Not much was clear by the time the six-hour Santa Barbara City Council meeting on the future of State Street ended Tuesday night.
Except for how people felt about Tess Harris, the city’s State Street master planner.
“Tess, you are a saint,” said downtown property owner Peter Lewis. “Putting up with the trauma, tension and community division, you are remarkable, really, really remarkable.”
Councilmember Mike Jordan called her presentation “one of the best narratives” he has seen in more than 20 years as a councilmember and planning commissioner.
“I was ready to stand up and applaud, but I would have been the only person and looked pretty silly,” he said.
Harris beamed in reaction to the praise, a rare point of agreement in the room on an issue that has flustered City Hall for nearly six years.
The seven-member City Council took multiple votes on various elements related to the 153-page State Street Master Plan, but generally concluded that eight blocks of downtown should be a place for bike riders and pedestrians, with access for shuttles and emergency vehicles.
How cars fit into the street’s future is less clear.
The plan calls for approximately 30-foot sidewalks with areas for outdoor dining, pedestrian
travel, disability access and furnishings.
Two 10-foot travel lanes in each direction would serve cyclists and transit during the day.
A bollard system, with eight retractable and 16 to 24 fixed posts at eight intersections, is also likely. Transit vehicles and approved small shuttles would be equipped with technology that automatically lowers the bollards on approach.
The master plan had proposed that private vehicles could use the street between 10 p.m. and 10 a.m., but that suggestion sparked wide opposition from many of the bicycle advocates who spoke during the meeting. Service and delivery vehicles are already allowed on the street during those hours.
The council could not agree whether people should be able to drive during that span, so it wiped the idea from the plan for now.
All of the changes would cost the city $48 million to $64 million — about $6 million to $8 million per block.
“It is a generational investment,” Harris said.
The money could come from capital dollars, a general obligation bond, state transportation funds, stormwater in-lieu funds, a property assessment district expansion, hotel tax re-investment, parking revenue, federal and state grant opportunities and donations from the public, Harris said.
Under the plan, parades also could return to State Street. And the plan proposes changing Anacapa and Chapala into two-way, instead of one-way, streets.
The consultant the city hired for the project, architect Stefanos Polyzoides, based in Pasadena, called one-way streets “archaic.”
It took nearly three hours before the public even had the opportunity to speak, following Harris and Polyzoides’ presentation and questions from the council.
This issue will now move to the Historic Landmarks Commission, Planning Commission, Access Advisory Committee, Downtown Parking Committee and Transportation and Circulation Committee for review, anticipated in June 2026.
State Street has divided the community since the moment Rob Dayton, the city’s former supervising transportation planner, closed the street in the days after the COVID-19 pandemic exploded in 2020.
At the time, the idea was to close the street for the summer to allow restaurants to bring dining outdoors.
The city’s Historic Landmarks Commission was not allowed input into the closure or the design of the outdoor dining parklets.
But what was supposed to be a temporary change remained permanent. And while the cars disappeared, electric bikes have since emerged. E-bikes are now everywhere on downtown State Street. It’s common for riders to whiz by at high speeds in the middle of the street.
Polyzoides said in other places, e-bikes typically occupy 5-foot lanes, not 10 feet like what is currently allowed on State Street.
“We are going to expect people on e-bikes to behave,” Polyzoides said.
Most of the pedestrians on State, as well as outdoor dining, have moved back to the sidewalks.
Several property and business owners have pushed for the street to be reopened to cars.
Mayor Randy Rowse has been the city’s most significant advocate for reopening to personal vehicles. But he has faced substantial opposition from bike advocates, including a community organization called Strong Towns SB, which pushed for no private vehicles on the eight blocks of downtown State Street at any hour.
Sullivan Israel, founder of Strong Towns SB, said he liked 95% of the plan, but he thought the idea of allowing cars on State Street overnight was wrong. He said he showed people renderings of the proposed new street during the recent Earth Day festival.
People were supportive of a car-less street, but said when he told them, “this picture is going to have headlights and taillights and break lights on it, and people waiting to cross the street, then everyone went, ‘Huh?’ “
Santa Barbara native Michael Mata disagreed. He said the city is changing too much.
“I see this and it doesn’t look like State Street,” Mata said. “It doesn’t look like Santa Barbara at all.”
He said it would be better to open State Street to cars again.
“We’re losing the tradition, we’re losing the culture here with this whole new Santa Barbara,” Mata said.
The issue of cars is not settled. And the public will have the opportunity to make written comments and speak at advisory board meetings through June.
“I am not ready today to say you cannot put vehicles on State Street,” Jordan said.
Councilmember Meagan Harmon called the draft master plan a “smashing succes,” and although she does not support allowing cars to return, she said that the bicycle- and pedestrian-only advocates need to understand there isn’t community consensus on the issue.
“I do think it is important that we be open to compromise,” Harmon said. “I worry that if we were to fully take it off the table right now, there are going to be people in the community for whom they feel downtown is not for them.
“I think there is something to be said for compromises where not one party gets 100% of what they want,” Harmon said.
Councilmember Wendy Santamaria pointed out that the draft master plan was not available in Spanish, and City Administrator Kelly McAdoo said staff would work to make it available by June.
Mayor Rowse has long pushed for the street to be re-opened to cars, while the master plan issues are worked out.
“I would ask for a reset of this,” Rowse said.
He said: “We’re making a big investment, and we are trying to turn State into something it is not. It is a street. Our main street. It’s not a park. It’s a street.”
He said he didn’t know whether returning cars to State Street would boost sales at downtown retail shops.
“Are cars going to bring that back?” Rowse asked. “I don’t know. But what I know is what is there now is not working.”
But Polyzoides, the architect hired by the city for about $500,000, offered a different perspective.
“We’ve worked in a number of places in California and the country over a 40-year period, and I would say without any reservation that Santa Barbara is among the top 10 most important cities in the United States in terms of its cultural and historic importance,” Polyzoides said. “It really is an extraordinary place.”
