The Santa Barbara Independent
Endorsements for the General Election,
November 3, 2026
Our Choices for National, State,
and Regional Offices, and the Propositions
By Indy Staff | October 8, 2026 Updated: October 14, 2026
These are the Independent‘s endorsements for the midterm elections. As always we do not endorse in every race or on every issue, but only those we feel sufficiently confident to recommend to our readers. Ballots began mailing this week, and election officials say that some could take as long as two weeks to reach all mailboxes. If you are registered but have not received your ballot within that timeframe, you can call the elections office at 1-800-722-8683 for help.
Whether you agree with our suggestions or not, please vote. It matters.
STATE
Prop. 1: Yes
Prop. 2: Yes
Prop. 3: Yes
Prop. 4: Yes
Prop. 5 (Amends State Constitution to Change Recall Process for High Statewide Offices): Yes
Prop. 37 ($25 Billion Middle-Class Home Loan Program): Yes
Prop. 38 ($8 Billion Bond for Immunology Research): No
Prop. 39 (Requires Government-Issued ID to Vote): No
Prop. 40 (One-Time Wealth Tax on Billionaires): No
Prop. 41 and Prop. 42: No and No
Prop. 43: No
Prop. 44 (Requires Community Health Clinics to Spend 90 Percent of Revenue on Services): No
Prop. 45: No
Governor: Xavier Becerra
Attorney General: Rob Bonta
State Assembly, 37th District: Gregg Hart
Treasurer: Eleni Kounalakis
Insurance Commissioner: Ben Allen
NATIONAL
24th Congressional District: Salud Carbajal
REGIONAL
Santa Barbara City Council
Mayor: Eric Friedman
District 4: Devon Wardlow
District 5: Ian Baucke
District 6: Gabe Escobedo
Lompoc City Council
Mayor: Jeremy Ball
District 2: Sharlameigne Segovia
District 3: Sarah Anne Read
Buellton City Council
Mayor: David Silva
Goleta City Council
District 1: Luz Reyes-Martin
District 2: James Kyriaco
Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors
5th District: Ricardo Valencia
Santa Barbara Unified School District Board of Trustees
Area 1: Mark Philibosian
Area 4: Valerie Amparan
City College Board of Trustees
Area 5: Dominique Lujan
Area 7: Andrea Varon
Measure H: Yes
STATE
Statewide Ballot Initiatives
Voters will confront 14 ballot initiatives. Most have to do with money and taxation; others have to do with how elections are carried out. Some are exceptionally hard to make out. If you don’t understand, chances are that’s not an accident.
Prop. 1: Yes
Prop. 1 authorizes $11.25 billion in bonds for affordable housing programs that will reportedly subsidize the construction of 40,000 multi-family rental units, 2,500 units of farmworker housing, 1,200 beds for university students, and housing for 2,100 veterans. It also authorizes $200 million in housing grants to tribes.
Prop. 2: Yes
The state budget reserve cap will double from 10 percent to 20 percent so that when times are especially flush, the state will be allowed to set aside a larger amount for when times are tight.
Prop. 3: Yes
Makes permanent the tax increase first approved in 2012 on the top 2 percent of state taxpayers. If Prop. 3 loses, the state will lose $5 billion to $15 billion a year in tax revenues. Roughly 40 percent of that money would go to schools and community colleges. If Prop. 3 loses, the top 2 percent of the state’s tax payers will reap a tax break of $5 billion to $15 billion a year.
Prop. 4: Yes
Would repeal California’s existing prohibition against the state using funds collected from the public to underwrite the cost of running for office. Right now, the state’s Campaign Reform Act bars this from happening. If Prop. 4 passes, it does not mean that publicly funded campaigns will automatically start. It means that the barrier blocking this from being considered will be removed.
Prop. 5 (Amends State Constitution to Change Recall Process for High Statewide Offices): Yes
This one requires some squinting, but we recommend a yes. Right now, when successful recall campaigns are launched against sitting governors, for example, their replacement is chosen in the same election. Typically, these are circuses with far more clowns than conductors. Typically, hundreds of candidates are involved, many one-time wonders looking only for the 15 minutes of fame to which they think they’re entitled. Prop. 5 takes all the fun out of this, requiring a whole new special election to select the replacement for whichever candidate got recalled. This one can be argued both ways, but when possible, we prefer to err on the side of sanity.
Prop. 37 ($25 Billion Middle-Class Home Loan Program): Yes
If approved, Prop. 37 would authorize the sale of $25 billion in bonds, the proceeds to be a loan to help middle-class would-be first-time homeowners to be able to make a 17 percent down payment for a home valued at no more than $1.5 million. We wonder just how far that $25 billion will go and how many people will actually be helped, but any response to the state’s housing crisis will require scatter-shot solutions. And this is one.
