Within its first year of publication, the Sun shined a light on local issues, leaders, and lore that continue to make headlines 26 years later.
Before its first year was up, the Sun also reported on Santa Barbara County’s early preparations for building a Santa Maria Valley jail, which current leaders are now reappraising, while weighing in on a potential future expansion.
Three months shy of the Sun’s first anniversary, a portrait of Santa Maria Mayor Alice Patino—a council member at the time, the first woman to sit on Santa Maria’s dais since the 1930s—was on the paper’s cover with possibly the greatest headline in the publication’s 26-year history: “Ascent of a woman.”
You won’t find a better pun in all 1,300-plus issues under the Sun’s umbrella, but you can read more about the paper’s earliest subjects and how they continue to impact the region below.
Past, present, future
For its debut issue in 2000, the Sun looked at Santa Maria’s “lack of a traditional downtown” and interviewed city officials, business owners, and residents about what could or should be done to enhance the corridor.
The story begins in 1976, when the Santa Maria City Council opted to bulldoze more than 17 acres of the city’s historic downtown core to make way for an upcoming indoor mall—the Santa Maria Town Center, as we know it today.
“I was about 11,” lifelong Santa Maria resident Kathleen Wilson told the Sun in 2026 for the article you’re currently reading. A longtime city employee, Wilson has worked for Santa Maria’s Community Development Department since 2004.
Framed landscapes of Santa Maria architecture, including glimpses of its original downtown, occupy her office’s walls, she said.
She remembers being stoked about the mall once it opened in ’76 and described it as “the happening place to be.” As much as she misses some aspects of her childhood tied to memories of Santa Maria’s original downtown, she has just as fond recollections of hanging out at the mall, especially for movie outings.
“Rocky and Star Wars were showing for like six months straight,” she said with a laugh.
She still goes to the mall for a movie every once in a while, including recently to see a new Elvis Presley documentary.
The Sun’s 2000 article included input from sources who blamed the mall’s construction for downtown Santa Maria’s perceived demise. Current city staff said that there are several downtown developments in the works that both critics and fans of the Santa Maria Town Center could consider a win-win.
The first of these projects, Community Development Director Chenin Dow said, is a multi-story apartment complex that broke ground in summer 2025 across the street from the mall. Anyone familiar with the project site will remember it as the retail building that once housed a Fallas, and a Mervyn’s before that.
The apartment complex’s developer, the Vernon Group, has a handful of additional housing, mixed-use, and commercial projects planned for Santa Maria’s downtown corridor as well, Dow said. But they’re not the only firm with an aim to boost activity in the area.
On the northeast corner of the Santa Maria Town Center, the two-story segment local shoppers formerly knew as Sears will be the site of a new El Super grocery store, as well as two retail units with tenants yet to be determined by the project’s developer, the Charles Company.
“They’re looking to open early next year,” Dow said about El Super.
When the Santa Maria Planning Commission approved the Sears remodel proposal in April 2025, Planning Commissioner Yasameen Mohajer said she’s looking forward to “how much life it’s going to bring to that corner”—a corner Planning Commissioner Esau Blanco referred to as “completely dead” at the time.
While bringing more visitors to the mall in general, the El Super project will hopefully appeal to residents—especially those who would rather walk than drive—looking for grocery store alternatives in “what’s essentially a food desert,” Santa Maria Principal Civil Engineer Mark Mueller told the commission. The next nearest grocery store to the mall is Vons, about a mile away.
No ‘get out of jail free’ cards
An artist’s rough rendering of what the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office envisioned for its North Branch Jail graced page 12 of the Sun’s second issue, which hit stands on April 7, 2000.
At the time, roughly 60 percent of inmates at the Sheriff’s Office’s main Santa Barbara jail were transported there by van from the county’s northern half. This reason among others led to the purchase of a 100-acre parcel of land at the corner of Betteravia and Black roads in the Santa Maria Valley.
“The building of the jail is not if, it’s only when,” former county Sheriff Jim Thomas said in the 2000 article.
