Your recent piece on fundraising by Supervisor Janet Wolf and Goleta City Councilmember Roger Aceves made it sound like Mr. Aceves has as much, if not more, support from small local donors as does Supervisor Wolf. But the numbers indicate otherwise.
Of the $118,927 that Mr. Aceves has raised, over 60 percent have come from oil and development interests. These include $40,050 from real estate and developer interests, including $10,200 from a developer who has major development interests in the Eastern Goleta Valley, $13,000 from the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians, who are seeking to remove a large track of land from the Santa Ynez Valley Community Plan process, and $23,000 from petroleum interests, including $9,500 from Santa Maria Energy and its CEO David Pratt. Some of these contributions were in his city council campaign fund and were carried over, so they are not apparent without some more substantial research.
These numbers paint a very different picture of where Mr. Aceves’s support comes from and what vested interested lie behind the funding of his campaign. The residents and voters of Santa Barbara County deserve to know this.