By the time Devon Wardlow was 12, she had already learned to take care of herself.
Her mother was ill, her family moved often, and much of her childhood was spent navigating circumstances that gave her no other choice but to grow up quickly. Eventually, Wardlow decided she was in need of a whole new environment.
She moved to Santa Barbara, where her godfather lived, and began building a life in a community she credits with changing its trajectory.
For the first time, she found stability—through her friends, their families, and the support of local educators.
“I genuinely believe that if I had not moved to Santa Barbara, my life would have turned out very, very differently,” Wardlow said.
Years later, after working in the Obama Administration, advising businesses on public policy and serving on Santa Barbara’s Planning Commission, Wardlow is seeking a seat on the Santa Barbara City Council.
Her campaign is centered around housing, wildfire preparedness, environmental protection and making local government more responsive to residents.
Beneath those priorities, she said, is the fundamental belief that government works best when people, even those who may have competing interests, are willing to work together towards a common goal.
“We have a very shared common goal of protecting Santa Barbara,” Wardlow said. “Regardless of where you sit on the political spectrum, everybody loves Santa Barbara, and everybody wants to protect Santa Barbara.”
For Wardlow, that ideology was fostered by the community that helped raise her.
Growing up, she said, she had to learn to be independent and confront situations head-on, rather than avoid them. When she first arrived in Santa Barbara, she found people willing to help her channel those experiences into something productive.
At school, she took Advanced Placement courses and started to attend classes at Santa Barbara City College in the evenings. By the time she graduated from high school, she had already finished her first year of college.
She also developed her political interests early on, specifically in international affairs.
That interest would eventually lead her to the Middle East, where she pursued graduate studies and worked in the West Bank during a period of significant political unrest.
She said that this experience exposed her to the complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well as the very real consequences of government decisions for the people living through them.
It also opened doors to opportunities she could never imagine growing up.
Following her participation in a program at Dartmouth, Wardlow applied for a White House internship during the Obama administration. She was accepted and became the first intern for the newly established White House Business Council.
She would go on to work for Business Forward, an organization involved in business engagement with the administration, before her return to federal service with Labor Secretary Tom Perez as an adviser on business relations.
In that position, she worked with businesses on issues including minimum wage, paid family leave and overtime regulations, oftentimes having to navigate disagreements between employers and labor advocates.
Wardlow subsequently worked at Facebook and Lyft, where she said her focus was on public policy issues such as expanding electric vehicle charging infrastructure.
Following her time spent in national politics and the private sector, Wardlow eventually returned to Santa Barbara—a move she said she had always intended.
Her professional experience continued on into the cannabis industry, where she later worked as vice president of public affairs at a California cannabis company.
Wardlow said her work was centered around connecting with the community, influencing local regulations and advocating for merit-based cannabis licensing—rather than lottery systems used in cities like Los Angeles. She recounted meeting and working with residents, law enforcement representatives and community organizations to address concerns about the expansion of the industry.
She pushed back on the characterization of that role as a lobbying position.
“I never was a registered lobbyist,” Wardlow said. “But there was somebody that was the head of government affairs. There was a complete other person that had that title. That was not me.”
Wardlow said she eventually left the industry after growing tired following years of extensive travel, and sought a position that would allow her to spend more time at home in Santa Barbara.
She now serves as head of public policy at Obvio—a traffic safety technology company whose systems are designed to identify violations such as running red lights.
Wardlow said she did not want her company’s work to be conflated with automated license plate reader systems like Flock Safety or Verkada.
She said the company’s technology is solely designed to identify traffic violations for public works departments. And that there is no collection of personal information or maintenance of a searchable surveillance database.
She is strongly against the use of Flock and Verkada surveillance systems in Santa Barbara, citing concerns over privacy and the possibility of information being accessed or shared beyond its intended purpose.
On the campaign trail, her professional background has also drawn scrutiny from fellow District 4 candidate Genevieve Taft-Vazquez and others, who had questioned Wardlow’s work in the cannabis industry and her subsequent move into traffic enforcement technology.
In response to the criticism, Wardlow pointed to her career, five years on the Planning Commission and endorsements from organizations including the Santa Barbara City Firefighters, Planned Parenthood and the Sierra Club.
“I’m focused on policy solutions, not discrediting other candidates,” Wardlow said.
“I’d rather spend this campaign discussing the issues that matter most to our community and the policies needed to move them forward, including wildfire safety, climate resilience, housing affordability and revitalizing State Street.”
After five years on Santa Barbara’s Planning Commission, Wardlow said she has grown increasingly frustrated with the city’s difficulty translating housing approvals into projects.
She wants to concentrate new housing downtown, where existing infrastructure and public transportation can allow for additional residents, while still avoiding development in high fire risk areas.
Wardlow has advocated for the prioritization of housing over hotels, contending that Santa Barbara needs to be more deliberate and thoughtful about how land is developed.
“We have very limited land,” she said.
She believes that approach could help show how new housing can coexist with the city’s character.
That effort, she said, will require working and collaborating with preservation groups and residents who have concerns surrounding the increase in density.
She also favors moving forward with the State Street Master Plan, which she sees as part of a larger effort to bring residents—and economic activity—back downtown.
Wardlow also wants to prioritize the development of city-owned properties for affordable housing, along with the city’s Better Buildings program.
She said it’s the order that these programs move forward in that matters—and that the city should pursue opportunities to develop its own properties first and avoid sole reliance on private developments to produce affordable units.
Wardlow also supports rent stabilization, though she has criticized many of the provisions of the ordinance recently adopted by the city council.
She views the ordinance’s rent-increase cap as too restrictive and wants exceptions for certain affordable housing properties and landlords who already charge below-market rents. While supporting limiting rent increases to protect tenants, she also feels the city needs to build more housing to address rising costs.
Beyond housing and downtown development, Wardlow has also emphasized wildfire preparedness and improving city services.
She wants the city to move ahead with rebuilding two fire stations, expand the use of solar power on city-owned properties and reduce its dependence on Southern California Edison.
She has also called for a simplification to the city’s permitting and development process, saying that even relatively basic home improvements can become unnecessarily difficult to navigate.
Wardlow describes those administrative changes as less attention-grabbing than major development projects, but just as important to residents and businesses trying to get things done.
Her approach to governing, she said, rests on the idea that Santa Barbara residents often share the same broad goals, even when they disagree on how to go about their achievement.
“We agree on more things than we disagree,” Wardlow said.
She still recalls what it felt like and what it meant to arrive in Santa Barbara as a child and find people willing to help her build a future.
Now, after an education that’s taken her across the world, and a career that’s taken her across the country and into national politics, Wardlow wants to help shape the community she credits with giving her those opportunities.
“I’ve never had anything handed to me,” Wardlow said.
