The fight over State Street is headed down two roads.
One leads to the courthouse, and the other to the ballot box.
As SIMA Corporation challenges Santa Barbara’s newly adopted State Street Master Plan in court over its environmental review, paid petition circulators are gathering signatures for a referendum against the ordinance that adopted the plan.
SIMA President Jim Knell said the company is pursuing both efforts because they challenge different parts of the city’s position.
“One action is about the flawed process, and the other is the flawed result of the broken process,” Knell said. “And both are wrong.”
Knell said the lawsuit targets what SIMA considers a failure on the city’s part to conduct environmental review prior to its adoption of the plan—while the referendum’s purpose is to give voters the opportunity to reverse the City Council’s decision.
The signatures of roughly 10% of the city’s registered voters are needed to qualify the referendum. If enough are collected, the ordinance would then be suspended and returned to the City Council for reconsideration.
If the council chooses not to repeal it, the ordinance will ultimately end up before voters.
Knell said that SIMA has hired a professional firm to help collect signatures during what he described as a short collection window, but declined to identify the firm or disclose how much SIMA is spending.
“We have committed to whatever it takes,” Knell said.
He also would not provide the number of signatures collected so far, saying only that the campaign has made “great progress” in roughly 10 days.
From a red camping chair outside Whole Foods on Upper State Street Monday, Mark Herd called out to passing shoppers as he gathered signatures for the State Street referendum.
Herd, who said he has worked professionally as a petition circulator since around 2012, told the News-Press that he is not running the Santa Barbara campaign, nor does he hold its signature-gathering contract.
Herd called the debate over whether State Street should be open or closed to cars a “red herring,” arguing that the referendum encompasses broader questions about the development envisioned for the corridor — including building heights and efforts to add housing, particularly affordable housing, downtown.
“This isn’t about lanes,” Herd said. “This is about the old plan or the new plan.”
Herd said he tells potential signers they are being asked to put the council’s decision before voters.
“I tell them the truth,” he said. “This is a referendum to overturn something.”
Knell, however, made clear that restoring vehicle access to State Street is one of SIMA’s primary goals.
He argued that the closure has hurt downtown businesses and said its reopening would “give it a chance to succeed.”
“We want our tenants to succeed; we want our tenants’ neighbors to succeed and bring life back to downtown,” Knell said.
If the referendum ultimately reaches voters, Knell said SIMA hopes they will reject the city’s direction for State Street.
“We are confident from our research and others’ research that the voters in Santa Barbara will vote to open State Street,” Knell said.
The referendum effort comes as the Master Plan is already being challenged in court.
The downtown property owner sued the city and Santa Barbara City Council on Sept. 29, arguing that city officials were responsible for conducting an environmental review prior to their approval of it.
The lawsuit asks a Santa Barbara County Superior Court judge to set aside the city’s environmental exemptions and ordinance adopting the plan, halt further implementation, and require the city to conduct an initial study and prepare an environmental impact report.
At the heart of the conflict is when exactly the environmental review of the State Street project is actually required.
The city maintains that adopting the Master Plan is not, in itself, authorization for any construction or physical changes to State Street and that, as soon as specific projects move into design and engineering, environmental review will take place.
“The State Street Master Plan is a planning document,” State Street Master Planner Tess Harris said in a statement ot the News-Press. “It sets a long-term vision and framework for the corridor, but adopting it doesn’t approve any construction, development, or physical change to the street.”
“Nothing on the ground changes as a direct result of the Plan’s adoption,” Harris added.
SIMA argues in its lawsuit that the city has already gone beyond simply adopting a long-term plan and has committed itself to a definite course of action before studying the project’s environmental effects.
The Master Plan calls for reconstruction of approximately one mile of State Street, including two 30-foot pedestrian sidewalks flanking a 20-foot central travel corridor, reconstructed drainage infrastructure, permeable pavement, and changes to trees and landscaping. The plan is expected to cost about $96 million, with construction set to start within 18 months and take about six months to complete.
As part of its adoption, the City Council also directed staff to begin procuring pre-construction, design, and engineering services, look into state and federal grants, and develop a multiyear capital investment commitment for the council to consider, according to the lawsuit.
SIMA contends those actions make the Master Plan substantially more than just a visioning document and argues that postponing environmental review until individual components of the project move forward amounts to unlawful piecemealing under CEQA.
Harris said the city’s position is that environmental review is more appropriately conducted once those projects become more specific.
“Environmental review will happen when the project moves forward in the pre-construction and engineering phase,” Harris said. “At that point, the project will be evaluated under CEQA based on its specific detailed design and scope, with the public review that goes along with it.”
Harris said the approach is consistent with how the city has handled other long-range plans.
Knell accused the city of avoiding environmental review because, he argued, its findings would undermine the city’s plans for State Street. The city disputes the premise of SIMA’s lawsuit and maintains that environmental review is required later on, once specific projects and designs are developed.
City Attorney John Doimas said it is too early for the city to give a substantive response to the lawsuit, but said that the allegations in the lawsuit are ones the city “will have an opportunity to respond to in court.”
Doimas reiterated the city’s position that adopting the Master Plan did not approve construction of any specific project and that environmental review will take place once a project moves into the engineering and pre-construction phase.
“There is nothing unusual about this approach. It is how the City has proceeded with long-range plans in the past,” Doimas said.
SIMA owns and manages several properties in downtown Santa Barbara, including properties along and near the Master Plan area. The company says the project could affect its properties and businesses through construction, changes to traffic and parking, and street redesign.
