On Sept. 10, the four candidates for the open District 4 city council seat gathered in TV Santa Barbara’s studios for a debate so pleasant and agreeable it might have passed for a dinner party on the Riviera.

Co-sponsored by Newsmakers, the Santa Barbara Talks podcast and TVSB, it was the first campaign-season forum to bring together contenders Jason Dominguez, Genevieve Taft-Vazquez, Devon Wardlow and Monte Wilson — an event that surfaced modest but significant differences on city finances, rent control, downtown development and fire safety.

You can watch the full 59:51 debate via YouTube below, or by clicking this link.

Here are four takeaways from the affair, followed by Newsmakers’ first Power Rankings of the season.

Genevieve arrives. In a field featuring two rivals with deep City Hall experience and another who has been campaigning for months, Taft-Vazquez is the closest thing to a fresh face in the race, and she made a first impression that could appeal to the older white homeowners who dominate the district’s voting rolls. With full-on, homegrown mom energy — “I was born and raised in this district, I am raising my three kids in this district, I am a homeowner in this district. I care very deeply about this district and I am not going anywhere” — her surface knowledge of policy details was offset by an earnest, intelligent and plain-spoken tone that signaled fast-learner smarts, stable neighbor values and a well-developed interest in the arts: a package that may play well in Upper East living rooms.

Devon in the weeds. Wardlow could have cruised to victory in downtown’s District 6, but her combination of millennial glibness and lefty politics could prove a less felicitous match for the propertied burghers of District 4, despite the fact that she spent part of her formative years in its neighborhoods. A planning commissioner since 2022, she clearly has a deep understanding of the confounding complexities of city and state land use policies, but her ability to explain them in plain English — instead of high-velocity planner-speak and political jargon — remains a challenge: “I’ve worked with different sides of folks to really make sure that we’re identifying shared priorities and coming up with a shared solution and vision, because part of what I’ve heard from staff about why things have struggled to move forward is because of a lack of shared vision.”

Jason scores on budget. Dominguez served one term on council in the Before Times but lost his bid for re-election amid a messy tangle of personal and political beefs. That may explain why he made such a bland presentation at TVSB, instead of wielding his sharp tongue and proven lawyer’s skills to score debate points — although he did a good job of outshining his rivals with an adroit summary of city budget matters: “I would do no more of these one-year salary payouts that are baked into our executives’ contracts when we hire from out of town. That’s the exact kind of severance bloat that we don’t need … City finance is complex … you’ve got state law that interferes with what you would normally have in the private sector … union contracts, a whole set of legislative tools and a whole set of legislative obstacles that counterbalance those. So you really need to have experience.”

Monte courts the Measure C crowd. The Nov. 3 midterm electorate will be much larger and much more Democratic than in 2021, the last time the city voted for mayor and chose Randy Rowse, but Wilson still benefits from being the only registered independent running against three Democrats. In cultivating moderates and the center-right, he was smart to speak up on behalf of fiscal discipline, at a time when Other People’s Money libs and Strong Towns know-it-alls are itching to grab revenue from the 2017 Measure C tax hike for the State Street Master Plan and other pet projects: “I am concerned about us deceiving the voters on Measure C. If you look at the first five years that we’re committed for Measure C, the police station was part of that, but also there were two fire stations … We’re well past that. We don’t have two new fire stations, and to compound the problem, those are in high fire districts.”

L-R: Dominguez, Taft-Vazquez; Wardlow; Wilson.

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Our podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, or on SoundCloud. TVSB, Channel 17, airs Newsmakers weeknights at 5 p.m. and at 9 a.m. on weekends. KCSB, 91.9 FM, broadcasts the program at 5:30 p.m. on weekends.

By Pat McElroy

Santa Barbara voters approved Measure C in 2017 for a clear purpose: to repair the city’s aging infrastructure and protect essential public safety facilities.

That promise should not be blurred, minimized, or repurposed in the heat of a city election or a debate over the future of State Street.

Recent public discussion about State Street, the budget deficit, and Measure C has become troubling to many of us who worked for the measure’s passage. Measure C was placed before the voters of Santa Barbara and approved in a general election.

It is not, and was never presented as, a slush fund.

Those of us who asked residents to raise their own taxes made a specific commitment: the money would fund a thorough, well-planned series of infrastructure projects.

Opponents warned at the time that future councils might ignore that intent and treat the revenue as flexible money for other priorities.

We assured voters that would not happen. And if it did, we would say something.

A City Council problem. I served on the Measure C committee, and I remember clearly how carefully the measure was developed. I have confidence in city staff and in the Measure C Oversight Committee, whose job is to protect the intent voters approved. I also respect the staff developing the State Street Master Plan at the direction of the Council.

This is not a staff problem. It is a City Council problem.

Measure C passed in November 2017 with 13,656 yes votes, or 56.2 percent, to 10,642 no votes, or 43.8 percent. It added a 1 percent local sales tax directed to the city General Fund with no sunset.

