Several Asian-owned businesses in Isla Vista claim to have been excluded from the list of vendors chosen for the sanctioned Deltopia alternative, Soltopia. The Isla Vista Community Services District, which planned the event, said it contacted these businesses but was unable to conduct multiple follow-ups due to the limited planning time.
Due to Soltopia vendors offering attendees with free food, several local businesses saw significantly less business than in previous years. Sherine John / Daily Nexus
On the day of Soltopia, April 4, Asia 101, Lao Wang Noodle Bar and Poke Theory published a joint post that stated “IVCSD: Asian Businesses are not welcome.” The post continued by saying that about 40% of businesses in I.V. are Asian-owned and asked for transparency from the Isla Vista Community Services District (IVCSD). The Daily Nexus could not confirm exactly how many businesses were contacted or how many can be categorized as Asian-owned businesses.
“If public money is being spent in Isla Vista, Asian-owned businesses should not be invisible,” the post’s caption read.
According to IVCSD, several of these businesses were contacted. However, attempts to contact them were missed.
Owner of Asia 101 Boxi Wang said he realized there were no Asian-owned businesses when he looked through the post announcing participating businesses offering free food. Boxi Wang said he checked his email inbox and found “nothing” about participating in Soltopia except for road closure information.
“I checked my inbox, because normally [IVCSD does] send routine newsletters every couple weeks. So I just want to make sure that I was reached out for it, but maybe I didn’t see it, right?” Boxi Wang said. “But I found nothing about Soltopia.”
He proceeded to contact other Asian-owned businesses and non-Asian-owned businesses, who said they weren’t aware of Soltopia. This sparked Boxi Wang’s inquiry into how businesses were chosen for the event.
He said he does not intend to “benefit” from bringing awareness to the decision-making process, as he is retiring next year. However, he hopes that these conversations encourage greater exposure for local Asian-owned businesses, especially considering that May is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.
“What I actually want from this is more exposure for Asian businesses in future events, not only limited to Deltopia, but also like Pardall Carnival and other stuff like that,” Boxi Wang said.
In an interview with the Daily Nexus, IVCSD staff members Jonathan Abboud and Myah Mashhadialireza said they reached out to many businesses in I.V., including some of those included in the post. The board contacted businesses through business involvement packets and phone calls. According to them, there was also an online form that businesses could fill out.
Abboud and Mashhadialireza also mentioned that the board had roughly three months to plan the event since the Board of Supervisors passed the 72-hour noise ordinance in January, limiting the number of times they could follow up with each business.
“It was the tightest timeline humanly possible to plan any event, let alone [an] event of this magnitude, because we were working on the timeline of the County Board of Supervisors and the ordinance that was approved to restrict music on that day,” Abboud said.
Board members also said they left physical involvement packets at businesses, which the Nexus has viewed. Some businesses were closed during the initial packet distribution, which is when IVCSD called several businesses. In screenshots obtained by the Nexus, an IVCSD member called Lao Wang on Dec. 17 and left a voicemail about Soltopia.
“If we had more time, we could have done five follow-ups instead of two, right? If we had more time, we could have deployed more people and made sure we had every business physically twice. If we had more time, we would have had a bigger budget to fund more businesses, because we were also constrained by a budget that we all had to scrape together at the last minute,” Abboud said.
According to Mashhadialireza and Abboud, a lot of the outreach occurred during winter break since that’s when the noise ordinance seemed likely to pass and business was slower due to students being gone.
“When we did do that outreach, it was during winter break. And so we knew that some businesses were closed, but we also knew that it was a good time to maybe talk to business owners, considering that it was a slower time for actual business,” Mashhadialireza said.
According to the board members, IVCSD was initially seeking businesses that could be venues for the various festival zones, such as those with adjacent parking lots. Abboud said that the business involvement form stated that businesses that could not be venues could be involved in other ways.
“I just want to make it really clear that there was no discrimination in our process. It was an open-access process, along with us looking at certain businesses who had venue space for an event,” Abboud said.
Theodore Lee, the owner of Teddy Rice, said that he believes IVCSD failed to offer Asian-owned businesses an opportunity to be vendors at Soltopia, and that there should have been an “open dialogue” to offer local businesses the opportunity to cater.
“The fact is they didn’t consult us. There were no Asian restaurants that were chosen,” Lee said. “They never came and approached us to talk about it. If you just look at all of the restaurants that were open, it was all just tacos and bagels.”
Wesley Wang, the owner of Lao Wang Noodle Bar — a Chinese restaurant that has been operating in I.V. for nine years — was also dissatisfied with the IVCSD’s lack of communication with local businesses regarding their plans for Soltopia. When Wesley Wang initially saw a poster for Soltopia, he believed that the businesses providing free food were volunteering to do so for marketing purposes, and that it was “unfair” that other businesses were not informed that it was actually a paid opportunity for vendors.
“We can say no, but nobody [from IVCSD] contacted us, and I don’t even know how they decided the vendors,” Wesley Wang said.
According to Lee, since opening Teddy Rice’s doors two years ago, he has been able to witness the difference in business between Deltopia last year and Soltopia this year. Lee said that, during Deltopia, his business earned five times more than they typically do, while during Soltopia, it was five times less than a typical day.
In preparation for Soltopia, both Lee and Wesley Wang prepared extra food and scheduled additional employees to work in anticipation of high numbers of customers. However, because of the Soltopia vendors, they had significantly less business than in previous years.
“They’re giving out free food so all the students are going to the free places, and you can’t compete with that. It’s literally impossible,” Lee said. “So obviously no one really came into our restaurant, but there [were] lines down the block for the free places.”
Wesley Wang shared a similar experience and claimed that the IVCSD’s planning of Soltopia resulted in poor sales for businesses that were not chosen to be vendors.
“They dumped a lot of money on those [vendors so] the kids get free food and then that affects our business on the busiest day of the year. Our sales dropped down 90%,” Wesley Wang said.
As a result, Lee said that he believes that Soltopia “completely destroys the small business community” in I.V. due to taking away from businesses that aren’t chosen as vendors. He said he feels that the Santa Barbara Board of Supervisors’s decision to enact a noise ordinance banning Deltopia has had a negative impact on local small businesses.
“What they’re doing is replicating what happened to Halloween. As a struggling small business, Halloween was a huge business day for the small businesses, and they took that away. Then now, with Deltopia, that was a huge business day for us,” Lee said.
In the aftermath of Soltopia, IVCSD has met with several of these businesses to mediate the situation. During the meeting between IVCSD and Wesley Wang, they clarified that they had made efforts to reach out to businesses, but there were communication issues. According to Wesley Wang, Abboud said the IVCSD plans to “do better” when planning future events to include local businesses.
Abboud said these businesses have been invited to be a part of the next Soltopia as well as collaborate on a more regular basis. To improve communication between IVCSD and local businesses, these discussions included a possible I.V. business association to streamline announcements.
A version of this article appeared on p. 4 of the April 9 print edition of the Daily Nexus.
