Our new home is in a neighborhood just behind a fold in the hills. Some of the neighborhoods we looked at last spring are hardly there anymore, burned down in the Thomas Fire.
I lived in Goleta from 1979 until then, and my husband from 1965 on. We never thought we'd leave, but with the kids grown and me wanting to fix the house and he not wanting to, we finally settled on buying my dream home in Ventura for a whole lot less than it would cost anywhere in Santa Barbara County.
I used to be very civically active, and have plenty of contacts to get started here, but at the moment -- well, it has been a fairly busy segment of time, what with one thing and another.
John Palminteri is right, if he's talking about Ventura. If SB is the culprit... I thought Santa Barbara County had things pretty well in hand, and thought that maybe I was just too new to Ventura to really figure things out. But after struggling repeatedly to get signed up for emergency notifications (NO, I do not want Amber Alerts), thinking I finally had it figured out as of 24 hours ago, only to get two updates hours too late to do me any good ... I may be losing patience.
Since you're on the Civil Grand Jury and are trying to get the emergency notification folks to talk to you, I do have a question about Senior Housing vis a vis emergencies. I have a friend who lives in the cottages downtown, and their instructions for potential evacuation during the Thomas Fire was that since they were in an independent living situation, they were expected to make their own arrangements. According to her, most of the residents don't have cars. She does, and she and a friend drove way out of town, but she was a bit shaken by that. I told her I thought she was within her rights to ask the Housing Authority why they were not prepared to load residents onto school busses (recalling all those unused and drowned busses in NOLA after Katrina).
Sorry this is really long. I don't know if I even answered your question.
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