Referendum to Repeal State Street Master Plan Is Based on False Premise, Promise

Please don’t sign on the dotted line when some nice young man in front of your grocery store or CVS asks you to sign a petition in the next week or so. It is to qualify a referendum to repeal the State Street Master Plan and bring cars back to State Street. He no doubt means well, if you can say the $2 or $9 per signature he’s getting paid qualifies as good intentions. But the referendum is based on a false premise and false promise. 

Here’s the deal. The target of this referendum signature drive is the State Street Master Plan. But the plan, as it was approved by the Santa Barbara City Council, already envisions cars coming back to State Street. Just not wide open, but at certain times and in places still yet to be determined. But absolutely back.

Here’s the other deal. State Street was heading into the woodchipper long before cars were banned from State Street. What’s killing State Street are not all the pedestrians courting death by walking across the street, red lights be damned, without looking either way because they’re too otherwise engrossed by the device in their hands. 

If there were laws against stupidity, we’d all be in jail.

What killed State Street was you, me, and anyone else for whom the Amazon delivery van is a regular visitor. What won’t bring the State Street retail vibrancy back are cars. 

Here’s another thing not to do. Don’t get into some chest-bumping and name-calling contest with the signature gatherers, as has been the case with Daraka Larimore Hall, a well-known so-called progressive activist. Dude, you do yourself no favors by impersonating Pete Hegseth. And you discredit your cause.

The reason people fight so fiercely over State Street, we are told, is because we love it so much. The same thing can be said about child custody fights. 

Here’s another deal — maybe the biggest one. We have spent the past five years arguing, planning, and butting heads trying to come up with a plan about State Street. Finally, earlier this this year, City Council voted on a plan. It was a 6-1 vote. Yes, there are many challenges ahead. Yes, it’s also very expensive. But if this referendum gets on the ballot and passes, here’s what we’re going to get: more delay. More impasse. More stupid debates. More expenses.

Like many people, I achieved my oversaturation on this issue a long time ago. There’s a lot about the messy hodgepodge that’s State Street that I love. But I get that not everyone does. Looked at theologically, State Street is a cross between limbo and purgatory. At some point, we need to extricate ourselves from this great in-between. The plan will do that.

Actually, State Street is already doing that on its own. UCSB is colonizing one of the great, yawning vacancies that’s made the 400 block such a dead zone. The Music Academy of the West is doing the same to the 900 block of State Street. In fact, State Street is on the cusp of an-yet-undeclared great rooftop war, as in which new project can offer the most spectacular rooftop amenities on which to get slightly buzzed, see the stars, fall in love, and perhaps get your pocket picked by some worthy charity.

It’s happening. So let it be. 

Let me be more specific. The true genius of COVID is that it forced City Hall — ever petrified by the prospect of any possible slip-and-fall lawsuit — to allow outdoor dining. This was a necessary move not just to save the soul of the community. It saved downtown restaurants and pretty much the whole central business district. Nobody wants outdoor dining to go away. But everyone agrees the parklets — with the exception of the Rose Café on the Mesa — are pretty ratty. 

The genius of the Master Plan is that it calls for the expansion of city sidewalks from their current width of 20 feet to 30. This way, people can eat outside, but on the sidewalk, not on the street.

You really want the outdoor dining magic offered by widened sidewalks to go away? For what? That’s what disappears if the Master Plan gets revoked.

What also gets revoked is all the storm-drain-runoff infrastructure that’s needed to stop State Street from becoming the reincarnation of Lake Titicaca every time it sprinkles. For all you pseudo fiscal conservatives out there looking for yet another lame excuse to mutter about the perfidious stupidity of City Hall, don’t we need that infrastructure as flood control? 

That infrastructure, by the way, is the single most expensive item of what will be a $100 million project; it accounts for about half the cost. 

Here’s the other deal. That storm drain infrastructure — sexy stuff, right? — is what’s legally, hydrologically, and geologically necessary if we want to build housing in meaningful numbers downtown. But the cost of such systems are so prohibitively astronomical that no single developer can hope to build housing and break even. Only by City Hall assuming the burden of such an expensive proposition can housing hope to happen in meaningful numbers. 

Everyone says the best way to save downtown is by building housing downtown. Time to put up or shut up. Or, as Joan Armatrading liked to sing, “Everyone wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.”

You can’t get there on cars alone. 

Yes, the State Street Master Plan limits the hours when cars can drive on State Street. Yes, it will also limit what blocks. But yes, cars will be back. But so too will be the wider sidewalks and stormwater infrastructure.

A couple of parting points. Some people running for office say in defense of the pique and petulance animating this masturbatory signature-gathering exercise, “Some people didn’t feel heard.” I would suggest there’s a big difference between being heard and being agreed with. Every time I open my mouth, I do not expect to be agreed with. That’s part of the pain of the human condition.

Having covered much of the Master Plan process, I can say the public outreach was so exhaustively exhausting that at times, I felt I was getting waterboarded. Minions of City Hall met 15 times with the Downtown Organization between 2022 and 2025. They met 14 times with representatives of the city’s new and awkwardly named business improvement district between 2025 and 2026. It held 20 community outreach meetings. I gave serious consideration to filing a restraining order. 

I would make the following criticism of the powers that be. From the very first community meeting on this process, it was made screamingly obvious that the only thing anyone could talk about was e-bikes. It didn’t just dominate the discussions; it hijacked them. No matter how many columns I wrote stupidly dismissing such concerns as over-blown or exaggerated — which I still fervently believe, by the way — somehow not one of the seven city councilmembers saw fit to do what elected officials are expected to do. 

Why didn’t two of the councilmembers write one of those now infamous two-person memos demanding that City Administrator Kelly McAdoo put it on the agenda? When people scream relentlessly about any one subject, elected officials are required by their very DNA to either do something or look like they’re doing something. I would give every single councilmember a big fat F. 

Finally, it should be noted, city police are now doing something about e-bikes. A little too late, however, to do the Master Plan deliberations much good. But still necessary. 

This is America, Land of the Free, or — as my son tells me — “We’re only as free as they let us think we are.” That means the biggest, richest landlord on State Street, Jim Knell, can bankroll a referendum to undo what it took the City Council five years to achieve. To quote Joe Hill just before they shot him dead, “Don’t whine; organize.” Besides nobody wants to hear that noise anyway. 

But be polite to those nice young men; tell them to pound sand. Unequivocally. But smile when you say it.