Provide Input on the Future of De La Guerra Plaza

Source: City of Santa Barbara

As a result of the pandemic, there have been many changes to downtown Santa Barbara—State Street in particular. Please provide your input on a brief questionnaire regarding the concept plan for the historic center of downtown, De La Guerra Plaza. Some context, explanation and visuals can be found at the following link, along with the questionnaire.

Click here to take the survey

What do you think?

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19 Comments

  1. What an absolute waste of money. A useless portico and pave over everything is supposed to be an improvement? Meanwhile, 10 yards away, store owners are hosing urine off their front doors just to open. Use the money for bus tickets back to Portland and clean up state so families feel safe there again.

  2. um probably because going to the library has nothing to do with DLG Plaza, same with “attend to business”.
    read it as it is dude….and remember, the city doesn’t revolve around you. the questions were pertinent to “business” around DLG plaza.

  3. hey monkeyboi, i manage a shop on state street. please show me the shop owners that have to wash away urine every morning. sounds like political ramblings from a republicant. So you’re saying all homeless people come from Portland? God that’s just stupid. period.

  4. worst drought in history? My god you people are just weird AF! It’s a cycle, part of living here. We are in a La Nina pattern, then it will be El Nino and it will be wet. IT’s a cycle that has been going on for hundreds if not thousands of years. It’s not a drought when it’s part of a repeating cycle.

  5. Zero–so the whole rest of the city is supposed to subsidize and create a play area for the few people who “live around” the public plaza???? Only those people can participate and create policy on how to spend our money? Nonsense. The survey is clearly loaded to get results that the Bren School social engineers are looking for.

  6. Zero: Lmao oh so manmade climate change doesn’t exist, it’s a “cycle.” I’m glad the peanut gallery’s resident scientist cleared that up for me. I was getting worried after seeing the overwhelming evidence *checks notes* everywhere, and the consensus of climate scientists.

  7. I like these suggestions — and do not like the proposed splash pad (aka “water feature”) that belongs more in a park for children —- oh, yes, there is planned to be a splash pad in Ortega Park , less than a mile away from City Hall and State Street.
    The de la Guerra Plaza should not be focussed on “toddlers”, any more than it should be for seniors or any other specific demographic but for all of Santa Barbara. (Two of the commissioners with infants of their own and expecting another drove this support while others were silenced, perhaps by not wanting to seem anti-child.) Not coincidentally, perhaps, both are running for election this November.

  8. Any attempt to make this a flexible multi-functional space. as suggested – typically fails at everything while becoming one more unsavory transient and grifter magnet. Just like we already learned from the installations the fountains, benches and brick seating “sculptures” on State Street which became grifter magnets. Or the mandated gardens in front of the West Carrillo Street Ralphs market, instantly became a vagrant hangout.
    Until the transient-grifters problem are solved, we simply cannot keep adding more “nice things” in this town. Past is prologue. Take the blinders off and stop repeating stupid. Crime Is now up 50% in the surrounding neighborhoods after the city’s misguided and counter-productive Rose Garden Motel project went in.
    No new activity in DelaGuerra Plaza is going to bring people downtown when downtown itself continues to be the current wreck that it is. Deal with the real; not the wishful thinking that has plagued this town’s decision makers for far too long. Static low-maintenance landscaping at minimal costs is the only viable option right now, until State Street itself can be re-vitalized. Reworking the massive Paseo Nuevo space should be priority. Then any Dela Guerra plaza makeover can flow from that.
    Best to be done right now is turning it into a large electric bike center and require all city employees and council members use only electric bikes, so they can act out in real time the mandates they want to impose on the rest of us.

  9. At the start of this re-imagining process, one that was held when most people could not “attend” via Zoom, Friday mornings, they made sure that all the grass was dead and that the Plaza was unattractive to any but the passed-out homeless who often were there passed-out, natch.
    If there is going to be a redesign, it should start fresh, without “water features” and arcades but have as an option simplicity — and then have 3 or so options, including one with parking retained, submitted to city residents for a vote. Noticeable was that the prime landowner at the south end, the News-Press building owner, had no input into the designs offered. (She was invited but probably not as a co-equal.)

  10. Yeah they do Townie..
    But have you ever seen a person describe themselves to a sketch-artist?..
    They end-up looking like monsters..& that’s what I do..I show people
    “pictures-of-themselves”..
    & they don’t like who they see.
    Put Stocks in the plaza, & I will go 1st ..like a leader.

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