Goleta, California

• 1. Introduction

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  Goleta, California takes its name from a wreck. Sometime after the 1770s, a sailing ship called a goleta ran aground at the mouth of a coastal lagoon, sat there for years in plain sight, and eventually gave its name to everything around it. Spanish for "schooner," the word stuck, and today it labels a city of more than 32,000 people tucked eight miles west of Santa Barbara along a stretch of Southern California coast where the shoreline runs east to west instead of the usual north to south.

  The name is one of the more poetic accidents in California geography, but the place itself has a stranger story. For most of its modern existence, Goleta was the largest unincorporated populated area in all of Santa Barbara County. It had tens of thousands of residents, a major university campus, aerospace firms, and a working airport, and yet it did not legally exist as a city until 2002. How that happened, what existed before it, and what the land itself looked like long before any of it is what this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. The Chumash and Early Visitors

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  For thousands of years before any European set foot on the California coast, the Chumash people inhabited the Goleta area. The Spanish would later call the coastal Chumash Canaliños, a reference to their proximity to the Channel Islands. One of the largest villages in the region, called S'axpilil, sat just north of the Goleta Slough, not far from where the Santa Barbara Airport stands today.

  The first known European to pass through was Spanish mariner Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, who explored the waters around the Channel Islands in 1542 and died there the following year. Sixty years later, Sebastian Vizcaino led another expedition along the California coast and gave the channel its enduring name: Santa Barbara. Spanish ships connected to the Manila galleon trade likely stopped in the area intermittently over the next 167 years, though they left no permanent settlements behind.

  The first land expedition to reach the area came in 1769, led by Gaspar de Portola on his way north to Monterey Bay. The group spent the night of August 20 near a creek north of what was then a vast open-water lagoon. At that time, the lagoon covered most of what is now the city of Goleta, stretching as far north as Lake Los Carneros. At least five native towns sat in and around the lagoon, the largest of them on an island in the middle of the water. Expedition engineer Miguel Costanso named them Pueblos de la Isla, or "towns of the island." Some soldiers called the island settlement Mescaltitlan, after a similarly placed Aztec settlement in Nayarit, Mexico. Franciscan missionary Juan Crespi, who traveled with the expedition, preferred Santa Margarita de Cortona.

  That island, eventually known as Mescalitan Island, would survive for nearly two centuries. It was bulldozed flat in 1941 to provide fill for a military airfield.

• 3. Ranchos, Shipwrecks, and a Name

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  After Mexico broke from Spain in 1821, the mission ranch lands around the Goleta area were divided into large grants. The eastern portion of present-day Goleta, lying east of today's Fairview Avenue, became Rancho La Goleta, named directly for the wrecked schooner visible at the lagoon's mouth. The rancho was granted to Daniel A. Hill, who holds the distinction of being the first American resident of Santa Barbara. A claim map, or diseno, drawn in the 1840s, actually shows the wrecked vessel.

  The land to the west of Fairview Avenue went to a different man entirely. Rancho Dos Pueblos was granted in 1842 to Nicholas Den, an Irish immigrant who happened to be Hill's son-in-law. Den's rancho was substantial: it took in the lagoon, the land where the airport now sits, what would become the UC Santa Barbara campus, and the community of Isla Vista, stretching west all the way to the eastern boundary of what is today El Capitan State Beach.

  The military governor Felipe de Neve had led an expedition in 1782 that founded the Presidio of Santa Barbara, and the mission followed shortly after. That established the administrative framework that would govern the Goleta area through the Spanish and Mexican periods. The road that Juan Bautista de Anza pioneered along the Santa Barbara coast in the 1770s eventually became El Camino Real, the chain of missions linked by a single coastal route. By the mid-19th century, Goleta's identity was bound up in farming, particularly lemons, which made the Goleta Valley a prominent growing region into the early 20th century.

• 4. Oil, War, and an Airport

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  The Ellwood Mesa, a stretch of bluffs on Goleta's western edge, hid oil and natural gas beneath its surface, and extraction operations began there in the 1920s. The same decade, aviation pioneers discovered that sections of the Goleta Slough that had silted in due to agricultural runoff made serviceable landing strips. The legal title to those former tidelands was ambiguous, which created complications as interest in a formal airport grew.

  In 1940, boosters from Santa Barbara began lobbying for federal funding and passed a bond measure to develop a proper airport on the slough. The urgency became undeniable in 1942, when a Japanese submarine surfaced and shelled the Ellwood Oil Field. It was one of the few direct-fire attacks on the continental United States during the entire Second World War. The Marine Corps moved quickly after that, completing the airport and establishing Marine Corps Air Station Santa Barbara on a site that would later be shared between the current airport and the University of California, Santa Barbara.

