Map of Santa Barabara County’s Calle Real Campus
UltraSystems Completes Preparation of CEQA Documents for Calle Real Master Plan
UltraSystems was honored to provide environmental consulting services for the Santa Barbara County Calle Real Master Plan update. This initiative will redevelop the Calle Real Campus over the next 20 years in an effort to create better services for the community.
The County of Santa Barbara (“County”) set out several years ago to develop a Master Plan for their government and community service offices. The objective is to redesign the Calle Real Campus and its facilities, in order to bring efficiencies to the County’s operations and create a “one-stop” service center for their community gathering needs. The mission is to “deliver exceptional services so Santa Barbara County’s communities can enjoy a safe, healthy, and prosperous life”. To fulfill this vision, the County has outlined five main objectives to this extensive project: eliminate buildings that are beyond their useful lives, streamline services across departments as applicable, incorporate the goals and objectives of the county’s Renew 2022 initiative, and maximize current vacant space.
The Calle Real Master Plan has been designed to centralize much of the county government and community services that it currently provides by establishing five distinct campuses to better serve its residents: the public safety campus, the county yards campus, the health and government center campus, the jail campus, and the community services campus. The goal is to identify synergies between departments that can then be used to streamline services. By using current space more efficiently the county hopes to maintain currently undeveloped land and protect views and access to natural resources throughout the Calle Real Campus.
Senior Project Manager, Hina Gupta, presenting information at the Santa Barbara County scoping meeting with County staff and the general public.
UltraSystems provided all environmental documentation related to this project. An Initial Study was performed in the Fall of 2023 and concluded that a number of environmental factors possibly affected by this project would in fact have a potentially significant impact on the environment. Therefore, a Notice of Preparation was prepared, and a public hearing was held to inform the public of UltraSystems intent to perform a Programmatic Environmental Impact Report (PEIR). The PEIR was required to examine the specific impacts more closely as they relate to the environment and provide a list of all recommendations for any mitigation and/or monitoring measures. The environmental impacts and potential mitigation measures were presented for public comment, and responded to, to complete the environmental documentation phase.
UltraSystems was pleased to be part of another large project that will assist the County in efforts to better serve its community. UltraSystems looks forward to working with the County of Santa Barbara on future projects as their community continues to grow and thrive.
About Santa Barbara County Planning & Development Department
We plan, support, and promote safe and sustainable land uses and development that foster social, cultural, economic, and environmental resilience and diversity by providing quality policy development, permitting, and inspection services for Santa Barbara County.
About UltraSystems
UltraSystems, founded in 1994, is a multi-disciplinary, full service environmental consulting and planning firm serving both the public and private sectors. The 30-year-old firm provides expertise in development planning; site selection and analysis; CEQA and NEPA compliance; technical studies, and environmental compliance during construction. UltraSystems Environmental is a certified DBE, SBE, and WBE company that is headquartered in Irvine, California.
