Goleta’s Ekwill Street Being Extended to Connect University and Airport to Rest of City

In the industrial part of Goleta, Ekwill Street is beginning to take shape to the west and east of Pine Avenue, along a brushy tree-lined arm of Old San Jose Creek. Due to connect Fairview Avenue to South Kellogg by the end of next year, the dirt outline of the street travels the backside of the UPS truck depot and Northrup Grumman, as jets fly overhead bound for Santa Barbara airport. A roundabout will go where work trucks currently thump down from Ekwill and cross Pine.

On Tuesday, the trucks were headed for what’s called “a bottomless culvert,” or a dirt-floored horseshoe of cement, as Craig Schellenger described it. He’s the resident engineer for Unico, engineers for the overall project. The culvert will hold up the new street as it crosses Old San Jose Creek, which rarely runs with water, said Schellenger. In the distance beyond the cement being poured, another wide strip of dirt running behind a Yardi Systems building will bring Ekwill Street to Fairview Avenue.

Running parallel to Hollister Avenue, the new Ekwill extension will add a road, sidewalks, and bikeway as a means to get from the airport and university toward the rest of the city. As well, with Yardi planning to add housing among its current buildings and the Winslowe development at the Kellogg end, the new extension provides increased access, although State Route 217 still blocks an unimpeded flow of traffic to the east toward South Patterson and the new housing zoned for the adjacent Santa Barbara County farmland.

Project Manager Melissa Angeles said the city was finally seeing the completion of Ekwill after 20 years of engineering and planning, a project the city had inherited from the county upon incorporation in 2002. For each tree along Old San Jose Creek that was felled by the project, 10 new California native trees are being planted at East Ekwill and Fowler and across four acres of the Ellwood Mesa. The associated bridge replacement project on Hollister will add a half-acre’s worth of trees at Lake Los Carneros.

The Hollister Bridge project snarled traffic on the major thoroughfare at its outset in 2024, but that snafu smoothed out after the traffic signal at the 217 was removed from Hollister Avenue. Drivers also seem to have become accustomed to the reduction of the lanes from two to one in a separate restriping project.

The bridge crosses today’s San Jose Creek, which was tamed into a concrete channel to reduce its near-annual flooding of Old Town. The bridge replacement opens the channel for the waters of a 100-year-storm and upgrades the deteriorating bridge structure. It also will link to the downstream fish passage project. The lanes have shifted as work is completed, with the north side of the bridge completed last December, Angeles said. Now pouring concrete for the south bridge deck, crews are allowed into the creek bed to work only until October.

The bridge project is expected to be completed by the end of this year. With Ekwill’s estimated completion in 2026 — and also the improved roadway and sidewalk for Fowler Road — the end of three years of construction may be finally in sight by 2027. Knock wood.