Once upon a time, Santa Barbara had a film commission as a part of the Visitors Bureau, which brought 115 productions to the county in 2017-18 with an estimated downstream spend of about $13.2 million. Santa Barbara County is ready to bring that much-needed revenue stream back, approving a new contractor during Tuesday’s administrative hearing at the Board of Supervisors.
On Tuesday, the supervisors approved $150,000 toward an individual or firm to pull together the elements that would encourage filming in the area. Even more important than a website of locations, contacts, and area resources would be a public database of the 38 jurisdictions a production might run across. These include not only Santa Barbara County and its eight cities, but potentially community service districts, State Parks, Caltrans, the Coastal Commission, Army Corps, Forest Service, UC Santa Barbara, and many others.
“Each maintains separate permitting requirements, timelines, fee schedules, and points of contact,” the staff report notes, and no consolidated record exists at the moment.
The Visitors Bureau’s full-time film commissioner position ended in 2019, but with photogenic Santa Barbara less than 100 miles from Hollywood, film, TV, and commercials have continued to find locations here. Filming for the opening episode of Succession‘s Season 4 took place at Villa Solana in Montecito in 2023 and the Best Picture Oscar winner One Battle After Another shot scenes at Lompoc’s Mission de la Purisima in 2025.
Productions not only bring about $50,000 per day in local hiring, sales and bed taxes, and hotel, transportation, and equipment rental income, they create enduring benefits to the area. The perennial example is the film Sideways, which not only featured the county’s grape-growing acreage but raised the profile of the region’s wine internationally.
“For Santa Barbara, film exposure helps showcase the region’s iconic beauty and lifestyle to audiences around the world, creating lasting tourism value beyond the production itself,” said Kathy Janega-Dykes, who leads Visit Santa Barbara, the successor to the Tourism Bureau. “We saw these benefits after films like Sideways and It’s Complicated were filmed here,” she recalled.
County finances are squeaky tight, and the new contractor position is currently budgeted for one year only, though “a little buzz” is already being heard about it, said Jesús Armas, the county’s director of Community Services. Armas said the Request for Proposal bid process will begin in about a month and take about that long to be finalized.
