Santa Claus Lane was once a quaint beach village, a family roadside attraction, where an 18-foot-tall, white-bearded Santa Claus statue stood on a roof and overlooked the people.

The half-mile strip also was home to a little zoo, until the monkeys escaped and took refuge in the hills of Carpinteria.

Those were the days.

Santa Claus since has moved to Oxnard. The array of Christmas-themed shops is gone. Government leaders have for the moment taken over Santa Claus Lane and are giving it a generational makeover, designed to improve safety for people, pedestrians and vehicles.

In addition to new soundwalls, parking spaces, pedestrian and bicycle paths, lighting and landscaping, Santa Barbara County is moving to eliminate the unofficial, scattered crossings from Santa Claus Lane over the railroad tracks to the beach.

The days of scampering across the tracks when no train is near are about over. The county wants to create a formal train-track crossing north of the shops, the latest expenditure that is part of an $8.37 million project.

Train deaths on the tracks have long been a problem on the South Coast, with rates higher than other nearby counties, according to a Santa Barbara Civil Grand Jury report in 2019.

The Santa Barbara County Association of Governments approved an extra $750,000 on Thursday for a “licensing fee,” essentially for a formal, designated location to cross the tracks. The $750,000 is on top of the $7.62 million already approved for the Santa Claus Lane Streetscape Project.

The total cost of the project is not to exceed $8.37 million, with $1.33 million coming from Measure A, a local sales tax approved in 2008.

The licensing fee came as a surprise to county officials. Chris Sneddon, Public Works director for the county, said the early plan was to create a crossing and make it compliant with the American Disabilities Act. However, Union Pacific, which owns the tracks, had other ideas.

“It’s a licensing fee, a quasi-right-of-way-passage fee,” Sneddon said. “Union Pacific holds all the cards in this process.”

How did Union Pacific reach the amount of $750,000? Sneddon said it used square foot evaluation based on property value in the beachfront area, which is essentially about $225 per square foot.

Now, anyone crossing the train tracks will have to cross at a designed spot.

“They don’t want people crossing at 30 different locations,” Sneddon said. “It is going to have a single crossing point.”

According to a 2019 KCRW report, Santa Claus Lane bloomed in 1948 when Pat and June McKeon bought a juice stand that at the time was called the North Pole. The new owners changed the name to Santa Claus. The area bustled as businesses, toy stores and candy shops around it expanded. Santa Claus Lane was a popular stop for people cruising the Pacific Coast Highway.

A zoo with monkeys was a success, according to KCRW, until they escaped in the avocado trees. A Santa Barbara sign-maker convinced the McKeons to place the Santa Claus statue on top of the juice and shake shop.

However, Highway 101 was built, and Disneyland became an attraction in the late 1950s, and Santa Claus Lane’s popular diminished. Opposition grew to Santa Claus, driven by new wealthy homeowners in the area, according to KCRW.

Eventually, the statue was deemed unsafe for the building it sat on, and in 2003, an Oxnard business owner agreed to take the Santa, which now stands on the other side of the train tracks.

The latest change to the area comes as mitigation to the Highway 101 widening project.

In 2018, SBCAG and Caltrans secured $184 million to construct three segments of Highway 101 covering seven miles and several so-called parallel projects within local jurisdictions. The Santa Claus Lane Streetscape and Railroad Crossing was one of those projects. Overall, the county is set to pay Union Pacific $1.9 million, including the additional $750,000 licensing fee, bringing the total current cost to $8.37 million.

Santa Barbara County First District Supervisor Roy Lee said he supports the additional expenditure.

“This will give locals better access to the beach,” Lee said.