Some registered nurses at Cottage Health in Santa Barbara and Goleta have announced their intention to unionize with SEIU 121RN and hope to hold a vote by the end of the year.

In front of Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital on Friday afternoon, a handful of nurses, union spokespeople and two Santa Barbara City Council members spoke about the unionizing effort and grievances with Cottage, and outlined a path moving forward.

Cottage registered nurses — backed by roughly three dozen in-person supporters and other nurses — cited high costs of living, high pay for Cottage executives, wage transparency and recent changes to the leave policy as reasons why they approached the union.

Union leadership said they’ve collected “hundreds” of union cards so far — enough to meet the 30% threshold to submit cards to the National Labor Relations Board and call for a vote.

SEIU President Rosanna Mendez declined to release the exact number of cards, but said it was in the “hundreds” and “absolutely above” the threshold.

Cottage spokeswoman Cristina Cortez said the union has not “disclosed to us the number of authorization cards it has collected, but many Cottage nurses have voiced opposition to the union drive.”

According to Cottage Health officials, there are 1,132 registered bedside nurses at the Santa Barbara hospital and 108 at Goleta. There are also 41 in Santa Ynez, though only some nurses at the Goleta and Santa Barbara systems have announced their intent to unionize.

Cottage Chief Nursing Officer Laura Canfield told Noozhawk that nurses’ wages are assessed annually based on data from nearby markets and the reimbursement rate from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

For Santa Barbara, that means the Southern California market.

She said there is a range of pay scales, called a “clinical ladder,” and that Cottage is a merit- and achievement-based organization.

Brand-new nurses come in at a position called Clinical Nurse 1. Nurses hit the Clinical Nurse 2 position when they have been working there for about a year, have been promoted and have completed their training, she said.

This is the level for the “majority” of Cottage nurses, she said, with pay ranging from $59.57 to $89 an hour. (She did not provide the Clinical Nurse 1 numbers.)

Cortez said the average Clinical Nurse II makes $68.62 an hour, and there are two additional clinical ladders beyond that that pay more.

She said in an email that nurses have received consistent raises during the past five years, including 6% in 2022, 6.3% in 2023, 5.4% in 2024, 6.3% in 2025 and 6.3% in 2026.

Cottage continues to provide annual increases and “navigate the challenges that are coming with federal reimbursement,” Canfield said.

Nurses pursuing unionization say that isn’t enough, and that their pay does not keep up with the cost of living.

Many nurses live “paycheck to paycheck,” said Tatiana Speier, who has been employed by Cottage for five years and works in the emergency room.

Claire Upton, who is pregnant with her first child, said she and her husband live 40 minutes from the hospital because they cannot afford to live in Santa Barbara.

“Unfortunately, I am one of the first in my family who is coming to terms with the fact that I may never be able to afford to live in Santa Barbara because Cottage does not compensate me enough to keep up with the cost of living,” Upton said.

Reyna Estrada Rioux said she knows nurses who “wanted nothing more than to stay here, start families here, buy homes here and build their future in this community, but they couldn’t afford to,” so they left.

In 2025, the median sales price of a home in Santa Barbara was $1.4 million, according to the state’s Employee Development Department. Real estate website Zillow put the average cost of a Santa Barbara home at $1.8 million as of September.

A study last year from the Santa Barbara County Association of Governments found that half of all renters across the county spend more than 30% of their income on housing and a quarter spend more than 50%. 

Canfield said Cottage offers “unique” benefits, such as subsidized housing, a childcare center, fertility and family-building benefits, and menopause education.

She said those things were requested through Cottage’s shared-governance system, which is a self-governing, coordinated council of inter-professional staff who are elected by their peers.

She pointed to Cottage’s virtual nursing program, where licensed nurses, through a live screen, handle patient intake and admission documentation, as an example of a program that helps nurses alleviate the “administrative burden” of documentation.

That allows bedside nurses to have more time doing the “hands-on” work with patients.

“Professional nursing is so challenging. … Our nurses take care of this community so well,” she said. “We’re locally owned. We are not part of a large system with an HQ outside of the community.”

She also said Cottage’s turnover rate was low at 8.4%, and said the organization welcomed 28 new graduate nurses on Monday. She added that there were 897 applicants for those positions.

Some of the nurses said the shared-governance system isn’t enough, and they want to be represented by a union, partly because three months ago, Cottage discontinued a long-term-leave policy.

(Canfield said she’s not aware of any concerns that have been brought up to her beyond compensation and benefits.)

They also pushed back on the virtual nursing system.

Daniella Alavi-O’Fahy, who has worked at Cottage since July, said being present during admissions and discharges “gives us opportunities to see and catch things that we might otherwise (have) missed.”

“People are less open when talking through a screen,” Alavi-O’Fahy added, “and our patients deserve a live human being at their side, not a face on a TV.”

City Councilwoman Kristen Sneddon, a mayoral candidate who represents City Council District 4, and Councilwoman Wendy Santamaria, who represents District 1, have thrown their support behind the union effort.

Sneddon said she supports the nurses, speaking both as a mother who gave birth and a daughter who had a parent in critical care.

“It’s the nurses who are there for us,” she said. “We stand with you.”

Santamaria said nurses need rights “that we can actually enforce” and “wages that we actually deserve,” pointing to the city of Santa Barbara’s “astronomical” wealth disparity.

“While somebody else makes that extra dollar or extra millions of dollars, it’s the nurses that have to be left with commuting long hours, packing in tighter, facing rent increase after rent increase that the wages just don’t keep up with,” she said.

“Your city leaders are behind you.”