The Santa Barbara City Council on Tuesday hired a new consultant to finish the State Street Master Plan, a project that has sputtered along for the past three years.

The council voted 7-0 to hire Pasadena-based Moule & Polyzoides to finish the job, after city staff terminated the contract of the previous consultant, MIG.

The city in 2022 hired MIG under a $780,000 contract to manage the State Street Master Plan. The city paid MIG $570,000, leaving about $210,000 on the contract. The council also approved an additional $343,250 for the consultant to finish the plan.

The consultant will work on a circulation and public safety study, and then city staff will return to the City Council by the end of the first quarter of 2026 with a proposal for interim solutions to State Street.

“It’s the right choice for our downtown and the whole community,” Councilwoman Meagan Harmon said.

The community has been grappling with what State Street should look like after an abrupt closure of the street in spring 2020 and the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, city staff, led by Rob Dayton, the city’s then-supervising transportation planner, abruptly closed part of the street to vehicles so that restaurants could provide outdoor dining.

Most of the area that was closed to vehicles, between Cota and Victoria streets, remains closed, except for one lane of traffic on the 1200 block of State Street, which is now open to vehicles headed north.

Factions of the community have been sparring over whether State Street should be open to vehicular traffic or remain closed. Right now, with the exception of programmed events that have proven successful, the street is dominated by people on bicycles and e-bikes.

“The favorite view I have of State Street, which is no longer possible, is a young couple with a 3- or 4-year-old with a scooter and a 7- or 8-year-old on a bike with training wheels in the middle of the street,” Councilman Mike Jordan said. “That’s not happening today, anywhere on the part closed to vehicles on State Street.”

Strong Towns Santa Barbara presented a physical petition with 1,000 signatures and said it had about 2,500 total signatures of people on the South Coast who support keeping the street closed to vehicles.

The Downtown Santa Barbara Improvement District, a group managed by property owners, has launched its own petition, and is pushing the city to open the street to vehicles.

It used Placer.ai data and analytics to show that 600,000 fewer people annually have returned to State Street since the pandemic in 2020, but other business areas in the city have seen an increase in pedestrian traffic.

As part of the master plan effort, the city plans to study a centralized stormwater project on the 700 to 900 blocks that will collect stormwater in one location. It would allow businesses to buy into a larger, overall stormwater collection project, instead of building by building.

Tess Harris, the city’s State Street master planner, said the eventual plan will include sections about economics, history, transportation, housing, public engagement and other recommendations. If it were written right now with all of the information the city has obtained, it would be a multi-hundred-page document, she said. She’s hoping to get the document to about 50 pages, so the public can read and understand it.

“This is a really complex project, and there are a lot of different avenues that we could take,” Harris said.

Even though Mayor Randy Rowse supported hiring the consultant, he expressed frustration with the process. He has long supported reopening State Street to vehicles while the master plan is underway.

“I really do think we have lost a lot of the faith of the business community in town with all of our delays and all of our equivocations,” Rowse said.

Although the meeting was tense at times, Councilman Eric Friedman made comments that got the crowd laughing. He referenced a Noozhawk article about Sunstone Winery’s new functional beverage, Solis.

“Many of you may have read an article about a local entrepreneur who created a mushroom drink, and I had the opportunity to try that mushroom drink, and I might be the only one who is crystal clear about the future of State Street,” Friedman joked. “The good news is it’s all going to be fine — I guarantee it. The bad news is there is no way to put in the English language what the future will be, so you are going to have to wait to find out what I already know.”