Prop. 38 ($8 Billion Bond for Immunology Research): No
If state voters approve Prop. 38, they will be all but guaranteeing that the measure’s biggest financial backer will be granted half of the $8 billion in bond dollars the measure secures for cutting-edge research in cancer, dementia, and immune disorders. While the measure does not mention Gary K. Michelson, founder of the California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy, it does list very specific requirements that only Michelson’s Institute can satisfy. Michelsen has donated $8 million to pass Prop. 38. The proposition’s remaining $4 billion will be available to a wider field for competition, but if Prop. 38 passes, state taxpayers will be on the hook for annual payments of $500 to $600 million a year for 25 years. We have no reason to question the scientific expertise of Michelson’s institute, but we do know a sweetheart deal when we see one. While such research is absolutely essential, the arrangement, originally exposed by CalMatters, underscores the extent to which special interests have usurped the proposition process. California reformers passed that process100 years ago to protect the citizens of this state from those very special interests. Vote No on Prop. 38.
Prop. 39 (Requires Government-Issued ID to Vote): No
Prop. 39 was hatched by those subscribing to a floridly paranoid conspiracy theory popular in certain circles that the Democratic Party is allowing undocumented immigrants into the county to exploit their votes. For those suffering such hallucinations, we would strongly suggest psychiatric attention. For everyone else, we urge you to vote no on Prop. 39. It is dangerously and sloppily written and purports to solve a problem that simply does not exist.
Even the right-wing Heritage Foundation, after examining the results from 200 federal elections, concluded that at most 15 votes out of 10 million cast in seven states over several decades were cast by non-citizens. Another study — this one of election results in 42 jurisdictions in 12 states of the 2016 election — concluded that .0001 percent of the votes cast had been cast by non-citizens. Needless to say, no outcomes were remotely altered.
If passed, Prop. 39 would amend the state’s very Constitution. It would require county election officials to “use best efforts” to verify that all registered voters are U.S. citizens by availing themselves to “government data.” Ominously, what those “best efforts” are and what that “government data” would be are conspicuously not specified. And it gets worse. Voters will be required to show various forms of government-issued identification to cast their ballot. What kinds of ID would be required are not specified.
In California 2.7 million voting- age residents do not have a driver’s license. Another three million have expired licenses or licenses from other states. Typically, these individuals are younger, poorer, and not white. One need not be a rocket scientist or brain surgeon to these connect dots such as these. Prop. 39 is bad for the country, the state, and you.
Prop. 40 (One-Time Wealth Tax on Billionaires): No
The division of wealth throughout the United States has grown morally grotesque. Under the Trump administration, it’s become pornographic. Due to the president’s “Big Beautiful Budget Bill,” one trillion dollars will be cut from the safety net from the nation’s poor in order to bestow $1 trillion in tax breaks to the upper one percent.
Prop. 40 is an attempt to buffer this cruel reality by promising to offset the billions in Medicaid cuts with billions generated by a one-time wealth tax on the 220 billionaires calling California home, four of whom reportedly live here in Santa Barbara. How could anyone resist such karmic comeuppance?
Sadly, at its best, Prop 40 is a rhetorical gimmick that can’t possibly deliver on its promises. But it will make a bad situation even worse by creating a completely new category of taxation: a one-time tax of 5 percent on the wealth — not the income — of state billionaires.
Wealth includes all kinds of things that don’t qualify as income: yachts, jets, art and wine collections, business interests, stocks, grand pianos, football teams. However, California’s vast tax-collecting bureaucracy is structured specifically to tax income, not wealth. Incredibly, the fine print of Prop. 40 allows the government only six months to create this new wealth-assessing system.
We are struck by how often the words “maybe” and “probably” show up in the fine print. How much money might actually be raised? How many billionaires might flee the state? How much might state income tax revenues drop? Since California relies upon income taxes — as opposed to real estate assessments — those are threatening questions.
Eventually, some thorny details might get hammered out, but the wheels of government turn even slower than those of justice: A six-month deadline is a practical impossibility; worse, efforts to meet it will generate more litigation than revenue. Little wonder that organizations such as Planned Parenthood and the California Medical Association — which would presumably benefit from Prop. 40 — have come out against the measure.
Of course, the billionaires, presumably terrified of becoming wealth-tax refugees, have raised $200 million to stop the measure. Yes, it’s a gross spectacle. But if the devil is in the details, then Prop. 40 needs an exorcist.
Prop. 41 and Prop. 42: No and No
If billionaires ever wondered why they have such a bad rap, Props. 41 and 42 offer 200 million good reasons why. That’s the amount of money they have already spent supporting these two initiatives they hatched as poison pills just in case Prop. 40, the billionaire’s tax, were to succeed. Prop. 41 would require a special audit before any special tax — such as Prop. 40 — specifically examining all government programs designated for additional funding with the proceeds of that one-time tax. Technically, Prop. 41 might not stop Prop. 40 outright, but it sure would gum up the works if it passed. Prop. 42 is more direct and to the point: If passed, it would flat-out prohibit the enactment of any taxes on personal wealth, which is precisely the new income stream that Prop. 40 hopes to tap into. Currently, California taxes income only, not wealth, which entails such things as art, wine, car collections, business interests, intellectual property and retirement accounts. We don’t support Prop. 40 for a host of good reasons, but this kind of spending is enough to make anyone want to stop being so reasonable.