That “when” occurred 22 years later, with the completion of the North Branch Jail. But it wasn’t easy, as the two-decade gap suggests, current county Sheriff Bill Brown recalled.
Once he became sheriff in 2007, he put together a special commission—made up of psychologists, attorneys, and other consultants—to study Santa Barbara County’s jail overcrowding issues and put clear goals in place for the North Branch Jail’s development.
“We weren’t asking for a huge jail. We were wanting to build a smaller jail that would be the type of place where we could rehabilitate people; help them conquer drug addictions; get them to … where they were not likely to reoffend,” Brown said, “give them some seeds to help them grow into the kind of people that could be successful in the community, and not be in that revolving criminal justice door.”
When Brown and his commission presented their North Branch Jail proposal to the Board of Supervisors at the time, feedback from the dais amounted to, “‘Thank you very much, but we’re broke, we have no money,’” Brown recalled.
“It was the start of the recession,” he added. “Everybody was struggling financially. … We were crippled in terms of being able to move forward.”
About a decade after those discussions, the county got an $80 million grant from the state that supported the North Branch Jail’s development, which cost almost $120 million, Brown said.
“It was a very happy day, believe me,” said Brown, who described the jail’s construction journey as fraught with obstacles.
Around this time, the county was eligible for an additional $40 million state grant that could have funded more than 200 additional beds—and other amenities, including a dog kennel for inmates to take part in a vocational dog grooming program—at the North Branch Jail.
But the Board of Supervisors at the time decided not to pursue it because the addition would have cost the county an extra $2 million a year to maintain, according to Brown.
“That has now come back to haunt us,” Brown said. “The irony is … just to do the expansion of North Branch Jail is going to cost us more than what we built the entire jail for, … in the area of $170 million, … which could have been done for less than $40 million.”
Sometime in April, the current Board of Supervisors will consider modifying the North Branch Jail to add either 350 more beds (for about $167 million) or 250 beds. County staff will present a cost estimate for that reduced route during the upcoming discussion.
Brown described going lower than the initial 350-bed pitch as “making a very unwise and dollar-foolish decision, … because you’re still going to need these beds in the future, and again, you’re going to be stuck with having to pay double or triple the price of what you can get it done now for.”
A star is sworn in
The Sun once described Alice Patino’s 1999 appointment to the Santa Maria City Council as the end of a 70-year drought.
She was the first woman to serve on the council in seven decades. She was also the first woman in the city’s history to become its mayor in 2012.
Today, all three of Mayor Patino’s peers on the dais are women, following Carlos Escobedo’s sudden resignation from the City Council in early March.
When asked who she hopes to see apply for the appointment to the vacant 1st District seat, Patino said she’s sure her answer is informed by her years serving the city.
“I think it’s great to have a variety of people on the council in different backgrounds because we all come from different life experiences,” Patino told the Sun. “I have found that my decisions, maybe 10 years ago, 20 years ago, may be different than ones I would decide today. … I think it’s good to have different life experiences [on the council].”
When the Sun interviewed Patino 25 years ago about her early City Council impressions—a cover story that she’s kept a framed copy of—she encouraged young people, especially, to run for a seat on the council.
“Younger men and women need to get involved in the politics of Santa Maria because it’s their future that’s at stake,” she said in the Jan. 19, 2001, article. “Their kids are going to be growing up in this community, and they know what they want. It’s not fair for me to say this is the way your kids’ lives should be.”
Another topic Patino touched upon with the Sun 25 years ago was Santa Maria’s need to expand its number of school campuses to accommodate a growing population.
She talked about anticipating an upcoming council hearing to discuss where in Santa Maria’s city limits would be best to build a new high school—what ultimately would become Pioneer Valley High School, completed in 2004.
Today, similar issues remain top of mind for Patino, she said. Later this year, the council will review city staff’s draft for Santa Maria’s next general plan update, as well as proposals tied to potential annexation east of the city.
“I think we need to start planning for two new high schools, … and that takes a lot of acreage,” Patino said. “We have to start planning for 30,000 people moving to the area.”
Reach Senior Staff Writer Caleb Wiseblood at cwiseblood@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in March 26 – April 2, 2026.