Maribel Aguilera sees herself as hardworking and determined, an experienced and data-focused leader who prioritizes negotiation: “That’s what’s different about me.”
Cory Bantilan brings continuity over dramatic change, calling himself the most realistic candidate: “I’m not up here making promises that I can’t keep.”
Ricardo Valencia touts his people-powered campaign, and if elected to the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors says he’d take a “co-governance” approach to getting work done: “I think most people are tired of the status quo.”
The trio faced off Tuesday as more than 75 people filled a community room at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Santa Maria. Sponsored by the non-partisan League of Women Voters, it was the first of two North County forums this week in the lively race for the open Fifth District seat held since 2011 by outgoing Supervisor Steve Lavagnino.
The nearly two-hour, standing-room-only event offered voters—including at least one who arrived with ballot in hand—a clear view of the candidates’ backgrounds, personalities and leadership styles, especially on economic and public safety issues.
If none of them wins a majority of votes in the June 2 primary, the top two finishers will advance to a runoff election in November.
A beleaguered county budget
While each candidate has years of political experience, their backgrounds differ. Aguilera is a Santa Maria attorney and City Council member. Valencia is a Santa Maria High School teacher and Santa Maria-Bonita School District board member. And Bantilan is top aide to Lavagnino, the latter of whom announced his impending retirement from public office in 2023.
As the race barrels forward, county officials are attempting to balance an estimated $1.64 billion spending plan for fiscal year 2026-27 plagued by plunging state and federal support. At last count, the county had identified as many as 131 filled positions and 118 vacant roles for elimination across multiple departments as part of an ongoing effort to cut more than $70 million.
Aguilera said she would look to refinance debt and draw on her legal training to find solutions.
“The county right now is paying $160 million in pension debt that is scheduled to be paid off in four years,” she said. “What I would propose is that we refinance that debt. It takes us a little bit longer to pay the debt, but then we’re not laying people off.”
Bantilan said he’s been preparing for the current budget challenge for 15 years.
“I’m known around the county as a budget hawk and a numbers guy,” he said, adding a reduction in Sheriff’s Office overtime is critical, and that making a smaller down payment on an expected $160 million Northern Branch Jail expansion also could help ease the financial pressure.
“As far as the pension money, it’s not going to be over $100 million annually,” Bantilan said. “We’re looking at maybe $50 million. I’d like to see that spent more on projects than programs, at least at the beginning. A lot of our programs serve a very, very narrow population. I think we can get a lot of roads paved. We can get a lot of parks refurbished.”
Valencia said he’d like to hire an inspector general to take a neutral look at the budget, like Mayor Zohran Mamdani did in New York City.
“As well as, of course, asking the rich, those that are able to pay their fair share, to make sure that they’re doing so,” Valencia said. “The Bonita School District is one of the largest in the state of California, and our budget is in the green… That’s partly how I grew up. When you don’t got much, you learn to stretch those dollars.”
Housing at Solomon Hills
How would the candidates ensure the proposed 4,000-unit Solomon Hills housing project between Orcutt and Los Alamos provides affordable workforce housing, and doesn’t contribute to commuter sprawl?
Bantilan said the proposal has the size and scale to be self-sustaining, not an isolated neighborhood negatively impacted by a lack of adequate services.
“And from what I’ve seen of the plan, there’s a lot of diversity,” Bantilan said. “There’s senior housing. There’s low income housing. There’s executive housing. I think it’s a fascinating project. I think there are a lot of challenges. There’s grading. There’s oak trees. There’s infrastructure, and you’ve got to make sure that those connections over to (highways) 135 and 101 are adequate.”
Valencia said residents benefit when developments include child care facilities and offer as much affordable housing as possible, noting college-educated workers struggle to live across the county in addition to farm and healthcare workers.
“It is critical that we make sure that we provide incentives for developers to invest in more mixed-income developments,” Valencia said. “If you look at our communities, we live in a hyper segregated world. I went to Santa Maria High School. When I was a student there, it was much more diverse. Now it’s 95 percent Latino and indigenous students. And I don’t think any of us want to live in a world like that.”
Aguilera said she supports ensuring housing is affordable at the earliest design phase.
“It ensures that the house prices will… not be controlled by the developers when it’s time to sell it two years later when everything is much more expensive,” she said. “From the beginning when you know the plan, the budget, the timing, then we, to a certain extent, can guarantee to the working families how much a house should be and what they will pay.”
Jobs and industry
In a district that relies heavily on employment in agriculture and oil, how would the candidates balance existing jobs with the county’s transition toward solar energy, electric vehicle infrastructure and green sustainability?
Aguilera said she’d look to maintain and create jobs across industries.
“California has demanded that we all need to be driving electric vehicles by 2040, yet we don’t have enough electricians to build that infrastructure,” she said. “So that’s where we start. We create jobs that really help the phase out… My goal is to create jobs that focus on the electrical, solar—and oil and gas—because you cannot have one or the other.”
Bantilan struck a similar note.
“We can do both, and I support an all-of-the-above strategy,” he said. “I don’t support the oil and gas phase out as currently structured. I think there’s too many questions. What happens to those jobs? What happens to the private property rights? What happens to the mineral owner rights? What do you allow folks to do with their property afterward?”
Referencing climate change, Valencia said he’s in favor of “courageous conversations” about transitioning to cleaner energy.
“I would never want to leave my neighbors and friends who work in the oil industry hanging, but I’ve never met one of those folks that has told me, ‘Hey, you know what? I don’t mind polluting the environment because I don’t care if my child has clean air to breathe,’” Valencia said. “It is possible to have a just transition from currently relying on fossil fuels to clean energy jobs. They pay just as well… We just have to catch up.”
