Many may know that Opal Restaurant & Bar and our neighbor, Carlitos Café y Cantina, have recently lost our parklets.

However, we have begun a process to rebuild with the City of Santa Barbara and are optimistic that will be done in a fair and collaborative manner.

So the following is not about the 1300 block of State Street, where we are located, but about the vision of what’s best for downtown State Street.

Ours was a beautiful and historic downtown that used to be the economic and cultural center of Santa Barbara, but is now struggling to revive itself, caught and conflicted between adhering to patterns of the past and embracing the changes the future inevitably must bring.

Reflecting one of those trends, recent articles published in various local publications have portrayed our downtown pedestrian promenade in negative terms, calling for it to end.

We in the community of businesses who actually have had a presence on State Street with outdoor dining facilities have a different take.

We want to present a different narrative, one more in alignment with the results of several polls over the last few years. Those polls show that 60%-80% of respondents have indicated a preference to keep the promenade car-free and support the expanded outdoor dining that was a prominent feature. 

We know the group promoting this negative narrative of the current state of downtown sincerely believes that their vision for the future of downtown is what’s truly best for the city.

However, according to the aforementioned polls, they are a minority: well-organized and vocal, but a minority.

With an agenda clearly focused on returning cars to State Street, and eliminating as much of the outdoor dining structures as possible, they have had considerable success in commandeering the narrative.

In service of this agenda, a number of statements have been made that we feel are exaggerated, slanted to elicit a negative emotional response, or in some cases misleading in their implication.

After enough of these statements are made, people are discouraged from coming to the area and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as the success of a promenade rests on people feeling comfortable and drawn to the area.

When they are not, the vibrancy is lost, and the naysayers can say, “See it wasn’t working anyway.”

Example: The claim that closing the street to automobiles has contributed to the many empty storefronts.

Fact: The number of empty storefronts is virtually unchanged in number from 2018-2019, many of them the same storefronts. So, if closing State Street was the cause of empty storefronts, wouldn’t there be more of them now, with the street closed for four years?

The faulty logic here is easy to spot, but omitting this fact feeds into a misleading narrative that the closure of State Street has hampered businesses opening into those storefronts. Where would that narrative lead us if we follow it?

Bringing back cars, when there wasn’t parking on most of downtown State Street in the first place? Would that solve that problem?

If we do it, are we then just to go back to the same old State Street that was dying because of an onerous permitting process, a lack of action to hold absentee landlords responsible to either rent their spaces or at least maintain their storefronts attractively?

Is that the kind of stagnancy that we want to return to?

What do you see in the Funk Zone? Throngs of people walking everywhere. Shopping, eating and drinking, enjoying art, and our wonderful outdoor environment.

That’s what we started to create on State Street, that vibrant experiential atmosphere that reaches a critical mass and fuels a sense of excitement and aliveness.

That seems to us to be the right way forward for a community that, in rightly appreciating its rich historical background, too often gets stuck looking backward. Risk-averse, rule-bound and not business friendly.

Rules, regulations and safety are important, but to live by them only, without looking outside the box to see how they could be creatively applied while still encouraging business, is to die by them.

Here are several factors that have hampered the State Street promenade from having a fair chance of success.

E-Bikes

A marvelous invention but one whose use should have been regulated in a pedestrian-friendly space.

When the promenade began, the atmosphere was magical. Messy, yes, but magical and vibrant.

However, as soon as people of all ages started to blow through red lights and terrorize pedestrians, they slowly began to destroy the formerly idyllic, family-friendly, pedestrian-friendly environment of the promenade.

But there was no effective attempt to stop the lawless behavior. No requirement for bikes to dismount or stationing of police at corners to issue large citations to scofflaws.

Virtually every business in this area points to the failure to stop this behavior as one of the major blows to a downtown economy that was starting to really take off as people initially flocked to this newly revitalized part of town.

This undercut the promenade’s potential and provided more grist for the negative narrative.

Cleanliness

A very high-profile story early on suggested the parklets were vermin-ridden. This was debunked in a response published at the time, when several of us showed there was no evidence of such, and that such claims were untrue, unless an isolated case in which a business owner didn’t maintain his structures properly.

Here, a few choice words pushed emotional buttons to convey an anti-promenade message.

Homelessness Issues

Sure they still exist, but virtually every business owner who is honest will tell you it became much better once the street was closed, and when it was vibrant.

But with fewer parklets, there’s less vibrancy, and thus a greater likelihood the problem returns. This also undercut the promenade.

We still have the opportunity to really give the promenade its chance to shine and show Santa Barbara as a model California city with a unique and progressive approach to solving the problems many cities face.

Here are some concrete suggestions to fix some things that aren’t working and give Santa Barbara a vibrant world-class promenade that works for everyone:

• Bikes must walk (with meaningful enforcement) and pedestrians must be given prominence.
• An increased and visible police presence to create a greater sense of safety.
• Dedicate a lane on State Street to a shuttle bringing people up from and back to the waterfront area, helping visitors and locals easily get to areas of interest and promenade businesses.
• Re-establish a business development manager position, to be a liaison with property owners and help curate the right kind of businesses to create a thriving retail and small business environment: one that would make for interesting shopping for the things you can’t find on Amazon.
• Which by the way, is the obvious cure for retail: Amazon hasn’t killed all retail. There are many up-and-coming entrepreneurs who could make downtown Santa Barbara shopping a unique and exciting experience.
• Without cutting corners on safety, make it easier for businesses to open up more quickly.
• Offer both incentives and/or penalties for absentee landlords who have no stake in how things fare in Santa Barbara, and who leave their storefronts vacant.
• Regarding proposals to offer expanded sidewalk dining for restaurants coming off their storefronts instead of parklets, with pedestrian passage occurring in the street: many of us would support that in a world with no restrictions. However, given the expense, the time it would take, and the city’s current dire financial situation, such an approach may not be possible for many years. In the interim, we feel it is important to maintain outdoor dining, and for now, that means parklets and other approved outdoor structures. To sacrifice the whole promenade idea now when, frankly, it hasn’t been given a fair shake, rather than fixing what isn’t working, seems a tremendous waste of economic, cultural and community vibrancy.
• In short, we need short-term goals, some of which are suggested here, to get us through to the long-term goals, on which it’s highly likely the currently divided stakeholders would find themselves in agreement.

There will be a number of meetings in the coming days when the State Street Advisory Committee will be finalizing its State Street Master Plan recommendations to the City Council to decide the future of downtown. 

If you share the point of view of our businesses that believe that maintaining the State Street promenade is the best thing for our city, please contact the City Council and State Street Advisory Committee to share your support for the continuation of the promenade.

If you are on the other side of this issue, please know that we, too, only want what’s best for the city, and we hope you may reconsider your position to one in which a collaborative effort between us to craft a vibrant and positive future for Santa Barbara is possible.

In reality, it’s likely we are not far apart in our goals.