Note: A response to this opinion essay can be read here.
In this year’s Santa Barbara City Council race, voters face not only a huge field of candidates, but also a rather perplexing dilemma: How to cut through the slick verbiage of each hopeful’s website, the practiced answers during interviews, and the self-serving endorsements from fellow politicos and advocacy groups? How to ascertain the most important qualities of an honest public official: strength of character, ethical decision making, and resistance to special interests?
As a resident of Santa Barbara’s District Four — comprising the Upper East Side, Riviera, and Eucalyptus Hill neighborhoods — I ran smack into this conundrum two months ago, when a candidate for my district’s seat asked me for a monetary contribution during a coffee meeting.
Our meeting morphed into a research project.
At Bree’osh Montecito, a young woman named Devon Wardlow regaled me for 45 minutes with stories of her work on political campaigns since college, from Lois Capps to Hillary Clinton; her service “in the Obama White House” and studies at Dartmouth’s famous graduate Tuck School of Business; and her tenure on the city’s planning commission for five years.
I recognized some of this as likely volunteer work, albeit impressive volunteer work, but I was left wondering, what does this candidate actually do to earn a living? Given her age of 37, just one year older than my own twin daughters, how could that Obama-era experience be anything but an internship? Did she earn an MBA at Dartmouth?
Thus began my political baptism in the importance of due diligence, Santa Barbara-style.
Because public records show my husband and I recently contributed to a triumvirate of sterling public servants — Laura Capps, Kristen Sneddon, and Roy Lee — we’re on the “call” lists. We’ve learned to lean on LinkedIn, old newspaper records, and the city’s free user-friendly database of political contributions, handily organized by candidate and date of contribution. Voters, neighborhood associations, and good-government groups should be looking into these records to ascertain from whom the candidates’ funds are coming. Anyone can easily and quickly follow the money here: https://netfile.com/public/CSB/campaign/elections
This political season recalls how I got started giving to our county’s public aspirants in 2020, when Ms. Capps — with a solid record on the school board and Democratic dynastic name recognition — challenged then-Supervisor Das Williams for the Santa Barbara County District One seat. He and his three political consultants were accused of engaging in an ugly, dirty tricks-style campaign against her. Then it turned out his finances had included major contributions from the cannabis industry — for which he was supposed to be writing tight regulations. (These scandals contributed to his loss in 2024 to Mr. Lee.)
Just prior to this, my family spent several years observing a determined group of wealthy Montecitans spend a whopping $250,000 attempting to take over, and then merge, the tiny local water district board with the sanitary district board — efforts (thankfully, thus far unsuccessful) that featured negative information about incumbents spread by a volunteer “associate editor” of a local newspaper — who himself turned out to be running the campaigns behind the scenes.
Such blatant acts of political theatre honed my view that Santa Barbara voters frequently know merely surface information when we fill out our ballots, not a unique situation in the U.S. electorate, but nonetheless an unfortunate one.
Regarding Ms. Wardlow, I only had to click on her publicly-available LinkedIn bio to learn of her nearly decade-long career as a corporate lobbyist. She worked for two different retail cannabis companies, Embarc and Coastal (parent of the dispensary on Chapala St.) in California and previously for Facebook and Lyft in Washington, D.C. Currently, she lobbies municipalities for Obvio, a relatively new company financed by $22 million in Silicon Valley venture capitalist money. Obvio sells AI-powered traffic surveillance cameras mounted next to stop signs, one of several differences between them and systems sold by Flock. By videoing drivers at eye-level, these cameras collect information about unlawful activities such as using a cell phone, not wearing a seat belt and running a stop sign — violations that can lead to tickets and fines. The goal is to improve traffic safety. (Details at obvio.ai.)
Arguably, each of the companies Ms. Wardlow works or has worked for is in quite a controversial industry. In particular, AI-powered traffic surveillance, despite its laudable claims of bringing us safer streets, is currently a hot potato throughout the U.S.
And therein lies what seems to me an incentive — encouraged perhaps by those naughty political consultants — to obfuscate how an individual earns a living, while attempting to embellish the more glamorous or important-sounding items. Ms. Wardlow’s website expends sixteen paragraphs extolling her volunteer work and experience yet never identifies for voters her current and previous employers. Same goes for her city council candidate statement, as veteran newsman Jerry Roberts pointed out; it ran to 591 words with no mention of lobbying in California for retail cannabis or for AI-powered traffic surveillance safety systems.
Through her LinkedIn, I also learned that Ms. Wardlow’s oft-mentioned “White House experience” comprised six months serving as an intern for the White House Business Council. She later served in the Obama administration as a special assistant to the secretary of labor for private sector engagement. Her Dartmouth sojourn was a four-week post-college program — certainly valuable, but was it of sufficient duration to be a principal talking point to a potential donor?
To be sure, Ms. Wardlow’s five years on our city’s planning commission have, without a doubt, given her highly valuable insight, experience, analytical knowledge, and data in many valuable areas regarding the function of city government, laws, regulations, and so on. Moreover, her service as a corporate lobbyist has earned her awareness of dozens of city and county government practices and policies throughout California and the U.S. There’s nothing whatsoever unlawful about being a lobbyist; this profession’s biggest “crime” might be that they all give themselves the most euphemistically creative job titles: government relations, strategic advisor, public policy, public advocate, public affairs, policy educator, regulatory consultant, and so on.
Still, Santa Barbara’s part-time city council position pays just $60,000 per annum, which means councilmembers typically must retain their paid employment. Even operating under the assumption that Ms. Wardlow and other councilmembers will recuse themselves from issues related to current or past employers, is it nonetheless a healthy sign for future city governance when a candidate — via their website, etc. — chooses not to disclose his or her employers going back several years? Lest readers conclude that I’m singling out Ms. Wardlow, I assure you, she happened to be the first, and thus far only, candidate in District Four to approach me for a contribution. (I suppose the other three candidates might regard this as fair warning.)
Elsewhere in this election, other candidates’ employment is also raising questions. In a recent Newsmakers with Jerry Roberts video, Mr. Roberts sounded off about the District Five race, asking whether Ian Baucke, who works as District Representative for California Senate President pro Tempore Monique Limon, should be serving two branches of government at the same time: “Is he going to keep that job if he’s elected to city council, and should he?….It doesn’t seem right to me. I mean, who’s going to be speaking up there? Is it going to be him, or is he going to be speaking what [Speaker Limon] thinks? It doesn’t pass the smell test. What is the oversight?”
Since Mr. Baucke is an active participant in the powerful local bicycles-vs-cars lobby, Strong Towns SB, District Five residents might want to research whether contributions to his campaign are coming from individuals affiliated with this group.
On the other side of the “future of State Street” political spectrum are the candidates — city council and mayoral — who favor opening State St. to cars; who’s getting the political donations from this powerful informal lobby led by retiring Mayor Randy Rowse?
Another divisive political issue bound to attract big money is the proposed measure to stabilize city rents. Which candidates are receiving contributions from tenants’ associations, and which from the real-estate and landlord lobbying groups — those same groups whose donations, when publicized, helped cause Councilmember Alejandra Gutierrez to lose her District One seat in 2024?
“Elections belong to the people. It’s their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters.”
– Abraham Lincoln
Correction: An earlier version of this opinion piece omitted Wardlow’s service in the Obama administration as a special assistant to the secretary of labor for private sector engagement.
Eileen White Read is a former Wall Street Journal reporter and retired nonprofit CEO who lives in Santa Barbara. She was a Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Economics and Business Journalism at Columbia University. The views expressed are her own.