Prop. 43: No
Prop. 43 would make it harder for voters to approve local special taxes that they — not their local government officials — put on the ballot by raising the percentage of votes required for passage from 50 percent to two-thirds. We will spare you the minutia of applicable state tax and election codes, but the point here is to make it harder for people to tax themselves for specific purposes. Fighting over this one are the usual collection of taxpayer protection and the unions. We are far from thrilled by the hint of higher taxes, but with the federal government now in full retreat from many of its traditional support roles, local governments will have increasingly rely upon their own local resources to weather the local disasters and health-care shortfalls.
Prop. 44 (Requires Community Health Clinics to Spend 90 Percent of Revenue on Services): No
This is yet another high-minded grudge match that drags voters into terrain over which we lack the competence needed to make an even quasi-informed decision. Who doesn’t think money going to medical clinics goes to services rather than administrative overhead? But 90 percent? California has about 2,000 safety net clinics; right now, they are being battered by violent changes in federal health care funding courtesy of Donald Trump’s Big Bad Beautiful Budget Bill. In Santa Barbara, the constellation of health care providers making up our health care universe are reeling. The community care clinics provide the absolute bedrock of safety-net care. However high-minded and lofty such efficiency mandates might seem, this is absolutely not the time for voters to meddle. Our medical world can survive half-assed opinions and knee-jerk reactions; it can’t, however, survive half-assed and knee-jerk votes.
Prop. 45: No
If you think an eight-story monstrosity built right behind the Santa Barbara Mission is a good way to solve Santa Barbara’s housing crisis, then maybe you might also think Prop. 45 is a good way to solve the state’s red tape problem. Otherwise, we urge you to vote no. We will stipulate the problems caused by excessive red tape are real and really infuriating. But anybody claiming to have a simple solution is to be distrusted. Red tape exists in such abundance in Coastal California because Coastal California is too damn beautiful for its own good. Balancing all that beauty with all that infinite demand requires a finesse, delicacy, and wisdom. Prop. 45 is just another one-size-fits-all solution that will not succeed in getting affordable housing built but will definitely succeed in making the coast ugly. Beauty counts. Vote no.
Governor: Xavier Becerra
If only, on occasion, it would be refreshing to seriously consider a candidate for elected office from the Republican party. But we’ve had little opportunity in this century. Certainly not in the case of this year’s gubernatorial election. Steve Hilton, the Republican standard bearer, is at best a MAGA mouthpiece, clever, and verbally nimble, but seemingly untroubled by the mass moral mayhem inflicted by his boss seemingly for no greater purpose than cruelty for cruelty’s sake. We are supporting Becerra mainly because Hilton is so very much worse. We remain troubled, however, by Becerra because of his level of care for unaccompanied migrant children when he ran Health and Human Services during the Biden administration. The New York Times, through an investigative series, exposed how many unaccompanied minors were falling through the cracks and into the hands of labor traffickers. It’s disheartening that he continues to shrug off those questions as mere “Trump talking points.” We might soon find ourselves pining for the good old days of Gavin Newsom. The alleged dialectics of the two-party system has been exposed as a mirage too many times now, but here we are, and Becerra is what is. We sincerely hope he will be much better than we expect.
Attorney General:
Rob Bonta
Attorney General Rob Bonta just launched his 83rd legal action against the Trump administration. If successful, this one could save motorists anywhere from $185 billion to $400 billion. This is money that will otherwise be funneled directly into oil industry coffers as a happy windfall. The Trump administration is now proposing to put the kibosh on the next scheduled improvement in federal fuel efficiency standards. The auto industry regards these standards — the single most effective tool against the proliferation of greenhouse gases aside from the catalytic converter — as an intrusive nuisance. As of 2031, the fuel efficiency required of Detroit would jump from the current 34.9 miles per gallon to 50.4. Detroit says it will cost $60 billion to comply with these new standards. Trump says by freezing this efficiency upgrade, new cars will be on average $1,300 cheaper. But even by Trump’s own math, the average gas price of the same car will be $1,600 more expensive. Even factoring in for inevitable performative theatrics, Bonta has truly outdone himself keeping the Trump White House in partial check. To date, of the 83 legal actions he filed, he has won 21, eight were withdrawn, and in 45, he secured some tentative preliminary relief. Sixty-six remain ongoing.
State Assembly, 37th District: Gregg Hart
Gregg Hart has not wasted his time in Sacramento since he was first elected to the California Assembly in 2020. This year, he got an impressive number of bills on the governor’s desk, including one designed to short-circuit White House plans to open the entire California coast to new oil development leasing. His bill prohibits oil pipelines located in state waters from carrying the crude oil pumped from wells in federal waters. (And, no, this bill would not have any impact on Sable Offshore’s ever-embattled project now under development.) The governor signed it into law — and that was not the only one.
Among the bills Hart successfully got signed was another engineered to crack the unfettered autonomy that California’s 58 elected county sheriffs have had on the management of their jails. Hart saw the damage that caused when he was a Santa Barbara supervisor: The county had to foot the bill for jail operations but had absolutely no control over its ever-escalating costs. His new bill allows county supervisors, for the first time, approval over who county sheriffs can or cannot appoint to run their jails.