Supporters were clear with skeptical voters: the revenue would address well-documented infrastructure needs identified by Public Works, not salaries or benefits. In seeking support from city firefighters and police officers, the Measure C committee made that point explicitly. They readily agreed.

At the time, the tax was projected to generate about $22 million a year. To date, Measure C has generated more than $230 million for the city, with annual revenues varying over time, including during the COVID years. The amount of money involved only heightens the importance of keeping faith with the voters who approved it.

What Measure C promised. Public surveys showed that voters’ leading reason for supporting Measure C was maintaining police, fire, and 911 response.

That included building a new Police Station and replacing Fire Station 7 on Stanwood Drive in the city’s Extreme High Fire area.

Roads were another major concern. They had deteriorated to the point that a major repair program was essential, and anyone who has driven through town over the past eight years has seen the results of that investment.

In recent weeks, some have blamed the new Police Station for Santa Barbara’s budget deficit and sharp decline in reserves. That claim is false and inconsistent with the facts. As intended, the Police Station will be paid for entirely with Measure C funds.

Fire protection needs. More troubling is what has happened to fire protection.

Fire Station 7 has disappeared from the City Council’s stated priorities, as adopted on December 12, 2023. Since then, it has become clear that Station 7 urgently needs replacement and that Fire Station 3 on East Sola is also a serious concern. Built in 1929, that neighborhood station may soon be unable to house a modern fire engine because of its size and historic architecture.

The City Council approved and funded a Fire Station Location and Facilities Master Plan in 2025 to address these concerns.

But plans do not protect neighborhoods unless elected officials make them a priority. Without Council action, those plans will remain on the shelf.

False equivalence. I am particularly troubled by the false equivalence being drawn between the estimated cost of the State Street Master Plan and the actual cost of the new Police Station.

The Master Plan may be a worthwhile aspirational effort, but the Police Station and other Measure C priorities were placed on the ballot and approved by voters. No comparable vote has been held for the State Street Master Plan.

If city leaders now want to redirect Measure C revenue toward new goals, they should put those goals before the voters.

Until the promises made in 2017 are kept, changing or diverting Measure C’s intentions would confirm the very concern opponents raised when we argued for its passage.

We promised that if those commitments were threatened, we would speak out on behalf of the people who supported Measure C.

That time has come.

Santa Barbara should keep faith with its voters before changing the use of Measure C funds.

Pat McElroy served as Chief of the City of Santa Barbara Fire Department from 2013-18, capping a 37 year career with the agency.

For further reference:

Signatories to the original Measure C Ballot Measure in 2017 were:

Congresswoman Lois Capps

Geoff Green

Randy Rowse

Helene Schneider

Supporters included:

Bendy White

Jim Armstrong

Gregg Hart

Santa Barbara Police Officers Association

Santa Barbara City Firefighters Association

Santa Barbara Chamber of Commerce

Santa Barbara Independent

CAUSE

League of Women Voters

Santa Barbara Board of Realtors

Santa Barbara Democratic Party

Image generated by AI.

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(Editor's note: Along with our singular coverage of Santa Barbara politics and media, Newsmakers periodically republishes high-quality, pro-democracy journalism curated from our endless excursions around the internet. Today, via gift link, a decidedly important enterprise piece by two New York Times star reporters drawing together the threads of how Donald Trump imperils the First Amendment. —jr).

By Maggie Haberman and Jim Rutenberg /The New York Times

The Justice Department has sent F.B.I. agents to reporters’ homes to serve subpoenas and, in at least one case, flashed a warrant to seize devices. The Pentagon has fired the editor and publisher of its traditionally independent newspaper, Stars and Stripes, and blocked access to other journalists who refused to sign pledges that would limit their reporting.

Regulatory agencies are using their powers to pressure media organizations over their content. The administration has stripped funding from public television and radio. Angry over stories he does not like, President Trump has sued major news organizations and the White House has taken control of the previously independent press pool that tracks the president, deciding which outlets can participate.

Almost 20 months into Mr. Trump’s second term, his long-running media clashes have grown into a sweeping campaign to control speech in America that stands out for applying so many levers, so fast, all at once.

Driven by personal pique, fury over leaks and a determination to shape the political narrative to his advantage, Mr. Trump is deploying the might of the federal government and filing personal lawsuits — targeting not just journalists and liberal critics, but also comedians and talk show hosts, and the corporate entities behind them.

To the president and his allies, he is simply demanding accountability for what he casts as biased, unfair and sometimes inaccurate coverage and criticism — an effort that has been welcomed by longtime conservative press critics like those at the Media Research Center.

Aides noted that the White House has this year expanded who gets invited to cover events, such as the off-the-record presidential lunch with network anchors that precedes the annual State of the Union address.

In a statement, the White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said that “biased reporting from the media is a disservice to the American people.” Pointing to Mr. Trump’s heavy rotation of question and answer sessions with reporters as evidence of “unprecedented access,’’ he added: “We utilize every tool available to ensure that accurate reporting is provided to the public and the stain of those who knowingly peddle false information is held accountable.”