A minimum farmworker wage
Some groups have proposed a $26-an-hour minimum farmworker wage. How would the candidates approach wages for workers in the county?
Bantilan said he’s against the county setting a minimum wage, and that he’s avoided making affordability a central talking point in his campaign.
“We don’t control a lot of those levers,” Bantilan said. “I’ve got no control over gas prices, food prices and things like that. Of course, I want to make life as affordable as I can, and so I’m going to do what I can do, but I don’t want to arbitrarily raise wages in one area.
“If we mandate certain wages, it’s going to come back on us with more costs,” Bantilan said. “What happens if we mandate $26 an hour in Santa Barbara County? Agriculture is going to disappear here… One of the things that I’ve committed to is not raising your taxes.”
Valencia noted he was endorsed by civil rights icon Dolores Huerta.
“I will be a champion for working people, especially some of our most vulnerable workers,” Valencia said. “I’m proud that I am a union teacher and I can see that the supervisors are in dire need of having that union member perspective so that the benefits of working people are at the forefront.
“My mother is a home care worker herself,” he said, gesturing toward the audience. “Shout out to my mama right there, literally taking care of our elderly and our sick and our folks with cancer, and she’s making a minimum wage salary. What’s up with that?… It is undignified that she’d be making minimum wage salary when the county can advocate for better wages.”
Aguilera said supporting business growth leads to wage growth.
“We need to do better as government to attract businesses,” she said, adding moving people past the minimum is key. “Nobody can afford to live on minimum wage. Most of us who can afford to have a good life know that it requires more.
“But the other thing that worries me about having a minimum wage is that when you talk about farmworkers like my family, if we start to pay them $26 an hour, now they will be at risk of losing their Medi-Cal, their free daycare and all the programs that they qualify for today because they make minimum wage,” she said. “So yes, you increase their wage by $10, but you now cost them $40 an hour because now they’re going to pay for housing. They won’t qualify for Section 8.”
Homelessness & Public Safety
How should the county address homelessness while also protecting neighborhoods, parks and public spaces? And how would the candidates improve public safety?
Valencia said the county should focus on creating more housing—and stronger policies are needed to resist ICE raids.
“We know that many of the folks that are enduring homelessness are veterans,” he said, adding his family spent time in a Santa Maria homeless shelter. “We know that many of them are enduring mental health issues. And sadly, some of those folks instead of being supported are criminalized. Some of those folks are even in our jail. I would do the opposite… We should be investing in permanent housing for our homeless folks.
“There’s been hundreds of cases of our family members, of our neighbors suffering ICE detentions and raids,” he said. “I think it’s critical that we develop policies to protect our community to make sure that this county sets a standard that we resist that.”
Aguilera said the North County has a disproportionate number of homeless people—and that in addition to keeping kids occupied so they stay out of gangs, she’d work to boost traffic safety and continue building upon a record of reducing crime.
With homelessness, “the first thing I would do is, I would extend the shelter and the temporary housing,” she said. “The second thing I would do is focus on the front end drivers that cause the homelessness, because the people who are unhoused are not just lacking a home. A lot of them have mental health issues, behavioral issues, criminal backgrounds.
“It is the county’s job to help the people that are the most vulnerable,” Aguilera said. “We pay a lot of tax dollars for that. So if somebody is mentally ill, we need to provide the mental health services for it and not cut back on that.”
Bantilan called homelessness a complicated issue that can be addressed through public-private partnerships, and said that in addition to increasing traffic enforcement and arresting more people with felony warrants, he’d consider closing the South County Main Jail to make custody operations more efficient.
“There are (homeless) people being trafficked,” he said. “There was a syphilis outbreak that wasn’t talked about. And there’s, like was mentioned, mental health, alcohol, drug abuse.
“But really, I think the answer is reconnecting people with their families,” Bantilan said, relaying the story of a young homeless man called “Rabbit” who’d become estranged from his relatives. “If you want to talk about how to solve homelessness, I think that’s how you solve homelessness, reconnecting folks with family in addition to reconnecting them with services.”
Fundraising in focus
Designed to discourage open debate, the forum on Tuesday provided the candidates a chance to answer questions in turns, but did not allow rebuttals.
The outgoing Lavagnino has endorsed Bantilan, but in fundraising the candidate trails. At the time of the forum Tuesday, Aguilera led with $178,000; Valencia was second, with $119,000; and Bantilan was third, with $83,000, according to campaign disclosure statements filed with the state Fair Political Practices Commission.
Bantilan has received nearly $36,000—more than 40 percent of his total raised—from cannabis growers, including Micah Anderson of Willits, Calif., owner of the largest pot operation in Santa Barbara County.
Aguilera has significant support from other North County agricultural interests—nearly $40,000 to date, campaign filings show. Big donors include Central West Produce, Sunlife Farm, Royal Oak Ag Services; and Blair Pence, a Buellton-area vintner who is suing the owners of a nearby cannabis operation, alleging that the “noxious” smell of pot is hurting his wine-tasting business.
The organizations endorsing Aguilera include the Grower-Shipper Association of Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties, and the Santa Maria firefighter and police unions.
Valencia has been endorsed by the county Democratic Party, California Working Families Party, Indivisible, Planned Parenthood and Sierra Club, in addition to labor unions. His campaign is leaning heavily on contributions from small donors, including dozens of people who gave $250 or less.
