The controversy over the proposed 250-room Garden Street hotel in Santa Barbara will continue a little longer.

A last-minute dump of documents from the developer and appellants over the weekend, along with hundreds of public comment letters that were not published before Tuesday’s meeting, forced the City Council to delay a vote on the project until Nov. 19.

“It’s kind of ludicrous to expect that anybody in their right mind or with any real life is keeping up with this stuff on a real-time basis,” Councilman Mike Jordan said at Tuesday’s meeting.

He noted that one party “dropped” 198 pages of technical documents at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, and another party submitted 98 pages on Sunday afternoon in response. Then, the first party released another 28 pages during Tuesday’s meeting.

Although the council didn’t vote, it spent five hours listening to staff presentations, appellant and applicant comments, and testimony from members of the public. More than 150 people attended the meeting, which was standing room only.

Public comment will not be allowed on Nov. 19, paving the way for a council vote.

Critics of the project said the hotel would wreck the charm of the Funk Zone and displace businesses on the site. They say housing, not hotels, are needed in Santa Barbara.

The project calls for an underground garage that would force the removal of contaminated groundwater sentiment, which could spill into Laguna Creek.

The City of Santa Barbara, however, approved a Specific Plan for the Wright family in 1983, which gives the developers the right to build a hotel or housing. The family proposed 250 rooms, and it was approved by a majority of the city Planning Commission.

“What we are looking at today is a hotel project,” project planner Kathleen Kennedy said. “A lot of people have talked about that it should be housing. We don’t have a housing project. We have a hotel project that we feel complies with the specific plan.”

Wallace Piatt, an artist with a shop in the Funk Zone, spoke against the project.

“I understand growth and change, but to move out for this corporate, cookie-cutter budget hotel is a tearjerker for us,” Piatt said. “Gateway to Santa Barbara, I don’t think so. It will be an eyesore for this community — too big, too common and far from anything interesting like the rest of our beloved Funk Zone.”

A couple dozen members of the Laborers Local 220 donned orange shirts and spoke at Tuesday’s meeting in favor of building the hotel.

Union member Jayson Baiz said he used to work a non-union job and struggled to take care of his family financially. Then, he got a union job on a big project like the proposed hotel and his life turned around.

“These projects provide a launching pad for stellar trades jobs for locals in the community,” Baiz said. “They also provide other jobs, such as administration, management.”

In 2008, the Wright family proposed 91 residential condominiums, of which 20 would be for-sale affordable, but they withdrew that project because they said it would not be profitable.

Then, in 2019, a new hotel project by the Wright family went before the Planning Commission and received mostly favorable comments during a concept review.

The project then returned to the Planning Commission in 2023 and was eventually approved in a 4-2 vote earlier this year.

The Wright family believes that it has a legal right to build the hotel because the city approved the Specific Plan, which allows for a hotel. The developer previously agreed to contribute $500,000 to the city’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund and build six affordable housing units on site.

On Tuesday night, Sean Gilbert, speaking on behalf of the development team, agreed to give another $500,000 to the Housing Trust Fund to offset concerns that housing is not going in at the site.

“I think a lot has been made about whether this should be a housing versus a hotel project,” Gilbert said. “What we want to do, and we do take the housing crisis seriously, is up our donation into the Housing Trust Fund.”

He said another $500,000 “helps get us there.”

“It’s our ability to help the housing outside the coastal zone,” Gilbert said. “We really want to see the project through. We’ll be great stewards to the community.”