Proponents of Goleta Cityhood Try, Try Again

If the people of this fast-growing region west of Santa Barbara don’t get their own city soon, it won’t be for lack of trying.

Local activists have put the question of cityhood to voters three times in the last 12 years. Three times, voters said no. But Goleta Now!, the latest incarnation of advocates to give cityhood a try, thinks it may have a winner.

Like movie makers who tailor a film to fit the dictates of a focus group, Goleta Now! has carefully cut unpopular and controversial elements from its cityhood proposal. What remains is a bare-bones plan that reflects the group’s name: a city called Goleta. Now.

“Our motto is ‘Keep It Simple,’ ” said Jonny Wallis, one of the group’s leaders. “We read up and did our homework and we came up with a plan that, based on how the votes went in the past, people here should support.”

So far, so good. More than 4,800 residents of the proposed city signed a petition asking for a fourth chance at incorporation. If 3,415 of those signatures are valid--that’s 25% of registered voters--the issue enters the bureaucratic pipeline that could land it on the November 2000 ballot.

But Goletans are a complex bunch. Their community sprawls across a narrow shelf of land bounded by the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Ynez Mountains. It’s a lovely swath of country with meadows and orchards that display its recent agricultural past. In Goleta, however, geography isn’t destiny.

Some residents, flush with civic pride, long for the local control that would give them a say over growth and development. But those on the eastern side of the community tend to ignore their geographic roots and embrace their Santa Barbara ZIP Code. In past cityhood ballot measures, more than 70% of Goleta’s east-siders have turned up their noses at incorporation.

The Isla Vista neighborhood, meanwhile, which houses an ever-changing population of UC Santa Barbara students, has been cut out of the cityhood equation completely. A community with a brand new citizenry every four to six years could dictate city policy if it ever organized a bloc vote, Goleta Now! reasoned, and it decided not to take that chance.

What’s left of the Goleta area’s 50,000 residents would be a city of about 30,000.

“I can’t think of another city in California since the passage of Proposition 13 where the debate about incorporation has been so divisive,” said Bill Fulton, publisher of a government and planning newsletter. “They are one of the few cities that has pursued cityhood and not achieved it.”

This underachieving has led organizers to draw up city limits that include the voters who in the past voted yes. The result is a ragged and rambling boundary that requires good map-reading skills for drivers trying to keep track of where Goleta would end and the county would begin.

The southern city limit would zigzag around Isla Vista, a polygon of seaside land, then hook around Santa Barbara Airport, which belongs to the city of Santa Barbara via a peculiar underwater boundary. To the north, the proposed city’s urban footprint would match the border of Santa Barbara County.

Aesthetics aside, this plan gives Goletans their best chance at self-rule, advocates say. In a development-happy era that has transformed the rural region into a sprawling suburb, that’s good news for many.

“We’ve lost an enormous amount of open space very quickly,” said Cynthia Brock, a graphic designer and environmental activist who has lived in Goleta for 20 years.

“The habitats are disappearing,” she said. “People here are used to having butterflies and birds and animals in the fields, and they’re getting fields of closely packed homes. The open space that’s left becomes even more valuable to the community.”

The pace of change has transformed neighborhoods in the space of a year, Brock said.

“People literally--and I do mean literally--don’t recognize their neighborhoods,” she said. “You’ve suddenly got five stoplights on a street that a year ago had one; the conceptual landscape has shifted.”

But some of the new development is what would help make the proposed city of Goleta economically viable. By drawing the city boundary to include retail giants such as Costco and Home Depot, Goleta would tap into a steady and reliable source of sales tax revenue, the post-Proposition 13 lifeblood of California cities.

But that question must wait until the next step of the cityhood process. The Santa Barbara County elections office has until Thursday to verify signatures collected by Goleta Now! If they hit the magic number of 3,415, the hard work begins.

As a next step, the Local Agency Formation Commission would complete an analysis of every aspect of the proposal. The carefully crafted plan submitted by Goleta Now! would be a starting point.

“All of it, including the boundaries, is a starting point as far as LAFCO is concerned,” said Bob Braitman, an executive officer of the commission. “This is just the beginning.”