms of scale painting project, that the North County has seen in a very long time.”
Besides the general esthetics of having one uniform color, Nelson added another key reason to have a same color throughout the town is to make it easier for residents to help provide care in the future.
“It’s going to give us a nice blank palette moving forward so that we can maintain it a lot easier, not only maintain it from our office, but now we have a paint palette that any homeowner can go down to hardware store and buy for themselves and continue to maintain where we started here,” said Nelson.
This current phase of the project is expected to last for at least six more weeks and include many of the busiest roadways in the Orcutt community.
“We’re doing Union Valley (Parkway) all the way from (Highway) 101 to Hummel Road,” said Hall. “We’re doing Bradley (Road) all the way from Santa Maria Way to Rice Ranch Road, and Clark Avenue from the (Highway) 1 to the 101.”
Looking further ahead, Nelson added there are plans to continue the project to include other areas of Orcutt.
“We’re going to start with the rough work here and then we’re going to actually use (Santa Barbara County) Public Works, and we’re going to bring in some landscaping moving forward in our next phase,” said Nelson. “We’re also going to be looking at Orcutt Road and some of the other areas, Foster (Road), potentially Lakeview (Road) in the future, trying to get a little bit more uniformity there.”
Nelson estimated the cost of the project will land between $200,000 to $300,000 and will be paid mostly from a federal grant.
“We’re combining local funds that we have in our district office,” said Nelson. “As a county supervisor, I have funds that come into my office and I’ve been reallocating towards this project. We’ve also been able to pull down a federal FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) grant that was awarded to the county based on past storms. We are also pulling in some of the youth in our community to work these projects. These are students at Hancock (College) and our local colleges. They are getting a chance to get some work study. They’re actually getting out there and developing some skills and making a few dollars.”
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