In 2025, Hart also got a bill passed and signed that gave third-party investigators oversight while looking into the deaths of people in custody. In Santa Barbara — as with many counties — the sheriff is also the coroner. For Hart, that was a conflict of interest that needed to be rectified. That bill takes effect next year.
These are just a few of the bills that Hart has gotten passed, and only some of the issues he has consistently worked to solve. Gregg Hart is a genuine political athlete endowed with rare stamina, smarts, connections, and a moral compass. We are lucky to have him representing us in Sacramento.
Treasurer:
Eleni Kounalakis
Insurance Commissioner:
Ben Allen
With natural disasters becoming more intense and more frequent, Californians find themselves increasingly up against the wall when it comes to finding remotely affordable fire and home insurance. What the state offers with its FAIR plan falls drastically short and given the state of the state budget, won’t be getting any better soon. Allen preaches the gospel of fire risk reduction and hopes to enlist anyone within earshot to this crusade. While the lingo of insurance is so opaque and obtuse, by design no doubt, we need a commissioner who will push and fight and ask all the uncomfortable questions so when that the time comes, we won’t find ourselves abjectly horrified by all the terrible answers. Ben Allen fills that bill. And perhaps if he’s elected, the answers won’t be quite so horrifying.
NATIONAL
24th Congressional District: Salud Carbajal
When Congressmember Salud Carbajal responded to the looming specter of climate change, he didn’t just shake his fist at the easy target of offshore oil. He worked to get the local fishing community and the Department of Defense on board for a massive, 400-square-mile offshore wind energy project about 40 miles off the California coast, an area known as the Saudi Arabia of wind energy. Three major companies had purchased federal leases. Earlier this year, Trump canceled those leases, offering to return to the companies their hundreds of millions of dollars in deposits but only if they agreed to reinvest it in the development of fossil fuels.
Given the gargantuan challenges confronting us as a species, we need more from those in office than to fulminate about the egregious excesses of Donald J. Trump and his administration. It is, however, a helpful starting point, and Carbajal has done a lot more than that.
Recently Carbajal, a moderate Democrat who has served in Congress since 2016, the same year Trump was first elected, has taken the lead in a number of challenges to Trump’s destructive initiatives and shenanigans. He led a group of 30 members of the Senate and House to remove the Hunt amendment from the massive defense appropriations bill. This bizarre attachment would give Secretary of War Pete Hegseth the unprecedented power to condemn any land in Santa Barbara County — whether under the jurisdiction of the county, the state, or private property owners — that Sable deems necessary for their Santa Barbara operation. Like that of Trump’s excessive new White House ballroom, the pretext is “national security.” After 10 years in Washington, Carbajal has made enough friends in high places that we have credible reason to hope this overweening act of overreach will be exorcised from the bill once Senate deliberations get underway.
Carbajal has been an outspoken advocate for protecting the environment, including introducing legislation to clean up the toxic dumps in the San Pedro Basin, sponsoring a multimillion-dollar upgrade for water systems throughout his district from Los Alamos to Ojai, and working to establish the Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary off the coast. Over the last year, he has taken on Hegseth aggressively when the secretary refused to directly answer if his oath of allegiance was to the Constitution or the president. And Carbajal’s record of constituent service has always been outstanding.
As a matter of existential urgency, we are betting the farm that this November the nationwide effort to take the majority away from the Republicans — who’ve surrendered their spines and souls — in both the House and the Senate will succeed. One important step is to send Carbajal back to Congress. He deserves our support.
REGIONAL
Santa Barbara City Council
Rarely, if ever, do Santa Barbara city voters get to roll so many dice when selecting a new mayor and new City Council representatives. In this election, those four seats are up for grabs. That brings a whole new majority to the council. Or it could be.
This year, the endorsement process has been unusually painful and conflicted. For mayor, we found ourselves forced to choose between two incumbent councilmembers we have long known, supported, and respected. For the council seats representing three districts, we found most candidates to be thoughtful and sincerely concerned about the state of the city. Ultimately, we are endorsing three who we believe are best informed and likely to do the best job. Most importantly, we believe all three have the personality and temperaments to present their ideas and ideologies in a practical, civil manner and reach decisions that acknowledge other points of view. Like Goldilocks, we didn’t find any “just rights,” but still, we think they all are pretty damn good.
Mayor: Eric Friedman
We are endorsing councilmember Eric Friedman — a moderate’s moderate who we believe will bring balance and a spirit of cooperation to the council, something that has long been missing from the present group on the dais. Friedman, a low-key policy wonk with decades of serious front-line government service under his belt, will work infinitely harder and more effectively to find consensus than the current mayor has. The council will be weighted toward a progressive agenda, one we generally support, but we believe Friedman will be able to incorporate other sensible ideas from the more moderate members, thus avoiding the bitterness and stalemates that have hindered this council for the last eight years. Given the weighty fiscal and political challenges confronting City Hall, those skills will be key.
