Regarding Noozhawk’s Dec. 13 story, “Santa Barbara’s Hotels, Tourism ‘Coming Out on Top’ After Pandemic,” I was struck by something not reported by staff writer Joshua Molina.
The Visit Santa Barbara president and CEO showed a graph of what visitors most want to see while in Santa Barbara. Although she said State Street and the Funk Zone were the most popular, the winner by one point was the Funk Zone.
I work in the Funk Zone, it was a surprise to see this with all the money the city throws at State Street. The Funk Zone gets nothing and we are more popular.
Government handouts and $800,000 consultants will not save State Street.
Dan Seibert
Santa Barbara
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Regarding the Dec. 12 article, “Downtown Santa Barbara 66-Unit Hotel Project Gets Positive Reviews So Far,” how tragic that needed housing is again lost in favor of tourists who buy T-shirts and cruise around on Segways.
With a master’s degree in urban planning and as a former Housing Authority housing development specialist in Providence, Rhode Island, and a former real estate broker in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, I am dumbfounded at the incompetence of the local officials involved, who are getting paid but not doing their jobs.
California requires thousands of new units of us, but the best sites get hotels. Is it a losing battle?
Lee Juskalian
Santa Barbara
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As long as the City of Santa Barbara allows State Street to look like the side streets of developing countries in the tropics, businesses will leave, and locals will shop elsewhere.
Return the street to its former condition, and people will return.
Also, when is the city going to return our gas tax taken to maintain State Street? Private business now occupies the street that we taxpayers have paid for. A class-action lawsuit might materialize.
Edith Ogella
Santa Barbara
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The Dec. 9 article, “Santa Barbara to Pay $225,000 to Settle Flightline Restaurant Dispute,” is yet another example of less than stellar judgment by the City of Santa Barbara staff.
The Flightline, for the period that it was open, was a nice addition to the Santa Barbara Airport. What better theme for an airport restaurant than aviation theme? I was there several times, and it was a nice venue.
When that restaurant was originally built, it was intended to provide a flight line food option for those using that part of the airport.
And Warren Butler’s background and experience in the restaurant business should have been positive indicators for success. Yet staff supposedly was concerned about Butler’s financial viability.
But one must ask how shutting him down over potential financial concerns was better than letting him continue to operate? Why did the city staff prefer years of an empty weed-covered parking lot and derelict building instead of a vibrant, functioning, aviation-themed restaurant just to prove their point?
If the concern was about getting the rent from Butler, why is it better that they get no rent at all?
Those employed by Butler’s restaurant certainly lost their jobs. And in the end the city had to spend hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to settle what they started.
So Butler lost, his employees lost, the public lost and the city lost the rent — a real lose-lose-lose-lose outcome from that staff decision.
When is the City Council going to convince the staff to change their mindset from one of finding ways of saying “No” to one of finding ways to help business owners and residents to succeed?
Art Thomas
Santa Barbara
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Robert Sulnick — in his Dec. 6 commentary, “Climate Change Requires a Global Revolution” — is right that “climate change is a global phenomenon requiring global solutions.”
It’s commonly argued that it’s futile for the United States to even attempt to reduce fossil fuel use if China, India and other developing nations continue their energy policies.
As heat-trapping emissions continue to rise exponentially, endangering lives and livelihoods for all the world’s people, what can we do?
Sulnick alludes to a local environmental group, Citizens’ Climate Lobby, of which I am a member. We advocate for a carbon tax that would require fossil fuel companies to pay for their pollution.
It’s a market-based policy that has long been advanced by economists, and it provides a global solution to involve all nations in transitioning away from these polluting fuels.
If the United States enacted a carbon tax on coal, oil and gas companies and applied it at our borders as a tariff on the carbon content of imported goods from nations that do not have a carbon price, it would incentivize all our trading partners, including China, to adopt similar policies to avoid paying a carbon tariff to the United States.
As more and more nations require their fossil fuel companies to pay, the demand for fossil fuels would plummet, renewables would gain a competitive advantage, and the revenue raised from the tax could be redistributed to citizens to ease the transition to a clean energy economy.
Robert Taylor
Montecito
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