Modoc Multi-Use Path Project Inches Forward

A number of obstacles run across the intended bike-hike-roll pathway Santa Barbara County is building along Modoc Road — trees, drains, water vaults, wetlands, and the residents of a nature preserve: foxes, skunks, opossums, bobcats, rabbits, monarch butterflies, and seasonal flowering plants. It is for the Modoc Preserve that the Board of Supervisors agreed on Tuesday, August 29, to spend $25,000 toward hiring an easement consultant to negotiate right-of-away along the preserve for a project still in a preliminary design stage.

The city half of the bike-pedestrian path is completed through to Via Senda — the little side shoot to La Cumbre Road from Modoc — and to the east reaches as far as the harbor and Montecito. The county’s portion of the 10-foot-wide Modoc Multi-Use Path, which runs along the south side of the road, heads west in three segments: two of them on county-owned land, and the middle section abutting the Modoc Preserve for 1,600 feet.

The preserve is roughly 30 acres of private property owned by La Cumbre Mutual Water Company, but a conservation easement over most of the land is administered by the Land Trust for Santa Barbara County. It also has a neighborhood across the road with activists who love the unkempt preserve and enjoy its natural beauty right at the base of Hope Ranch. They formed the Community Association for Modoc Preserve, or CAMP, and succeeded in reining in the number of trees to be cut to about 20 from about 80, depending on who you talk to. CAMP also filed a lawsuit arguing that issues remained with the environmental study results, a lawsuit that is in the mandatory settlement negotiation stage.