Also running are current councilmember Kristen Sneddon and former school board member Wendy Sims-Moten. Sims-Moten brings many admirable qualities to the race but has had limited experience in city government and has not raised enough money to be a viable candidate. We hope that she will continue to participate in the civic life of Santa Barbara, and we look forward to seeing her in coming elections.
We have long admired Kristen Sneddon during her eight years as a councilmember and as a person. But in recent years, she has disappointed us with her leadership skills. Nevertheless, she has done much for the city. She advocated for a downtown homeless day center years before it became a reality. In the face of ICE onslaughts, she secured city funding to defend immigrants under attack. She herself has gone out on neighborhood dawn patrol looking for ICE vehicles. And Sneddon pushed hard for the creation of the Sustainability and Resilience Department in City Hall.
But so too did Eric Friedman. They both pushed for an affordable housing trust fund, but Friedman cautioned against allowing it to eat too much into the city’s reserves. That led to the much-ballyhooed budget tussle putting the two on different sides.
Where Sneddon connects on big issues, Friedman tends to stick to the nuts and bolts of government funding and inter-departmental procedure. His early training in how government works was with county supervisor Naomi Schwartz, then for Salud Carbajal. Constituent service was everything. He tends to trust staff; staff tends to trust him. As Friedman tells it, it’s all about listening to people. He rarely gives advocates the unequivocal answers they want. Rent stabilization is an exemption; he believes it will reduce housing supply. Rents will go up. The exact opposite of its intention. With the present rent stabilization ordinance recently approved by the council, we think he probably will be right.
We wholeheartedly support a different form of rent stabilization; if done correctly, such measures show they can protect neighborhoods from gentrification, and the city from depopulation. But we had serious issues with the specifics of the ordinance that will go into effect next year.
It will be among the strictest in the state — allowing landlords to increase rents by only 60 percent of the consumer price index (CPI) or a flat cap of 3 percent, whichever is least. Based on our reading of rent stabilization measures in other cities, the stricter the controls, the higher the median rent becomes. That sounds counterintuitive, but when rent-stabilized units become vacant, landlords in those cities tend to jack up rents more than they do in cities with milder ordinances.
In addition, city administrators are seriously alarmed at what they expect to be the high number of appeals filed by landlords of this ordinance. They estimate it will cost $27,000 per appeal. Overall, city staff estimates the new ordinance could cost $2.4 million to administer. This would come when the city is looking at multimillion budget deficits for years since it has already eaten perilously deep into city reserves.
Instead, we liked the idea of exempting all units for which landlords charge less than the market rate from the stabilization ordinance. That would better address the issue of higher rebound rents, and reduce the number of appeals — triggered by the 60 percent CPI requirement.
This idea was shot down by councilmembers, led by Wendy Santamaria from the District 1 before it was ever broached. From our vantage point, rent stabilization advocates on the council and in the community took a win-at-all-cost posture here, even refusing, until the bitter end, to exempt low-income units under the control of the City Housing Authority and already governed by rent limits. Ultimately, this exemption was included but only after a knock-down drag-out between councilmember Meagan Harmon and Santamaria, both ardent rent control advocates.
This was an avoidable collision of bad policy and bad politics.
We had hoped Kristen Sneddon, with years more council experience under her belt, would have demonstrated more mayoral leadership skills. She only pushed for the elimination of the 60 percent CPI requirement in the final few hearings, but even then, her efforts were tentative and ultimately too damn late.
There’s such a thing as being unduly deferential to the activists. Ultimately, Sneddon would blister others for hijacking the ordinance and said she “felt played.” She never said specifically by whom. Presumably, she meant Santamaria.
It hurt to watch.
And worse, paid crews are already out collecting the signatures to qualify the rent stabilization ordinance for a ballot referendum early next year. No doubt, that would have happened no matter how moderate the ordinance. But supporters of the strict measure did themselves, the community at large, and rent stabilization no favor by making it such an easy target to attack. Assuming landlords collect the necessary number of signatures, we think it’s not outside the pale of likelihood that rent stabilization ordinance will be defeated.
Then what?
When it came to the State Street Master Plan, Friedman showed real leadership and vision. He called around to other cities with pedestrian malls. What worked? What didn’t? He concluded that the eight block paseo for Santa Barbara was too long, and he proposed a four block paseo instead. He twisted arms and bent ears. But the arguments on the council had boiled down to cars or no cars. He got nowhere. When the State Street Master Plan came up for a vote late last month, Friedman put aside his differences and sided with the majority. It was a 6-1 vote.
Today, there is an attempt to get a referendum on the ballot next year to stop the master plan. It is being financed by landlord Jim Knell, who is also one of Friedman’s biggest funders. Friedman hopes this attempt at a referendum might help him fashion a compromise that would allow cars on half of State Street until funding can be secured to build out the plan. That would take years. To date, however, such talk remains speculative. It’s not clear there are any takers.
We wish Friedman could articulate a more passionate response to the national and global challenges confronting us as his opponent Sneddon can. That is not Friedman’s style, but he has strong liberal, compassionate, democratic values that have anchored his decisions in the past, and we are convinced they will do so now. We cannot guarantee he will succeed in solving the city’s great challenges, but we believe it is Eric Friedman who gives us the best shot of getting us all there in one piece.
