California policy experts and community leaders talked downtown revitalization, education and the state’s alarming population shift on Thursday night in Santa Barbara.

Hundreds of residents and politicians attended Spotlight Santa Barbara’s second community conversations event at the Lobero Theatre.

Panelists were Santa Barbara South Coast Chamber of Commerce president and CEO Kristen Miller; Pete Peterson, dean of Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy; UCLA economics professor Lee Ohanian; and former two-term Fresno Mayor Ashley Swearengin, now president and CEO of the Central Valley Community Foundation.

Moderated by Noozhawk publisher Bill Macfadyen, it didn’t take long for the panel to take on one of Santa Barbara’s most contentious issues: State Street and downtown revitalization.

“Our governments are struggling with downtowns,” Miller said. “They’re starting to think about economic development, but the mindset shift that we think really has to happen next is to think about revenue.”

She said local businesses have been clear about what they need: access to a qualified workforce, workforce housing and less regulation.

Miller praised City Administrator Kelly McAdoo, who was in attendance Thursday night, for leading city staff through exercises focused on generating revenue.

Ohanian said there are ways to increase revenue without burdening taxpayers and suggested that opening State Street to vehicles could help.

He noted local areas that are open to vehicles, such as Coast Village Road and the waterfront, where revenue has gone up.

“I worry about downtown and State Street,” Ohanian said. “Tax revenue from downtown, with inflation, is down about 20% since prior to the (COVID-19) pandemic, whereas revenue from Coast Village Road and from the harbor is up over that period.”

Swearengin shared her experience working on downtown revitalization in Fresno and how the city debated for 50 years on what to do with its pedestrian mall, which was one of the first in the nation went it was built in the early 1960s.

“I think it was about six years after that pedestrian mall went in, the property tax and sales tax plummeted,” she said. “It was clear that it was a failure.”

In the end, after 10 years of work, the city took out the pedestrian mall.

Swearengin said that even during the COVID-19 pandemic, sales tax revenues went up and there were more visitors in the downtown area.

“It seems to me that, especially in a place like Santa Barbara, that’s very concerned about environmental impact, that you would, in fact, want to reuse your physical footprint and do that again and again and again and be as efficient as possible with what you’ve already built,” she said. 

Swearengin suggested that the city redeem “your urban core and (do) anything and everything you can to make the best use of that space as possible.”

Miller talked about ways to make downtown a place where people want to be, not just with outdoor dining but outdoor activity.

She said there are important strategies and factors that people aren’t talking about: a leasing strategy, incentives to get businesses into empty spaces, and encouraging parades and activities that “cause people to feel like, ‘This is my home. This is our downtown.’”

The panelists also discussed California’s future and how it could change because of the state’s population decline.

Peterson said California is about to face an identity crisis because 160 years of population growth has stopped.

He said most experts expect California to lose three to five congressional seats after the 2030 census, and Texas could potentially have a larger population than California by 2050.

“California is becoming less family-friendly,” Peterson said. “Even though we always claim we’re the most diverse state in the country, that may be because people are moving in internationally, but as far as kind of a homegrown diverse population, we are losing that by the day to Arizona, Texas and Florida, and we’re doing it to ourselves.”

Swearengin encouraged the crowd to get more involved in their community, work with civic leaders, and not wait for the local government — or Sacramento — to make the changes they want to see.

“We don’t have to wait for the perfect collection of people to be elected to office,” she said. “We take responsibility. We create public processes. We decide what our priorities are. We partner with our government. We partner with our private sector, our educational institutions.

“But we don’t let anybody tell us what we’re going to be. We decide that ourselves, and we make it happen. That’s how we make California better.”

Thursday’s event — a partnership of Noozhawk and Spotlight Santa Barbara — was sponsored by American Riviera Bank, Montecito Bank & Trust, Nicholson & Schwartz CPAs, Pence Vineyards, the Pepperdine University School of Public Policy, the Santa Barbara South Coast Chamber of Commerce, the Santa Barbara Foundation and Village Properties.

The next Spotlight Santa Barbara event is scheduled for Oct. 8 at the Lobero Theatre.

The October event will include a conversation with Greg Lukianoff, CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and co-author, with Jonathan Haidt, of The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.

Lukianoff is also the co-author, with Rikki Schlott, of The Canceling of the American Mind: Cancel Culture Undermines Trust and Threatens Us All — But There Is a Solution.

Click here to purchase tickets online.

The Spotlight Santa Barbara series kicked off in February with CalMatters political columnist Dan Walters.