Our view: Central Coast should be proud of 2025 milestones
As 2025 comes to a close, it would be easy to dwell on our affordability crisis, tariff mayhem and upheaval among our immigrant communities.
But we’d prefer to look on the half-full side of the glass and point to some landmark accomplishments during the past year.
• Amgen’s $600 million investment in the Conejo Valley with a research center on its Newbury Park campus will be a game changer for innovation in life sciences. Word is already rippling out that the area is going to be the next San Diego or South San Francisco when it comes to drug discovery.
• The Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant has been approved to operate for another 20 years, heading off an economic disaster for the San Luis Obispo-Santa Maria area and providing key base load power for all of California for the next two decades. Even the notoriously anti-business California Coastal Commission gave a green light to the license extension, a big win for operator PG&E. Now there is talk about operating a suite of next-generation, smaller plants on the property.
• The Ventura County Office of Education has stepped up skills training with the opening of a Welding and Testing Facility at the Career Education Center in Camarillo. It’s Ventura County’s first program American Welding Society. That’s just one of the many ways that schools and employers have come together to reinvigorate the region’s manufacturing sector. Now if only the worst of the tariffs would get negotiated away.
• The Cal Poly Tech Park will be opening its Phase Two expansion early next year. The tech park is essential for students to interact with major industry players and get the experience they need to jump-start their careers.
• Travelers up and down Highway 101 are finally getting a taste of what a couple of billion dollars will buy in terms of better transportation between busy Ventura and South Santa Barbara County. The improvements aren’t going to improve the ailing downtown business corridor in Santa Barbara, but they will be a significant relief for commuters and it will spark tourism expansion.
• Finally, when it comes to STEM education, you can’t do too much better than the Georgia Brown Dual Immersion School’s brand-new robotics program. Its elementary and junior high teams won top honors at a Santa Maria competition, and now they are on their way to the SoCal championships at UC Irvine.
STAY TUNED
As we approach the holidays, it’s time to put down your phone, turn off the TV and tune in to what really matters. The spirit of innovation is alive and well on the Central Coast and we are still incomparable as a magnet for talent and new ideas. We’ll be exploring many of those new ideas in our next print edition, the 2026 Forecast Issue, which will be publishing on Jan. 2.