For the three council seats, we are endorsing Devon Wardlow, Gabe Escobedo, and Ian Baucke, three young, smart,
wonky progressives all with actual experience in government service. All are fueled by a seething impatience to
maximize the city’s limited opportunities to get genuinely affordable housing built and to bring downtown back to
life. We know there will be disagreements. We certainly hope so. But these three councilmembers bring a better
balance to discussions. And, with Eric Friedman’s guidance as mayor, we think the ensuing debate will be more
constructive, civil, and fruitful.
We know all too well the sound of one hand clapping, and we don’t like it. “My way or the highway” has never
served the city well. Some of the current sitting councilmembers have been seriously alienated by the dismissive,
superior tone used by their colleagues in recent deliberations, particularly on rent stabilization. Those conversations
did not bring about sensible solutions. The three candidates we are endorsing all have correctly cited affordable
housing as the single most pressing issue facing the city and we think they will be able to work together with the
other three sitting councilmembers to get us closer to this goal.
District 4: Devon Wardlow
Of the four candidates now vying to represent Santa Barbara’s District 4, voters are fortunate to have a candidate with the exceptional experience and temperament needed to solve many of the issues that have plagued the council in recent years. That candidate is Devon Wardlow.
For the past five years, Wardlow has served on the city’s Planning Commission — where push comes crashing to shove, where commissioners must balance the city’s insatiable demand for new housing with our collective determination to keep Santa Barbara’s treasured ambience intact. It’s not a job for the faint of heart.
Earlier this year, for example, when the city administrator was urging the commission and council to accept a take-it-or-leave-it deal from new owners of the Paseo Nuevo mall, it was the Planning Commission that first called the developers’ bluff. That courage proved contagious, and the City Council quickly followed suit. Wardlow was a strong voice supporting that action, as she has been on other issues.
She has not been shy to criticize the stream of downtown hotel proposals that kept coming before the commission. Hotels that zoning and previous planning had allowed, but that she believed should have been housing instead. She pressed on, extracting employee housing units out of reluctant hotel developers — often when no one thought it was possible. Importantly, Wardlow has worked cooperatively, civilly, and effectively with her fellow commissioners as they worked through these proposals.
A policy wonk and public affairs specialist by inclination, training, and profession, Wardlow reads the fine print carefully and actually understands its implications. A case in point involves the recent blowup over the rental stabilization ordinance. Wardlow wrote an op-ed explaining that she supports some kind of rent stabilization ordinance, but that the version before this council constituted a serious overreach. And being a policy wonk, she was able to cite the proposed ordinance chapter and verse.
It’s important to note that this election will bring a new mayor and three new councilmembers to the City Council — four votes. That’s the majority. Such a transition could be disastrously jarring. That is why we strongly believe Devon Wardlow should be one of those four new votes. With five years of in-the-trenches experience under her belt, Wardlow will provide the much-needed vision and practical approach needed on the newly reformed council.
Lastly, Wardlow is a progressive but independent thinker. She radiates raw intelligence by the megawatt; ideas and policy lingo pour forth like water from a firehose. And a pragmatic approach to problem solving will inform her votes, rather than any ideology.
Santa Barbara, she likes to say, helped raise her. Her family has a bumpy history, and she moved to Santa Barbara on her own at age 13, lived with her godparents for a while, attended local schools, and by age 14, she was working at restaurants to pay her way.
In person, Wardlow is like a sprinter trapped in the body of a long-distance runner; nobody on that council will outwork her. If you live in District 4, we urge a vote for Devon Wardlow. All of Santa Barbara will benefit.
District 5: Ian Baucke
Ian Baucke, running in District 5, is a key member of the Strongtown high-density-development-car-free-activist core. At 27, he might seem a little young for the district in which he’s running. But smart, savvy and schooled in the art of politics, Baucke exudes an air of inevitability about him. By day, he works for State Senator Monique Limón, doing constituent service work in her downtown office. The work grounds him, though raises conflict of interest issues. Legally there are none, but the interests of California and the city collide? Yet he can get the ear of the most powerful woman in state government to make Santa Barbara’s case?
As part of his Strongtown values, one point Baucke hammers away on is the need for improved road safety. And on the subject of e-bikes, Baucke says, they are here and we need to get used to it. But they do have to follow the rules.
District 6: Gabe Escobedo
Gabe Escobedo — running for downtown’s District 6 — harnessed his experience on the planning commission and the school board to push for the development of school district employee housing on two parcels of land owned by the school district. With City Hall now exploring similar efforts with land it owns, Escobedo’s experience would be valuable. In person, he is thoughtful, reflective, and personable. In the wake of the George Floyd murder, he played a major role helping to navigate and negotiate the creation of a new police review type board. He spent about 13 months on that project, which ended on a sour note that persists to this day for a host of reasons. That commission, while lamentably underutilized, still exists and still offers a vehicle by which the broader community could weigh in on such things as ICE, video surveillance, police staffing, and alternatives to incarceration for people suffering from addiction or mental illness. He would be the person to make that happen.
