It was a packed house at the Santa Ynez Valley Marriott on Nov. 8, and the topic at hand was jobs and how to bring more to Santa Barbara County.
Business ranging from Pacific Coast Energy to Halsell Builders to communications giant Comcast shelled out $750 per table and $85 a plate to hear how the local economy fared and how to attract “living wage” jobs to the Central Coast. The event was chaired by the Northern Santa Barbara County Econ Alliance, a nonprofit with a stated goal to create a “high performance, globally competitive” regional economy.
“We’ve got to think regionally,” said Rick Stollmeyer, CEO of the San Luis Obispo-based software and wellness firm, Mindbody. “Alone we’re small fry: SLO is small fry; Paso is small fry; Santa Maria and Lompoc are small fry; together though, we have a population of more than 500,000.
“We have Allan Hancock and Cuesta colleges–two of the best community colleges in California–we’ve got a tradition in technology centered around Vandenberg Air Force Base, and we have this beautiful place to live.”
Stollmeyer told the crowd that night it was imperative to improve the area’s cost of living and invest in areas where housing prices are still reasonable for average workers and families.
“SLO is an expensive place to live,” he said. “How in the world do you start a job, or company, where you want to pay people $40,000, $50,000, $70,000 a year? It doesn’t work. Paso is more affordable. Santa Maria is more affordable, but we’re running out of affordable places to live.”
In 2014, Mindbody was expanding rapidly. It had around 1,000 employees and needed to open a second space to alleviate crowding at its headquarters in SLO.
Stollmeyer and his executive team initially looked inland, to places like Fresno, Modesto, or Merced as potential homes for the new location. However, after creating a “heat map” of employee data and where they lived, an idea emerged: Why not Santa Maria?
“We had a whole bunch of people living right here,” he explained. They were coming from Los Olivos, Santa Maria, and Lompoc to commute to the SLO office.
“So we asked them to cut their commute down,” Stollmeyer added. The result was the 14,000-square-foot space at 2811 Airpark Drive in Santa Maria, which houses around 88 Mindbody team members.
The addition has been a boon for the local economy, according to Suzanne Singh, economic development director for the Santa Maria Valley Chamber of Commerce.
She told the Sun that while tech companies like Mindbody moving in may not be the norm for Santa Maria, the city has much to look forward to.
“We currently have a lot of activity in the development world,” she said. “I think you’ll see in five years that Santa Maria is going to be very different from what it is today.”
Which is good news for a region expected to lose a number of high-wage, “head of household” career positions once the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant shutters in 2025.
“Diablo is gonna hurt everybody,” Singh said, “and we have a huge workforce from Santa Maria that is in Diablo Canyon.”
But it’s not all bad news, as other industries including tech may still find Santa Barbara County’s largest city an attractive place to set up shop.
“I think some of these tech companies will come down here purely because it’s where their workforces are and that they can attract workforces that can’t afford to live where they are currently,” Singh explained. “Santa Maria helps them with that. It especially helps them with the workforce side because we have the numbers and it helps attract people into the area because it’s affordable.”
Santa Maria isn’t about to become the next Silicon Valley, but it may benefit from some “overflow” from that sector. It has already seen such overflow from Mindbody, which undoubtedly helped contribute to the bump in tech and business service jobs since 2010 (from 21,000 to 21,400 in 2017, according to the California Employment Development Department).
“I do think Santa Maria is going to be the great overflow place when those companies expand or can’t afford to expand more in SLO,” Singh said. “Like Mindbody, they may do a second location here. And I do think that Santa Maria is a great second location for any California business.
“We are probably the last affordable city on the Central Coast,” she added, “which means if you really want to be somewhere where you can have a good quality of life and start a business, or relocate one, or bring one here, and this is probably the time to do it because in five to 10 more years it probably won’t be that affordable.”
Boom or bust
Santa Barbara County is growing.
From 1990 to 2017, the population spiked by nearly 100,000 people, topping out at around a half million people last year, according to the California Employment Development Department.
With the population expansion came a larger labor force, swelling from 160,900 to 204,000 over that same period. The unemployment rate oscillated alongside the labor force growth, ranging from 4.9 percent (9,400 people) in 1990 and then peaking in 2010 to a startling 9.7 percent after the mid-2000s Recession.
An estimated 20,000 people in the county were without jobs that year, and the effects were felt in both the private and public sectors.
“The Great Recession really clobbered city revenues,” Santa Maria Public Information Officer Mark Van de Kamp told the Sun. He said revenues for the city fell by nearly 20 percent during that time.
“The local government revenues, which are necessary for government operations, were down tens of millions of dollars,” he added. “We had to make a lot of adjustments.”
In 2017, Santa Barbara County’s unemployment fell to some of its lowest levels in 20 years, a sign of a recovering economy for the Central Coast county and its cities.
The numbers were accompanied by consistent growth across all industry sectors, with jobs in the county increasing by more than 40,000.
And while much of that growth is due to the wine and hospitality industry expanding over the past three decades, there’s still a skilled labor force waiting to be tapped into.
“If you pull data from this area, you’ll find that there is a lot of wealth,” the Chamber’s Singh said. “We have really good demographics to attract almost any business in the country, if they are willing to give the Central Coast a try. The problem is a lot of companies, if they’re not from California, coming to California scares the hell of the them because California is super expensive to do business in.”
That hasn’t deterred Mindbody, which, despite having 14 locations worldwide, points to Santa Maria as one if its most successful branches.
“If we run out of the ability to attract talent, we’ll move, but we’ve never been unable to attract talent here,” CEO Stollmeyer said.
Staff Writer Spencer Cole can be reached at scole@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Nov 15-22, 2018.