After some wheeling and dealing, the Santa Barbara City Council on Thursday approved a rate structure for outdoor dining along State Street.

The vote was 4-2 in favor of a “variable design,” under which rates for outdoor dining will vary based on the designs of the structures. For example, restaurants that have their outdoor dining structures portable or at grade level would pay less than those who don’t.

The rates will vary widely, but a portable setup with a platform and no roof would cost $4 a square foot. Structures that are not portable, have no roof, but have a platform would be $4.50 a square foot, and structures not portable with a roof would be $5 a square foot.

The new fees will go into effect May 1.

Most of the discussion centered on an effort by Councilwoman Meagan Harmon and Councilman Oscar Gutierrez to delay the meeting because it was held on a Thursday.

The council took two votes on Thursday that deadlocked 3-3. Councilwoman and professor Kristen Sneddon was absent because she is on a Santa Barbara City College geology trip.

After a persuasive speech by Councilwoman Alejandra Gutierrez and direction by City Administrator Rebecca Bjork, Mayor Randy Rowse voted in favor of the variable design proposal. Rowse, Alejandra Gutierrez and Councilmen Eric Friedman and Mike Jordan were in support, and Harmon and Gutierrez were opposed.

The original discussion on the matter was supposed to happen the preceding Tuesday, but the rainstorm canceled the meeting.

The idea is that the larger and more permanent the structure, the more time and resources it would cost the city to maintain.

“I do want to stress my concern about whether this is truly getting a full hearing today, being on a Thursday and not a Tuesday,” Harmon said. “I just put that out there for the council to consider continuing this item.”

Harmon attended the meeting remotely.

Councilman Oscar Gutierrez agreed and said he spoke to business owners who said the storm affected their businesses and that they needed time to recover. He said the council should consider postponing the item so more business owners could be present.

“It would just be a little more equitable to them for them to be able to voice their opinion,” Oscar Gutierrez said.

But his colleague, Councilwoman Alejandra Gutierrez, jumped in and pushed back.

“This is not a surprise,” Alejandra Gutierrez said. “We’re going to have another disaster, who knows when, or probably COVID hits us again. We need to have structure.”

She noted that the council previously directed staff to look into rate structures and that was the point of the meeting.

“We spent 2½ hours, and we’re just going to go back and postpone?” Alejandra Gutierrez said. “We have to do something with the downtown because it’s a mess and it is just getting worse.”

Bjork also explained the importance of taking action.

“We can’t continue to subsidize these maintenance costs,” Bjork said, noting that they were currently being paid for by federal COVID-19 disaster relief money.

She said that without an outdoor dining fee for restaurants, the city’s only options would be increasing parking rates or lower services.

“If you don’t want to put the cost onto the restaurants, which was the direction the council had given us, we can go away, work toward a May 1 date, and come back with an alternative approach to perhaps increasing parking rates,” she said. “Frankly, the other alternative is we can reduce services.”

She said the city has spent a lot of money on maintenance for the downtown outdoor structures.

“It’s a zero-sum game,” Bjork said. “Either we get the money to continue this, or reduce the service.”

Rowse said he supported the decision to close the street during the pandemic, but is skeptical about continuing to close the street when many businesses are suffering.

“Has it filled in the vacancies? No, it hasn’t,” he said. “It has helped these restaurants out. How about these ancillary restaurants? We haven’t increased the pie. We have only taken the pie slices and concentrated them into one area.”

Here’s a link to the city’s outdoor dining fee structure.