Santa Barbara Supervisors Tap Boulder County Tsar to Replace Mona Miyasato

[Updated: Tue., May 26, 2026, 4:30pm]

The Santa Barbara County supervisors announced last week the selection of Boulder County, Colorado, county administrator Jana Petersen to replace County Executive Officer Mona Miyasato, who is stepping down this August after 13 challenging, tumultuous but strangely collegial years at the helm. Of the 66 applicants, the supervisors interviewed five. 

“Jana just rose to the top,” said Board Chair Bob Nelson, who led the negotiations with her. “She is a very direct person. And she exudes competence. And based on her references, she doesn’t appear to need sleep; she’s always that available.”

Petersen started out professionally as a public information officer for Bolder County in 1996, transitioned to the City of Boulder for a series of high-ranking administrative posts, and then transitioned in 2020 back to the county, where she served as county administrator right at the onset of COVID, forcing her to figure out how to transition the county from in-person to Zoom-accessible services and communication. She was at the helm as the wind-driven Marshall Fire whipped through Boulder, wiping out 1,084 homes and killing two people. According to press reports, she is given high marks for the speed and efficiency with which the county was able to recover. 

Like Santa Barbara County, Boulder is overwhelmingly blue politically and also shares a split between the rural and the urban. Remnants of a once-thriving hippie culture are still alive and well in the city of Boulder, where its main drag, Pearl Street, was one of the first main streets of America to ban cars and go pedestrian only. Throughout Santa Barbara’s protracted deliberations over the future of State Street, Pearl Street was frequently invoked. 

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, Santa Barbara County has struggled with mixed success to realign its criminal justice system to put greater emphasis on diversion and mental-health and addiction treatment rather than incarceration. But even before Floyd, Boulder County voters approved a sales tax increase to fund the construction of a new 253-bed center to offer alternatives to incarceration. The county jail was seriously overcrowded at the time, and the new center was seen as a cheaper, more humane, and more efficient alternative to building and staffing new jail cells. The center — named after former Boulder sheriff Joe Pelle — is run not by the sheriff but by a division of a department that answers to the county administrator. The center now has 213 of its 253 beds occupied. This happened on Petersen’s watch. In her interview, she expressed pride in the center, and the Santa Barbara supervisors — worn out by their regular head-butting with Sheriff Bill Brown over jail management and spending issues — were impressed. 

In Boulder, ICE has also emerged as a hot-button political issue with the activist community, denouncing the strong-arm tactics deployed by ICE agents. The Department of Homeland Security has returned the favor by accusing Boulder of being a sanctuary county.

Boulder County has roughly 100,000 fewer people than Santa Barbara, but its budget — $750 million — is only half as large. And it has three supervisors rather than five.

Supervisor Nelson acknowledged Petersen will come to the job without the “local knowledge” that an in-state candidate would bring. She’s operated far outside the gravitational pull of Proposition 13 — which limits the rate at which counties can increase property taxes — and CEQA, California’s controversial, groundbreaking environmental quality act that, like Prop. 13, is blamed for many of the ills that have long plagues the state. 

“There’s a lot of things that are really screwed up about California,” Nelson said. Maybe the outside perspective Petersen brings might help. But really, he said, it wasn’t an issue in her selection. “I think that just speaks to how highly we thought of her,” he said. “I have no doubt she will be up to speed quickly.”

The supervisors are scheduled to approve Petersen’s contract at their June 9 meeting, and once it is approved, she will start on August 20.