Goleta has three contested races for the upcoming Nov. 5 election: Voters in the third and fourth districts will choose their city councilmember, and voters across the whole city will vote on the mayoral seat. 

Goleta is undergoing a lot of changes with Project Connect, restriping in Old Town, and new housing for formerly homeless individuals. More changes are in the city’s future, with large housing projects proposed from the state-mandated Housing Element process.  

Three candidates are running as a sort of slate of political outsiders, frustrated with how the city has handled these changes. 

District 3 candidate Ethan Woodill said he’s concerned with the impact large projects are having on the environment, his neighbors, and business owners. 

Woodill also said he wouldn’t run without Richard Foster.

“Richard Foster just wanted to be retired, he didn’t want to do this, but I told him I wouldn’t do it without him,” Woodill told Noozhawk. “I told him that he needed to do it because we need him as a mayor; he is the mayor that I feel we need 100%.”

Foster, a longtime resident of Goleta, has been regularly attending City Council meetings for the past 10 to 15 years. His main concerns are the city’s underfunded capital improvement projects and road improvement projects, and the recent Hollister Avenue restriping.

Woodill and Foster also recruited Eric Gordon, a local business owner, to run in District 4 against incumbent Stuart Kasdin. 

Gordon told Noozhawk that he was originally going to run for mayor but decided to step down when he saw Foster was running. 

“I came home and I told my wife I don’t need to do this, he’s got this,” Gordon said. 

Woodill and Foster asked Gordon to run because if all three of them were elected, they’d have a majority alliance on the five-member council, allowing them to make the changes they hope to see, according to Gordon.

Gordon said he’d run if Woodill and Foster couldn’t find anyone else in District 4 willing to do it. When it came close to the filing deadline and they hadn’t found anyone else, Gordon threw his hat in the ring. 

Gordon said he is focused on upkeeping quality roads, bringing back community events lost during the pandemic, and ensuring that the city has the electricity and water it needs if more housing is going to be built. 

Goleta City Council Election

In the Nov. 5 election, Goleta Mayor Paula Perotte is running for re-election against Foster.

In District 3, Ethan Woodill and Jennifer Smith are running for an open seat.

In District 4, incumbent Stuart Kasdin is running for re-election against Gordon.

Having all contested city council races hasn’t always been the norm for Goleta.

Perotte said she remembers the city having a hard time to get people to run for office and that many races used to go uncontested. Her own race for city council was uncontested in 2014. 

“Having a race where you have somebody that has maybe different ideas or opinions, that’s fine, that’s great. That’s what we all strive for,” Perotte said. “We want our community to have choices.”

The Struggle For Affordable Housing

The county’s Housing Element Update left Goleta with many major projects planned just outside its city borders. That’s a big reason Foster, Woodill and Gordon are running; however, they don’t necessarily agree on what to do about housing.

“It seems to me that our need for housing is outweighed by our need for just better infrastructure, saving our money for a rainy day and doing the type of boring governance work that a small town should be doing,” Gordon said. 

Gordon said that the idea of low-income housing doesn’t exist on the South Coast and that state mandates aren’t going to help.

“The price of everything here is always going to be high,” Gordon said. “What you have to do is try to balance that with leaving the area alone, letting the market decide, and if we start to run out of people to work because they can’t afford to live here, then those systems will take care of themselves. There will be people starting to build ADUs, and they’ll rent out apartments and do things that will allow those people to live here, but you don’t do it by building new housing.”

Meanwhile, Foster said, the city has enough housing for the population, but not enough affordable housing. 

“We built enough housing over 20 years for our population growth; what we don’t have is economically affordable housing, and that’s one of the great failures,” Foster said. “The state defines affordable as bigger, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it actually ends up being more economically affordable.”

Perotte, running for her third term as elected mayor, agrees that the state mandates don’t necessarily work to ensure that the housing being built is affordable. Perotte said she’d like to see more workforce housing and is even considering using city property to build it. 

“​​I am committed as well as the other council members to making sure that we get what we need, and it doesn’t take away the character of Goleta,” Perotte said. “We need housing for people that want to live where they work, so that they can then be part of the community.”

Jennifer Smith, city planning commissioner and candidate for the District 3 seat, said city leaders should be advocating for more funding from the state to meet housing needs. 

“I think local jurisdictions have a role in terms of advocating for that funding; if the state is saying we need this affordable housing, then there should be a method for it to be funded,” Smith said. 

Along with other candidates, Smith wants to focus on prioritizing capital improvement projects and road repairs. 

“We definitely need to look at both the maintenance issue and any other improvement issues with a focus on how are we ensuring the basic functions of the city,” Smith said. “Because I think we risk losing trust with the community if we’re not providing just the basic infrastructure that’s needed, but it really does start with the budget.”

Impact of Infrastructure

Goleta is undergoing major infrastructure changes, the largest in the city’s history with Project Connect, which includes three areas: Hollister Avenue, Ekwill Street and Fowler Road.  

The plan is to add roundabouts to Hollister Avenue near Highway 217 and replace the existing bridge over San Jose Creek. The city restriped Hollister Avenue in Old Town in the effort to add parking and, leaders said, to address traffic issues.

The project included reducing the two lanes on each side to one, not allowing left turns from Tecolote Avenue to Orange Avenue, and adding bike lanes. Street parking went from parallel parking to back-in angled parking. 

The project is quickly becoming a hot-button issue this election season. 

Many Old Town business owners have been against the project since the beginning and are now reporting a decline in revenue, citing the increase of traffic and customers not wanting to navigate the new parking. 

Woodill said business owners got left behind during the restriping process. 

“Old Town right now, they got forgotten and underutilized,” Woodill said. “We left them behind. That cannot happen, cannot happen ever again. I don’t care what you think about the progress you want to make. You cannot rush progress and leave people behind. Their businesses matter. They matter.”

Perotte said that the city had a number of workshops to discuss the project in the months leading up to the restriping and that they first heard complaints in the weeks before the project began. Perotte said they are working with the Greater Santa Barbara Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and business owners on identifying solutions and a path forward for Old Town. 

“I feel badly, I know, when there’s ever a construction project — it’s hard on businesses,” Perotte said. “I do want to talk to them and find out how we can help them. I want to hear what their ideas are.”

Across the whole city, all the candidates have acknowledged that the city needs to improve road conditions.

Kasdin said the city hasn’t had the funds they need to maintain good road conditions, especially due to the rising cost of construction.

“We don’t want to allow our roads to deteriorate, because the worse the conditions are, the more expensive it is to maintain it,” Kasdin said. 

Kasdin said that city staff is working to develop a five-year plan to get to a point where roads are regularly being taken care of.