  After the war ended, Goleta Valley residents backed the construction of Lake Cachuma, which supplied the water that made a housing boom possible. The aerospace and research sectors moved in alongside the new subdivisions, and the valley's character shifted from agricultural to high-tech. In 1954, the University of California, Santa Barbara moved to the former Marine base, anchoring the area's identity in ways that persist today. Defense contractors including Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman all eventually set up operations in the area, drawn by the university's research presence.

  The onshore portions of the Ellwood Oil Field were not dismantled until the 1970s, though the offshore wells outlasted them. The La Goleta Gas Field, on the bluffs west of More Mesa, stopped producing commercially and was converted to gas storage by the Southern California Gas Company.

• 5. The Long Road to Cityhood

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  For decades, Goleta occupied a peculiar position in California civic life. It was the largest unincorporated populated area in Santa Barbara County, home to tens of thousands of residents and significant economic activity, yet it had no city government of its own. Incorporation efforts came and went without success.

  The breakthrough came through Measure H-2001, passed in the November 2001 election. The first five city council members were elected at the same time, and they officially began their terms on the 1st of February 2002. Goleta was, at last, a city.

  The boundaries drawn for the new city excluded two substantial communities. A heavily urbanized strip between Goleta and Santa Barbara, sometimes called "Noleta" by locals, was left out because it had polled against incorporation; removing it made approval of the measure more feasible. The student community of Isla Vista, directly to the south, was also excluded. Debate over Isla Vista had been sharp during incorporation planning, with some Goleta residents worried about the effect on tax revenue and the voting patterns of a large student population. A Local Agency Formation Commission report found that differences in "community identity" supported exclusion, while also noting that either outcome would have been viable. Some discussion later arose about whether Santa Barbara might annex the Noleta strip, but no resolution had been reached.

  Governance evolved over the following years. Until 2018, city council members took turns serving as mayor. In November 2018, Paula Perotte became the first directly elected mayor in the city's history, defeating fellow council member Michael Bennett. Voters had authorized that change two years earlier via Measure C-2016. In November 2020, another measure, Measure O-2020, extended the mayoral term from two years to four.

• 6. The Land Underneath

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  The Goleta Valley sits on a coastal plain roughly three miles wide, pinched between the Santa Ynez Mountains to the north and the Pacific Ocean to the south. The geology is active in ways not always obvious from street level. The soils are mostly well-drained, sandy loam of the Milpitas series, sitting atop layers of older material: Holocene and Pleistocene alluvium, estuarine deposits, and marine terraces formed during periods when sea levels were higher.

  The More Ranch Fault runs beneath the southern edge of the valley, making it one of the most geologically active faults in the area. Its path tracks along El Colegio Road, cuts through the southern part of the airport, follows Atascadero Creek, and continues east into Santa Barbara as the Mission Ridge Fault Zone. The fault has been pushing land upward over time, which created the coastal bluffs and the narrow beaches that define the shoreline. That same uplift placed relatively impermeable rock units between the ocean and the Santa Barbara Formation, a bedrock unit that serves as the region's principal groundwater aquifer, protecting its freshwater wells from saltwater intrusion.

  The Santa Ynez Mountains that form the northern backdrop are built from sandstone and conglomerate layers dating from the Jurassic to the present. They have been rising rapidly since the Pliocene, which gives them their craggy profile and drives the landslides and debris flows that spill into lower-lying areas. The range exceeds 4,000 feet in height to the northwest of Goleta, near Broadcast and Santa Ynez Peaks. Sundowner winds descend from those mountains and move through both Goleta and Santa Barbara, occasionally pushing temperatures to extremes. The warmest temperature on record for Goleta is 109 degrees Fahrenheit; the coldest is 20.

• 7. A City Today

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  Goleta's population reached 32,690 at the 2020 census, with a median age of 38.2 years and a median household income of $118,039. About 48.3% of residents held a bachelor's degree or higher, reflecting the university's gravitational pull on the local workforce. The racial composition recorded in 2020 included 52.0% white, 35.3% Hispanic or Latino, 12.1% Asian, and 17.0% identifying as two or more races.

  The University of California, Santa Barbara, remains the dominant economic force. It draws technology and defense firms to the area, and supports a service economy built around its staff and students. Deckers Outdoor Corporation, the parent company of UGG Australia and Teva, has its headquarters in Goleta. AppFOlio, FLIR, and InTouch also operate in the city.

  In 2017, the city set a goal of supplying all municipal facilities and community-wide electricity with renewable power by 2030, with an intermediate target of at least 50% renewable use at municipal facilities by 2025. The city's parks include Coronado Butterfly Preserve on the Ellwood Mesa, which hosts the largest overwintering grove of Monarch butterflies in the region. The Stow House and the South Coast Railroad Museum preserve traces of the agricultural era. Carl Barks, the comics illustrator who created Scrooge McDuck, lived in Goleta during the 1970s, and pop singer Katy Perry grew up in the area.