Lompoc City Council
Mayor: Jeremy Ball
District 2: Sharlameigne Segovia
District 3: Sarah Anne Read
It’s perversely fitting, perhaps, that a town that was once the cut-flower capital of California, producer of the most mustard in the United States, and home to 20 recreational marijuana dispensaries, has gone to seed. At least that’s the claim of five-year councilmember Jeremy Ball, who is challenging incumbent mayor James Mosby for his seat.
Ball, the son of a conservative minister who grew up in Lompoc, charges that Mosby has allowed other large property owners to let their land lie fallow and their rental properties lie empty in visible disrepair, and has gutted the city’s code enforcement function. People calling to complain about run-down derelict properties, Ball said, are no longer granted anonymity. All this has created a run-down ambience that does not encourage small businesses to invest in Lompoc, and Ball is determined to fix it.
He has also tried unsuccessfully to force out fellow councilmember Steve Bridge — charged with 25 criminal counts for allegedly filing $10,000 in fraudulent construction invoices at city expense. Bridge has declined to do so unless he’s found guilty. Mosby has backed him up. The pervading taint of scandal has livened up council meetings but has not put Lompoc in a favorable light. Mosby, known for a gruff, commanding, and sometimes intimidating persona, has dismissed Ball’s concerns as political grandstanding.
Running alongside Ball for two council seats are longtime Lompoc nurse Sarah Anne Read and Housing Authority housing advisor Sharlameigne Segovia, both first-time candidates also running as Democrats. North County homeless service providers have long complained that Lompoc has adopted a drawbridge mentality when it comes to taking advantage of homeless services the county provides. The Santa Ynez riverbed has long been a haven for homeless encampments, but Lompoc officials over the years have resisted collaborative efforts on the grounds that doing so might entice even more homeless people. This complaint has been an abiding issue, and Lompoc’s refusal to engage has hamstrung the effective delivery of services to people who need help and to a community that needs relief from some of the activities taking place along the river bottom.
Buellton City Council
Mayor: David Silva
Goleta City Council
District 1: Luz Reyes-Martín
District 2: James Kyriaco
Goleta first became a city unto itself back in 2002; today, it’s a looming, booming tech hub — among other things. Given the passion with which Goleta residents want to keep the Goodland good — in spite of all the intense internal and external pressures to colonize ag land into housing and commercial development — experienced and sensitive political direction at the helm is essential. It’s not always easy, as the growing pains of Old Town, with the application of newly striped parking lanes, can attest. Or the firestorm that erupted when it was discovered that a gun shop was opening up right next door to a preschool. Making the connection between city staff, often overworked and beleaguered, and community members who don’t often feel adequately heard are the elected officials. In this regard, councilmember Luz Reyes-Martín, a graduate-school urban planning wonk now running for her second term, is blessed with a deft touch. It doesn’t hurt that she served on the Goleta school district as well, worked as public information officer for Planned Parenthood and City College, and seems to know everyone in town. Councilmember James Kyriaco — now running for his second term representing Old Town and an old hand politically — has distinguished himself in the past by moving the needle to expand the number of development incentives for child care. A wonk’s wonk, Kyriaco is endowed with seemingly unlimited energy and enthusiasm. But at times, he can seem a little Panglossian when assessing the pinch caused by “progress,” especially in places like Old Town, where even the slightest of changes can feel monumental to those who live there.
Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors
5th District: Ricardo Valencia
In this county election, the 5th Supervisorial District — encompassing Santa Maria, Guadalupe, and Tanglewood — will have the greatest impact. Whatever the outcome, the political and emotional chemistry of the Board of Supervisors will change drastically. Supervisor Steve Lavagnino, who for the last 12 years has been the unprecedented swing-vote mix of fiscal conservatism and human compassion — an old-school Republican until Donald J. Trump burned that schoolhouse down — is retiring.
In the quest to fill Lavagnino’s shoes, we are endorsing Ricardo Valencia, an18-year Santa Maria High School teacher, a four-year member of the Santa Maria School Board, and an unapologetically progressive Democrat. The child of undocumented immigrants from Mexico, Valencia grew up raw and poor in both Guadalupe and Santa Maria. His parents worked hard, but the family was forced to move often, once into a homeless shelter. Valencia said he was falling in with gang life but was saved by a high school teacher who saw in him possibilities he didn’t see himself. Valencia was the first in his family to attend college at UC Berkeley and graduate school at Tufts.
His opponent, Maribel Aguilera, shares an equally compelling immigrant success story, picking strawberries in the field and being the first in her family to attend college, then law school. Aguilera worked at the Rape Crisis Center and the Legal Aid Society helping victims of domestic violence. Today she works on real estate transactions, boasting she got hundreds of units of housing built. She has served on Santa Maria’s planning commission and on its city council.
Valencia has raised about $200,000 from unions and the usual Democratic Party sources. Aguilera says she’s independent, but she is backed by the county Republican Party and generously funded by the usual big business and big agricultural interests. Both are formidable candidates. Both would bring a radically different life experiences to the board.
