The “Master Plan” for State Street has been adopted by City Council after six years of
indecision and stagnation.
Property values and commercial rents have fallen, emergency response times are impeded and traditional cultural activities have been displaced for seven summers now.
The “Plan” which is yet to be technically engineered is estimated to cost nearly
$100 million which the city doesn’t currently have. All of this to adopt a concept which has
been tried and failed all over the country for many decades. It is a road to the past, not the
future for our downtown business corridor and that is the primary reason I have opposed it.
The positive developments, i.e., the redevelopment of the Paseo Nuevo mall into offices and
housing, the SB Film Festival Theater Complex on State and the Music Academy of the West
are fortunately happening not because of the current condition of State Street, but in spite of it.
Santa Barbara remains a renowned international destination and an incredible city in which to
live. We should be mindful of that as we plan to permanently modify what we have, instead of
maintaining the core beauty and value of the city and architecture we all love.
So where does $100 million come from? Perhaps there might be some grant funding out
there, and we could issue more debt or assess more in taxes. In any case, it will involve the
diversion of Measure C money, a one percent sales tax that was passed in 2017 to improve our
roads, build a new Police Station, re-do Dwight Murphy Park and replace Fire Station 7 in the
high-fire district.
Until now, that measure has been utilized to perform the initial tasks as promised, but State Street’s closure and makeover were never on the menu. The re-shuffling of fiscal priorities in a time of an already precarious budget is unwise.
The plan’s rendererings, while attractive and fanciful, provide no strategy for economic
improvement, outside of the hope that 2,000 to 4,000 more people will reside downtown in
housing units that don’t yet exist. At the current city-wide pace of housing development, that is
many decades away at best. The constricted circulation has been on display since the road
closed in 2020, has not helped business vitality and has hampered public safety.
One of my colleagues recently stated that “diminishing rents and property values were not her
problem”……that, my friends, is the proverbial “Canary in the Coal Mine.”
The shrinking value of private assets is not a healthy sign for an economy that, when robust, serves everyone. The simple solution is to re-open our main street, add pedestrian lighting and do some deep cleaning. We need business and property values to recover and pay heed to those who have invested in the downtown corridor.
We live in one of the most amazing cities in the world…..let’s maintain and celebrate it. Let’s choose a successful future and not repeat the planning mistakes of the past.
