Judge Dismisses Mission LLC’s Lawsuit Against City of Santa Barbara

City Did Not Deliberately Try to Delay Application for Eight-Story Apartment Building near Santa Barbara Mission, Judge Tentatively Rules

Old Mission Santa Barbara | Credit: Adobestock

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A Santa Barbara Superior Court judge has issued a tentative ruling that the City of Santa Barbara did not deliberately try to delay the application for an eight-story apartment building near the Santa Barbara Mission. On Wednesday, Judge Thomas Anderle denied The Mission LLC’s writ of mandate that alleged the city had violated the Housing Accountability Act by finding the LLC’s fourth application incomplete. Anderle also found all other points in the lawsuit against the city either moot or unripe.

The project, which would construct 250 units in a single eight-story building with three levels of underground parking, invokes Builder’s Remedy. Builder’s Remedy is a provision of housing law that allows developers to bypass zoning restrictions for projects that include affordable housing units if a city or county does not have a state-certified housing element. The City of Santa Barbara certified its housing element less than a month after The Mission LLC submitted its final preliminary application (there were six previous iterations, ranging from four units to 320 units of housing).

The Mission LLC itself does not have clearly stated ownership. It is linked to Craig and Stephanie Smith, a married couple who are the developers of another Builder’s Remedy project on Grand Avenue. The Smiths are the CEO and CFO of the Unitarian Universalist Mission, a religious group that The Mission LLC alleges it rents to. The Mission LLC’s manager, Ben Eilenberg, is also tied to the Grand Avenue project.

For nearly a year, The Mission LLC submitted applications that the City of Santa Barbara deemed incomplete. Each time, the city said the application was missing necessary information, including net floor plan areas.

On October 1, 2024, after the initial incompleteness letter, the Mission LLC filed a lawsuit against the City of Santa Barbara, arguing the city was not complying with state housing laws regarding Builder’s Remedy. This lawsuit was dismissed without prejudice in April 2025.

In May 2025, after the Mission LLC had received its fourth incompleteness letter, it sued the city again. In the city’s letter, Santa Barbara had requested that the developers include square footage information in their plans. A table meant to contain this information was cut off in the submitted application.

The Mission LLC argued that the city’s incomplete letter was “entirely in bad faith and designed to harass and cause unnecessary delay,” according to Judge Anderle’s tentative ruling.

Despite the new lawsuit, the Mission LLC submitted new plans with a comment that said “the table has been expanded to show the cut-off values — tables are updated and corrected.”

The city found this application complete in July.

In his tentative ruling, Judge Anderle said that the accepted fifth application, with its corrected table, demonstrates that the Mission LLC was not “unequivocally” confident in the fourth application’s completeness.

The Mission LLC’s lawsuit also alleged the city had illegally failed to process the application without payment of fees and imposed improper restrictions on the application. Judge Anderle’s tentative ruling found that these points were either moot (as the application is now deemed complete) or unripe (based on events that have not yet occurred).

The Mission LLC has sued both Santa Barbara County in Superior Court and the State of California in federal court. The lawsuit against the county alleges that the Mission LLC does not need to pay property taxes, because it rents to a church. Judge Anderle will issue a judgment on the pleadings in that lawsuit on June 17. The lawsuit against the State of California alleges part of a state budget trailer bill illegally singles out the project. Federal Judge Hernán D. Vera has taken a motion to dismiss under submission.

As for the city suit, Judge Anderle’s tentative ruling said that if the Mission LLC and the city don’t resolve the issues, the city can make a motion for judgment. If that motion is successful, “then the matter is teed up for judgment,” Anderle wrote. If it fails, there will be a court trial.