As the Omicron variant propels COVID-19 to new highs, the City of Santa Barbara is looking to pass a new ordinance to restrict outdoor dining.
City staff has proposed that outdoor dining structures on the State Street promenade be portable and that there’s at least a 20-foot-wide passage way down State Street. Currently, there’s about 14.6 feet of space down the middle. The proposal also calls for returning Victoria Street and the 1300 block of State Street to two-way vehicular traffic.
However, many business owners say they feel left out of the process.
About a dozen business owners met on Friday with Jason Harris, the city’s economic development manager, at Bob Stout’s Wildcat Lounge on Ortega Street to talk about the proposed ordinance, which is scheduled to go before the City Council on Jan. 25. Among those in attendance was Aron Ashland, owner of The Cruisery.
“The staff has already written a report, and they didn’t talk to any of the business owners,” said Ashland, whose Cruisery restaurant is at the gateway to the State Street promenade at Haley Street.
Ashland said that if he is forced to remove tables and chairs on State Street to make room down the middle, it will cost him about $250,000 in revenues this year.
“In a year when I wasn’t even sure if I was going to make money, to take $250,000 in revenue out of my pocket and not even discuss it, I don’t know,” Ashland said. “I think we are all really creative, but they didn’t give us any options. They have already written their report, and they are going to the City Council with it.”
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The proposed ordinance also calls for an extension of outdoor dining through Dec. 31; it was originally supposed to expire on March 8. According to a draft ordinance that has not been publicly released but was obtained by Noozhawk, the recommendation is that “outdoor business facilities existing on Jan. 25, 2022, shall be modified as necessary to comply with the fire and emergency vehicle access requirement.”
The City Council in 2020 moved quickly to close State Street to vehicles and allow outdoor dining and parklets to help restaurants that were ordered by the state not to serve customers indoors. The change fueled a dramatic change on State Street. What once was a traffic corridor is now a vibrant and energetic scene where people of all ages go to eat, socialize and be seen.
But is the party over?
According to the ordinance, “The current configuration and location of many of the temporary outdoor business facilities installed along the State Street Promenade … result in an access route that is less than the minimum width established by (the) Santa Barbara Municipal Code.”
Santa Barbara Mayor Randy Rowse told Noozhawk that his impression is that there may be confusion over the proposal.
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“I do know the city is interested in maintaining the ability to provide outdoor space for customer seating,” Rowse said. “We are required to provide a minimum 20-foot clearance for public safety in the roadway. The priorities have been towards trying to provide as much flexibility to the business community as possible, while having to balance the requirements for public safety, total community access and some sense of uniformity.”
Richard Yates, owner of Opal Restaurant & Bar at 1325 State St., sent a letter to the City Council expressing his frustration.
“Why can’t we look instead at finding a way to both reinstate any actually compromised safety protocols and allow the economic vibrancy created by our new outdoor business areas to continue?” Yates wrote in a letter he shared with Noozhawk. “Why does one have to be at the expense of the other?”
Yates also gave credit to the city for responding quickly to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It is no exaggeration to say that the city saved us all when we faced the worst of the pandemic,” Yates said. “When COVID hit and threatened pretty much everything, the city had a can-do attitude. Whatever it took to keep us alive, there was a vision that arose to meet that need and a willingness to figure out how to get it done.”
Now is not the time, he said, to lose that attitude.
“Are there problems with the promenade in its current state? Sure, but the tremendous value represented by the promenade, as the first positive thing the city has done in the last 15 to 20 years to address the decline of State Street, should motivate this city and its leaders to think proactively how to maintain that value while addressing these other issues,” Yates said. “It’s entirely possible to conceive of designing a promenade from the ground up, to take all these issues into account as we go along.”
Robin Elander, executive director of the Downtown Association, said the proposal comes at a bad time.
“COVID cases are way up, people are again not wanting to eat inside due to Omnicron, and now the city wants to implement a larger fire lane that would cut the available space that business can use back significantly,” Elander said.
There are some practical concerns regarding the proposal, she said, particularly as it relates to making outdoor dining portable.
“The street is arched like a rainbow, which allows for water drainage at the curbs,” Elander said. “So in order to not have a wobbly table and chair dining experience, you need a leveled platform to sit everything on, or quite a large number of shims or other creative design materials. You also need to make sure you’re creating ADA accessible spaces that involve ramps over curbs and create a space that allows for social distancing and movement for staff and patrons.”
She said restaurant owners also have to consider the weight of items such as tables, chairs, heaters and umbrellas so that employees can move them safely and have a place to store them. When everything outside is required to go inside, it’s not easy to do business inside because tables and chairs pile up, she said.
Creating a 20-foot fire lane down the middle is also problematic, she said.
“If the newly imposed 20-foot fire lane — a state mandate that should have been part of the initial city guidelines for businesses to follow and use to construct their spaces, but wasn’t — is now implemented as a straight-line fire lane down the street and not meandering from side to side as it does now, much of what we have in downtown Santa Barbara now in terms of outdoor dining will be gone,” Elander said. “We’ll be essentially starting from scratch, and we’ll have lost what we’ve gained.”
City Councilman Oscar Gutierrez was one of the people at Friday’s meeting at the Wildcat Lounge who listened to the business owners.
“They made good points about how much money, resources and effort they put into their outdoor dinning, and I thanked them for that and told them we all really appreciate their hard work and sacrifice, but I reiterated that the State Street closure has been a temporary ordinance this whole time and that the street is public land that they have been operating their businesses on, and that public safety is our No. 1 responsibility,” Gutierrez said.
He said the council still needs to read the staff report.
“I found the meeting very informative and encouraged them to continue to reach out to all of us before the meeting so that we can have a better understanding of their perspective so we can come to a decision that will best benefit as many of our community members as possible,” Gurierrez said.
— Noozhawk staff writer Joshua Molina can be reached at jmolina@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.
