I recently wrote about the Santa Barbara County budget hearing wherein the board discussed soaring labor costs (over $700 million in salaries, benefits and pensions), failing infrastructure (over $500 million worth), while proposing new taxes so that they can grow government even more. (They already have a $1.5 billion budget and 4,628 employees!)

This pervasive growth of government comes at the expense of the private sector, which is paying the bills for all the above! Overbearing regulations, including the torturously slow and uncertain permitting process, along with high taxes and fees, hinder economic development and job creation.

For example, did you know that our No. 1 tourist attraction is the wine industry, which draws over 50% of the tourists coming to the Central Coast? Yet this industry has an uphill battle drawing and serving these tourists in a manner that is standard in the industry in places like our neighbor to the north, San Luis Obispo County! How so?

Because there are so many competing wine labels in stores and restaurants, it is vital for vintners to draw people to their wineries for a first-hand impression.  Wineries elsewhere do this by offering food, entertainment and events such as weddings to wine lovers.  However, in Santa Barbara County, offering any of these value-added accouterments has always been a battle.

Moreover, over 50% of the grapes grown in Santa Barbara County must be shipped out of the county for processing because county supervisors will not permit facilities that are large enough to process our grapes locally. Why? Because they want to keep the county as “rural” as possible even at the expense of our farmers obviously!

Lost on our supervisors is the fact that bottling and selling wine here has a 3x or more multiplier effect for our local economy. That is, $3,000 worth of raw fruit becomes $10,000 worth of wine and jobs!

Well, we thought we had seen it all until the county planning commission required some local grape growers to pay for a very costly environmental impact report to build frost ponds for their vineyard. Frost ponds must be used to store water that is sprayed on the vines to prevent the fruit from being damaged by freezing temperatures.

Nobody, I mean nobody, has ever had to do anything more than get an over-the-counter permit to build a frost pond until now. The ag community is aghast as evidenced by a letter from the county Farm Bureau to the planning commission.

One of the excuses the county planning commission gave for what amounted to this overwrought 5-year delay is that the project is located some 10 miles outside of the town of Cuyama, which is in serious overdraft. However, the planning commissioners have ignored the fact that via the implementation of the State Groundwater Management Act, which is now the prevailing authority on water use by both urbanites and farmers throughout the state, no restrictions have been placed on this vineyard’s use of water. That is because this vineyard does not draw from the same aquifer as does the area in overdraft.  Hello?

Moreover, to add more insult to injury, the local vintners who created and manage this vineyard are some of the most respected people in the industry.  Their families go back several generations in this county. Furthermore, the wines coming off this vineyard are rated among the top 100 in the world!

Instead of celebrating this incredible accomplishment, the county’s obscene abuse and overreach on this project are risking the yields to be destroyed by frost while creating dangerous precedent for other vintners!  

Hence, Santa Barbara County hinders the growing, the bottling and the most effective method of marketing grapes, while pretending to support farmers. Talk about the wrath for grapes! We could and should be awash in red (and white!) wine rather than red ink.

Andy Caldwell is the COLAB executive director and host of “The Andy Caldwell Show,” airing 3 to 5 p.m. weekdays on KZSB AM 1290, the News-Press radio station.