At first blush, it might appear the two candidates currently vying to fill the soon-to-be-vacant seat representing the fifth supervisorial district — Santa Maria City Councilmember Maribel Aguilera and Santa Maria school board member Ricardo Valencia are only $3,000 apart when it comes to the size of their campaign war chests. Both have raised more than $200,000; both report having a touch more than $100,000 left in their bank accounts. But looks are deceiving.
Backing Aguilera, a declined-to-state moderate conservative, is a political action committee made up of big ranchers, big business, the Republican Party, and Sable Offshore Oil company — which to date have combined forces to shell out $97,000 to defeat Valencia — not to get Aguilera elected per se but to defeat her only opponent, who is running as an unabashed progressive with strong support from the county’s Democratic and activist communities. Of that $97,000, more than $41,000 was raised by a relatively new outfit calling itself the North County Jobs & Opportunity PAC; Sable Offshore contributed $49,000.
Earlier on in the campaign, Aguilera stressed that she was not accepting oil money after receiving — and then quickly returning — a $1,000 donation made by Sable’s government affairs coordinator Lee Danielson. The local Republican Party donated another $37,000 to the PAC as well. By law, Aguilera is not allowed to coordinate with the PAC over how that money is spent; its presence in the race gives Aguilera — an eight-year councilmember — a $100,000 edge.
Valencia, seeking to mobilize Santa Maria’s notoriously disengaged voters by taking on ICE and the oil industry with a message of social justice, received $2,000 from the Central Coast Construction Trades; hundreds and thousands from South Coast progressive activists such as Lee Heller, who gave $2,500; $3,700 from Santa Maria activist Helen Galvan of One Community Action; $2,500 from Santa Maria NAACP head Lawanda Lyons-Pruitt, and another $2,500 from State Senator Monique Limón. In previous reporting periods, Valencia scored big donations from the building trade unions. He and Aguilera split the deck with the county’s two Service Employee International locals, and she did well with the unions representing law enforcement, firefighters, and other first responders. Aguilera scored a $5,900 donation from vintner Blair Pence, long a critic of the county’s cannabis policy; $75,000 from rancher and planning commissioner Roy Reed; and $9,400 from the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians, which just announced plans to take 350 acres of land adjacent to its casino into “federal trust,” meaning that the county would have no say over what happens there.
In addition to the $41,000 the Jobs PAC spent to defeat Valencia, it chipped in another $11,000 to get Aguilera elected. Whoever wins on November 3, will replace Steve Lavagnino, a former Republican who left the party during Trump’s first term and who cast a deciding vote against Sable Offshore despite his own impeccably ardent pro-oil credentials. If Valencia wins, that will give the board’s so-called progressive tilt a solid four-vote majority. If Aguilera wins, she will provide 4th District Supervisor Bob Nelson — a canny conservative and formidable in the chess-playing of board politics — an ally he has not had.
