Friedman Mayoral Campaign Flush with Cash; Sneddon Says Santa Barbara Not for Sale

With only one day left before Election Day, Santa Barbara mayoral candidate and city councilmember Eric Friedman enjoys a decisive advantage when it comes to campaign fundraising, having raised $275,000 for his own campaign. 

Although Friedman received many donations from downtown real estate interests, real estate and business interests created two separate independent expenditure committees on Friedman’s behalf into which they’ve funneled another $105,000. One of those committees — Better Santa Barbara for Eric Friedman — is a creature of the South Coast Chamber of Commerce and has spent $55,000 on Friedman’s behalf on mailers extolling his civic virtues and others lambasting Friedman’s chief rival in the race, fellow councilmember Kristen Sneddon. In addition, the National Association of Realtors — headquartered out of Chicago — spent $50,000 to help Friedman get elected. 

Sneddon, by contrast, had raised $115,460 as of October 17, and has reported collecting another $1,600 since then, $1,500 of which comes from the Planned Parenthood Action Fund. Wendy Sims-Moten, a former school boardmember, is also running for mayor and has raised $7,825 but only very late in the campaign. 

While Friedman and Sneddon are both lifelong Democrats, Sneddon is strongly aligned with the party’s progressive wing and Friedman more with its moderate tendencies. Sneddon, for example, strongly supported the city’s recently passed rent stabilization ordinance while Friedman has opposed it. 

Likewise, Sneddon strongly supported the city’s recently passed State Street Master Plan, which outlines an eight-block stretch of downtown State Street for a car-optional future. While Friedman also voted in favor of this proposal, he also tried — without success — to persuade his council colleagues that a four-block project would prove infinitely more successful instead. 

With downtown commercial landlord Jim Knell of Sima Corporation — who donated $5,900 to Friedman’s campaign — having bankrolled the signature gathering effort to qualify the master plan for a citywide referendum, Friedman has expressed hope that his truncated version of the master plan might have a new lease on life. Whether there’s any basis for such hope has yet to be determined.

For many in Santa Barbara’s real estate universe, both issues — rent stabilization and cars on State Street — have emerged as line-in-the-sand issues over which the two candidates are diametrically opposed. Accordingly, they’ve thrown their money behind Friedman with great force. Robert Kooyman — executive of the Meridian property management company, one of the largest rental firms on the South Coast — donated $18,000 to one of the independent expenditure committees seeking to elect Friedman as mayor and prevent Sneddon from wielding the mayor’s ceremonial gavel.

Sneddon has sought to highlight this fact in a broadside she wrote for the Noozhawk this past weekend. “Santa Barbara is not for sale,” she wrote. “That is what we need to tell major developers and powerful, well-funded real estate interests in Tuesday’s election.”

Sneddon, a geologist, jumped into politics during Donald Trump’s first term in reaction to his scornful disregard for the scientific basis for climate change. In her op-ed, she resurrected the specter of Donald Trump, noting that he “built his career as a developer, treating rules and institutions as obstacles to get around … push hard enough, spend enough money, and maybe you can change the rules that apply to you,” she wrote. “I don’t want that mentality anywhere near Santa Barbara City Hall.”

Shortly thereafter, Friedman submitted an op ed to the Independent, headlined, “Santa Barbara’s Future Belongs to All of Us.” In it, he never brought up the issue of campaign contributions but instead extolled the public library as a rare gem of civic life, noting that it belongs to the rich and poor alike. He then extolled the necessity of prudent fiscal stewardship, highlighting how his life was recently saved by a firefighter who just happened to be walking along the beach when he was in the throes of what could have been a fatal heart attack. 

“Like our library, Santa Barbara belongs to all of us, and we hold it in trust for the next generation,” he wrote. As mayor, he said, he’d make City Hall “as open and welcoming as our library, a place where every resident has a voice.”