Santa Maria’s public library—a big, handsome building that smells like an airport—was built the last time the city tried to re-vamp its downtown. Under an overcast sky still humid with the hangover of mid-July’s freak storm, city officials met with community members on July 22 to discuss the roadmap for the city’s new version of the Downtown Specific Plan (DTSP).
Near the front of the room, Peter Gilli from Santa Maria’s planning and development department stood, smiling with his hands clasped behind his back and a color-coded map of the neighborhoods around downtown on an easel next to him.
Just after 6 p.m., the projector lit up, the room quieted down, and the PowerPoint started. The questions at hand: Why is Santa Maria’s downtown important? What can be done to make it nicer?
“It needs to be a place that looks good and has lots of things for people to do,” explained Gilli, and the room nodded along in agreement. The last DTSP didn’t go so well—the city started planning in 2004, reached out to the community in 2005, and rolled out the final plan in 2007.
“Land development was hot, and property values were high,” Gilli recalled. It made sense back then, from a pro-business standpoint, to try to rebuild a downtown around the mall, revitalizing the economic engine at the center of the city and giving Santa Maria a bustling State Street of its own.
“That didn’t happen,” Gilli said. While Santa Maria’s core was trying to reinvigorate, the economy was torn down. The subprime mortgage bubble collapsed, the stock market tumbled into a free fall, and the global economy slipped into a devastating recession. Downtown Santa Maria got a new library and a cinema multiplex at the mall but didn’t transform into a place where lots of people wanted to spend their time and money.
Neda Zayer, who works in the planning department, stepped up to take over for Gilli. She waved the last DTSP in the air—a thick, intimidating ream of white paper—and made the case that it was too specific. It was written with “some inflexibility,” she said, and thus it couldn’t adapt to the market tanking.
So, after regrouping, the city revamped the plan into a looser, less specific set of guidelines. “We took out all the fluff, some of the regulations, and we reduced this beast by half,” she said, smiling broadly. A wave of scattered applause washed over the room.
It’s a general roadmap, she stressed, not a policy-heavy prescription for Santa Maria’s ills. It specifies a few important goals: activities for downtown, including a farmers’ market; simplifying the “gauntlet” of red tape that business owners have to cut through and assigning them “advocates” to help them through the process; and beautifying the streets with bike lanes, trash pickups, and lots of trees.
After Zayer spoke, the public comment period opened up. The arts community led the charge, with Craig Shafer commending the planning department before calling them out for overlooking the arts completely in the DTSP.
“It does not make strong recommendations or requirements,” he said—no murals, no concerts, no gallery incentives, not so much as an arts-related recommendation at all. Plus, he lamented, downtown is still missing a central gathering place, and it didn’t look like the DTSP would do much to address that, either.
“I’m not going to bash that huge department store in the middle there,” he said. “It would have made a great park.”
Joe Gallast took the mic to slam the lack of trash cans. “If you don’t control the trash,” he said, “you’ll have nowhere anyone wants to go.” Going north-south on a bike, he added, is “almost suicidal,” and adding a bunch of bike lanes and racks downtown wouldn’t do much to address that.
Gallast also emphasized the need for an inclusive plan, evoking the ugly, divisive fight over the Fallas department store which recently marred the last DTSP.
“We need to make it friendly to everybody,” he said, pausing for emphasis. “That means everybody.”
Resident Kathy Hayes, who’s lived in Santa Maria for 32 years, told the Sun “it was a good meeting” and was glad that the city reached out for input. She expressed nostalgia for the downtown that preceded Town Center.
“They tore it all down for a mall,” she recalled. “Old homes, an old theater with a balcony. It’s almost criminal that it was torn down.”
Hayes was skeptical that that mistake could be undone.
“If you look into books and articles that are written about when communities remove a downtown area for what they consider progress, once that area’s removed, it’s really hard to establish the same sense of community that was there,” she said.
Contact Staff Writer Sean McNulty at smcnulty@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jul 30 – Aug 6, 2015.
