Some Think Butterfly on City’s Logo Flies in Face of History

For years, this community had an identity crisis worthy of a teenager living in the shadow of an older brother who captained the football team.

Santa Barbara was the jewel of the Central Coast. Goleta’s sea views and weather might be every bit as stunning, but its downtown was frumpish.

Even though the world-class University of California campus is practically on Goleta’s doorstep in an unincorporated section of Santa Barbara County, no one gave a moment’s thought to calling the school UC Goleta.

Tired of living in a community known as that place west of Santa Barbara, Goleta voters proclaimed cityhood last year. And recently, the new city chose an identity in the form of a city logo: a butterfly hovering over a stylized scene of agricultural row crops and the ocean. “The butterfly represents beauty and life and movement and transformation,” said Kathy Fritz, whose firm designed the logo.

But some people say the city missed the boat: After all, Goleta in Spanish means schooner, the seagoing kind, not the glass of beer they pour down at the Mercury Lounge. Much of the agriculture depicted in the logo is long gone, replaced by housing tracts. And a developer has talked about building homes near the roosting place of the monarch butterflies that the logo is supposed to represent.

“I’m very disappointed,” Councilwoman Jean Blois said of the logo. “We were on vacation when the vote came up. I was glad because I don’t know if I could have voted for it.”

The transformation to cityhood has not been easy or quick. City Council members are crammed into a 10-by-10-foot office with no pictures on the wall. They just hired a city manager in August. The prospects for building a city hall are, in the words of Mayor Margaret Connell, “a long way off.” But when they adopted their first budget in July, a $12-million spending plan, they found $1 million more than expected. “We’re feeling reasonably confident,” Connell said.

Especially now that they’ve chosen a symbol to guide them into their uncharted municipal future. But even that process was challenging.

First, the Santa Barbara News-Press sponsored a contest allowing its readers to submit ideas. More than 70 people participated. Some ideas were serious, while others were funny, or meant to be. Good and bad, the one thing all 70 ideas had in common was that they were unwanted. To Goleta residents, the News-Press contest was an example of their neighbor’s smug condescension. “It was unfortunate,” Connell said of the contest.

Goleta solicited ideas in its own newspapers and then hired Fritz to bring them to life. “It wasn’t simple,” Fritz said of the process. But she’s proud of what she came up with, and so apparently were most of the council members, who voted 4 to 0 for the new logo.

“It was a sad day for me” when the City Council chose the butterfly, said Robin Cederlof, a fifth - generation resident of Goleta whose ranching family arrived in 1874. The butterfly “doesn’t have historic significance. There are a couple of people on the council who are extremely pro-butterfly.”

Mayor Connell said the butterfly is not some generic image slapped on the logo by a New Age hippie trying to promote peace and love along Hollister Avenue. The eucalyptus grove where the monarchs gather by the thousands is famed as the “largest over-wintering roost in California.” Ron Nye, president of the Goleta Valley Historical Society, insists that he’s not anti-butterfly. He was just hoping that whatever logo the city chose would in some way recognize “the history of the area.”

Despite the fact that Goleta as an incorporated city is only a year old, those who have been around a while point with pride to the community’s role in everything from commerce to war. During World War II, a German prisoner of war camp was located just outside town. “They worked on local ranches,” Nye said. Also, in the first attack on American soil since 1812, a Japanese submarine lobbed several shells in 1942 into the oil fields that used to line the bluffs. No one was killed, and management handed out pitchforks so that workers could defend the beach.

Admittedly, a logo containing an oil derrick or a POW camp would not be suitable for the thriving bedroom community Goleta has become. Some suggested the tomol, the famed Chumash canoe on which Native Americans ventured to the Channel Islands 500 years ago.

If any town could claim a link to those ancient seamen, it would be Goleta, advocates said. One of the largest Native American settlements was on the shores of the Goleta Slough.

If not a tomol, others asked, what about a sailing ship? “Ocean vessels were always a part of the community,” Cederlof said. She said Spanish ships used the area to offload lumber cut from forests in Northern California.

“The one thing that really said Goleta was the schooner,” she said. To most of the council, however, it said boring. “A lot of other Goleta organizations [such as the Chamber of Commerce] all have schooners in their logos,” Fritz said. The city wanted to be different.

So what if Goleta means schooner? That doesn’t mean you are confined to using a sailing vessel, she said. Santa Barbara doesn’t have St. Barbara in its logo. It has two sailing ships. As for any threat to the butterflies from developers, Connell said Goleta is working on a land swap to make sure the butterflies last as long as the logo.

The arguments don’t impress the aggrieved opponents. “When people think of Goleta,” Blois said, “I don’t think they think of the monarch butterfly.”