We feel it’s especially important Valencia get elected. Valencia supports transitioning from onshore fossil-fuel production to new green energy sources. Given the large number of high-paying oil and gas jobs in the 5th District, this could be political suicide. But sooner or later, the human species will finally accept that climate change is real. That’s a whole other form of suicide. With Valencia on the board, we are confident he will work to make this transition.
Last Monday, like many people, we were morally horrified when ICE agents snatched an Allan Hancock student’s father as he dropped his daughter off at school. A father taking his daughter to school? What happened to going after “the worst of the worst”? And he was just one of 50 people arrested by ICE agents in Santa Maria last week.
Valencia has pledged to aggressively bird-dog ICE agents’ access to county jail and to speak out against their outrageous behavior. In response, Aguilera points out that immigration enforcement is a federal matter. We already know that. But this doesn’t absolve our elected local officials from bearing moral witness in the face of domestic terrorism. We are living in one of those times now.
Santa Barbara Unified School District Board of Trustees
Area 1: Mark Philibosian
Area 4: Valerie Amparan
An elementary school principal gets caught rigging a class election so her daughter can win the vote? Now we’re hearing this may not be an aberration but business as usual. Could that really be true? And the Santa Barbara Unified School District is $9.7 million in the hole. No wonder math scores are going down. No wonder Superintendent Hilda Maldonado is about to hit the road. The only question will be whether she was pushed or whether she jumped. Does it matter? Does it matter who we elect to the school board in November? It always does.
Clearly, one of the two most technically qualified is Valerie Amparan, a charter school mom with loads of nonprofit and corporate experience. She knows how to read a spreadsheet and what it means. She also knows how to use “data,” something most students are taught but many candidates are not. For the record, she is Latina, said to be proud of her Central Valley roots and a cross between a badass and a pain-in-the-ass. Little wonder, then, why she was endorsed by board members Celeste Kafri and Sunita Beall, who are both smart, tough, independent, and comfortable asking uncomfortable questions.
The other candidate who intrigues us is Mark Philibosian, mostly because his background is in finance and his
wife is a teacher. Philibosian is openly Christian; his wife teaches at a Christian school. We don’t know what that
may or may not mean, but he too knows how to read data when it comes to test scores and expenditures and
revenues. If you can’t do high finance, you’ve got no business on the school board. Maybe if we had more number
crunchers there, principals would not be so brazen as to rig class president elections.
City College Board of Trustees
Area 5: Dominique Lujan
Santa Barbara City College is so important to the community because of what it can offer for students who may not have gone through the traditional four-year college pathway. Having somebody on the Board of Trustees that understands the unique needs of a community college is critical to the future of leadership and school policy. For Area 5, which includes the Mission Canyon and Santa Barbara, we believe that full-time re-entry student Dominique Lujan is exactly the type of individual who should be involved in conversations about SBCC’s future. Lujan’s presence on the board would add the perspective of students who are returning to school or adding new skills toward their careers, giving added strength to the SBCC’s already robust workforce training and adult education programs.
Area 7: Andrea Varon
For thousands of students and hundreds of professional educators, the Santa Barbara Community College board of directors calls the shots on a host of critical policy and fiscal matters. We have seen what mischief ensues when unqualified candidates get elected. In Area 7, encompassing the Mesa, Hope Ranch, the Upper Westside and Samarkand, we are lucky to have a qualified candidate: Andrea Varon, a teacher and school administrator for 43 years. One of the candidates Varon is running against is the daughter of the chair of county’s very pro-MAGA Republican Central Committee, Heather McGinnis. The other, Oscar Zavala, is worthy of consideration with a 30-year career as a SBCC counselor, but is not waging a campaign, relying instead on being a longtime Mesa resident.
Measure H (Education and Economic Development Bond for Santa Maria and Alan Hancock College): Yes
Measure H is one of the smartest, best conceived education and economic development bond measures to be put before voters anywhere in Santa Barbara County for eons. It will only affect property owners within the Allan Hancock Community College tax district up in Santa Maria. For example, a home assessed at $500,000 would be taxed $95. This would result in the college generating $290 million to build an expanded campus for students seeking four-year degrees. Currently, Allan Hancock, like all community colleges, offers only two-year degrees. These added two years would be taught by faculty associated with Cal Poly up in San Luis Obispo or Cal State NorthridgeTK down south. This means students in Santa Maria won’t have pay the higher tuition to attend either of these two far-away campuses — or take that extended time away from their families. For them, this new campus will be nothing less than a godsend, as it will for Santa Maria. Only 17 percent of Santa Maria adults have earned a bachelor’s degree. Seventeen percent of Santa Maria residents live in poverty. The median income is $27,000. Such an affordable expansion of access to a four-year degree will have an obvious tonic benefit for a local economy. To the extent North County is hitching its wagon to the Space Force at Vandenberg Space Force Base, this new program will give Santa Maria residents a much better shot. The benefits are so obvious that even longtime adversaries such as Congressmember Salud Carbajal and Andy Caldwell of the Coalition of Labor, Agriculture, and Business are working together to see it get passed.
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