Born and raised in Santa Barbara, local Anabella Lehne may have been late to join the race for the District 6 City Council seat, but over the past few weeks, her campaign has taken full form.
Lehne is running against three other candidates—Alexander Stoeber, Jason Carlton and Gabe Escobedo. Proud to be the sole female candidate for District 6, Lehne outlined her campaign through clear platforms. She is for economic transparency and vitality, affordability, public safety and against the rent stabilization ordinance, arguing that the issue goes beyond just tenants and landlords.
Though Lehne’s career has taken a journey throughout Santa Barbara—from teaching junior high, to social work at Cottage Hospital, to notary work for undocumented immigrants, to escrow loan signing—helping people has remained her guiding priority. Her knack for social work is what led past city councilmember Alejandra Gutierrez to convince Lehne to run.
She said her hard-working roots begin with her parents, who immigrated from Mexico. Lehne’s father worked as a cook at Cottage Hospital, and her mother was a seamstress.
“Working hard and being proud of being from Santa Barbara has always been a part of my life, seeing how hard my parents worked to be here,” Lehne said.
After becoming pregnant at 16, Lehne wanted to stay local, and earned her degrees in law and society and Spanish from UCSB. She said her experience as a teen mom and background in legal studies positioned her advantageously in local social work.
Lehne has clear thoughts on how to make District 6 more affordable, and a rent stabilization ordinance isn’t one of them. The polarizing ordinance, which would limit annual rent increases to 60% of the consumer price index, has been making slow but steady progress at city council since April.
While Lehne, a tenant herself, acknowledges that most tenants want the ordinance to pass, she said she is worried about its long term impacts.
“The ordinance has been incorrectly labeled as helping the tenant, but in reality it’s being used as a political stunt to confuse people,” she said.
Lehne explained that for landlords, their housing units are their small businesses. More rent regulation would leave them unable to cover the costs of running it, leading to bigger, non-local companies coming in to take control of the housing.
“We definitely have investors that have an eye on us,” Lehne said. “In the long run this could cause rent to go even higher.”
Fiscal transparency and responsibility are more aspects of concern to Lehne, who also said her finance background makes her good with numbers. She wants to work to rebuild the emergency reserves, which the current city council has recently had to dip into.
To promote economic vitality, Lehne suggested refining the State Street Master Plan on a block-by-block basis. Every block has a different need, she said, and noted that the State Street argument should be about more than just cars or no cars. But when it comes to money, Lehne’s number one priority is transparency.
“Transparency isn’t an option,” she said. “We’re all in this together, we should know what the costs are.”
If elected to city council, Lehne said she would lead with the philosophy of “keeping Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara.” She believes that Santa Barbara doesn’t have the infrastructure to meet some of the goals the state is demanding of it, like meeting bold housing elements. Instead of trying to make the city bigger, Lehne feels that the city government needs to focus on what current residents are suffering from.
And according to Lehne, in District 6, that’s affordability. She recalled conversations with neighbors whose adult children have been unable to leave their parents’ homes and start their own lives in Santa Barbara.
This care for her neighbors is what Lehne said separates her from her opponents in the race—she wouldn’t use the job to climb any sort of political ladder.
“I’m not using this as a stepping stone to further my political career,” Lehne said. “This is a job where you focus on the city and the people.”
District 6 residents will decide who will represent their district on Nov. 3.
