A heatwave this past August caused air conditioning units to fail across Santa Barbara, including at the federal bankruptcy court at 1415 State Street. The heat that grew intolerable on the second floor might just bring about the removal of the Santa Barbara News-Press case from the venue, away from the city that the daily print publication covered for more than 150 years.
The Santa Barbara property that holds the Northern Division of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California belongs to Wendy P. McCaw, the billionaire publisher of the News-Press when it filed for bankruptcy in July 2023. She owns a number of significant pieces of real estate around town, and her property management company was in charge of maintaining the air conditioning at the courthouse. A stream of emails between “ampersandsb” and the court’s facility managers indicated it would be days before the repairman could get there and that someone was getting hot under the collar about it.
Who that someone was is redacted in the emails presented in an exhibit that McCaw’s attorneys filed recently. Also redacted is who was present to discuss “an ongoing rent withholding dispute concerning conditions in courthouse” at a Facility Security Committee meeting in August. In fact, the entire meeting document is a series of big black boxes in the exhibit McCaw’s attorneys filed in step one of a two-step process. They must first get the court’s permission to use redacted documents before they can file their motion to change the venue of the bankruptcy proceedings. That motion has not yet been filed, but the implication is that the court holds prejudice against their client…