The Santa Barbara County Civil Grand Jury released a report recently stating that the City of Santa Barbara’s service portal “SB Connect” struggles in its ability to alert people of project progress.
SB Connect has been the City of Santa Barbara’s official, non-emergency service request portal since September 23, 2023. Typically what gets reported are municipal issues like potholes, graffiti, road signs as well as general code compliance.
The report, titled “From Complaint to Closure: Gaps in the City of Santa Barbara’s Service Request Process,” states that users are not being updated regularly with project progress. In the calendar year of 2025, 42% of issues were resolved by City Staff, 40% were routed to departments that do not use SB Connect and 18% were automatically closed without City Staff involvement.
“Accurate, timely status tracking is the second and most consequential promise of SB Connect,” reads the report. “If residents cannot tell whether the City received, routed, and acted on a service request, the system’s value as a single point of contact is substantially reduced.”
The report considers SB Connect to be, in general, needlessly complicated. Highlighted is the 15-step process users must follow to submit a request of any kind— asking for general information like the type of report, its address, whether or not people are present as well as a description of the issue.
Additionally, the report states that users who have their language settings set to Spanish are often not routed to SB Connect as easily as those with their language set to English. For instance, on the City of Santa Barbara website’s contact page for English-language users includes a button that will take you to the service portal. In contrast, only an email address is displayed for Spanish-language users.
The report also states that there is no one person within City Staff who is responsible for routing requests from SB Connect to their respective city departments.
The report praises the portal’s “Nearby Requests” page for its ability to keep residents informed of reoccurring issues. However, the report believes its full potential is not being realized by not alerting residents of any progress on the displayed issues.
“Based on interviews conducted across numerous City departments, the Grand Jury found that accountability for SB Connect is poorly defined,” the report states. “Multiple individuals were identified as primary contacts or managers for the system, yet none possessed clear authority to direct policy changes across departments.”
The Santa Barbara City Council has 90 days to respond to the report.
Kelly McAdoo, the city administrator, told the News-Press that the city has known about the issues with SB Connect prior to the Grand Jury’s report and that a response is being worked on.