Free speech advocates say the president’s intent is apparent: to punish, intimidate and silence dissenters.

“There’s not a week that goes by where they’re not taking a new step to curtail press freedom in the country,” said Clayton Weimers, the executive director of the North America division of Reporters Without Borders. “We have measured a substantial diminishment of press freedoms.”

When challenged in court, the president and the administration have frequently lost, confronted with strongly worded rulings from judges affirming First Amendment rights.

Still, even the path to legal victory can have severe financial and reputational costs for those he views as adversaries, which have included The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the BBC. And each time the president assails what has long been considered protected speech, media analysts say, he is eroding norms and undercutting the role of an independent press.

Reporters Without Borders maintains an index that tracks press freedom in 180 countries, clocking governmental threats, subpoenas and the vindictive use of regulations against journalists. The United States now ranks at its lowest since the organization started the index in 2002 — 64th, just above Panama and just below Botswana. The trend is the same at similar indexes kept by the Freedom of the Press Foundation and the V-Dem Institute of Sweden.

There is a long record of U.S. presidents taking steps to curtail speech. President Woodrow Wilson imposed strict censorship and forced dissenting publishers out of business during World War I. Richard M. Nixon kept an enemies list, and his aides threatened F.C.C. action against broadcasters. More recently, the George W. Bush White House expanded government secrecy and the Obama administration went after the sources of journalists through leak investigations.

Mr. Trump had inveighed against the Biden administration for what he and his supporters portrayed as draconian pressure on social media companies to censor disfavored content often at their expense, promising at his second inauguration to “stop all government censorship.”

Now his administration is breaking new ground in stifling dissent with personal lawsuits and novel uses of executive power, longtime First Amendment lawyers say, with implications that extend far beyond Mr. Trump’s presidency.

“We live in a different world under this administration because the threats are so grave,” said Floyd Abrams, who has worked on free speech cases for 60 years. “It’s one thing to say there’s an extraordinarily powerful First Amendment, but unless and until courts rule on these matters, the threat is very real.”

Harnessing Government Power. Long before he took office, Mr. Trump was well known for his media feuds. As a developer and reality TV star, he was quick to threaten defamation suits against those who challenged his assertions about his business successes and his wealth.

Mr. Trump has been candid about his aim: to inflict pain, even if it was fleeting. After bringing a failed libel suit against the former Times reporter Timothy L. O’Brien, whose book “TrumpNation” estimated Mr. Trump to be worth far less than he claimed, the president gloated about forcing the publisher to spend money. “I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about,” he said.

In his first term, the president branded journalists as “fake news” and crudely attacked reporters, especially women.

In his second term, Mr. Trump is now imprinting his pugilistic approach across the machinery of the federal government. Those who once might have checked him have been replaced by loyalists who often use their power to fulfill Mr. Trump’s desire to punish perceived enemies.

Soon after his inauguration, the White House banned The Associated Press from the Oval Office and Air Force One, ostensibly because the wire service would not call the Gulf of Mexico by Mr. Trump’s preferred name, the Gulf of America. Another reason for the ban: The A.P. would not give the Trump team rights to its photo of Mr. Trump, bloodied with a raised fist, after he was shot in Butler, Pa., in 2024. At a private lunch with Mr. Trump and network anchors last year, White House aides tied the A.P. ban to the denial of the rights to the photo, according to two people briefed on the event.

Mr. Trump’s team is unapologetic about its goal of achieving firmer control over the national information environment — what Mr. Cheung, the communications director, has dubbed in a social media post “Full Spectrum Dominance.”

Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and one of the most aggressive supporters of Mr. Trump’s efforts, has said that the president is “reshaping the media landscape.”

Citing the big broadcast networks, Mr. Carr told an interviewer for CNBC last year that “for years government officials just allowed those entities, with executives sitting in Hollywood and New York, to dictate the political narrative.” Mr. Trump, he added, has “fundamentally changed the game.”

One of the Trump administration’s strategies appeared to take root in a dispute between Elon Musk and the liberal press watchdog group Media Matters for America.

In 2023, Mr. Musk was furious about a Media Matters article that showed pro-Nazi posts were running on his social media platform X alongside promotional posts from major consumer brands, contributing to an advertiser exodus from the site.

A longtime Trump adviser, Stephen Miller, took to X to pointedly note that Republican state attorneys general had the power to consider civil and criminal fraud charges against the group. In short order, Mr. Musk sued Media Matters for allegedly manipulating the X algorithm to produce its results, the Texas attorney general’s office opened an investigation into deceptive trade practices and the Missouri attorney general followed with its own inquiry.

Media Matters won court injunctions blocking the Texas and Missouri investigations. But soon after Mr. Trump took office again, the Federal Trade Commission, newly headed by the conservative lawyer Andrew Ferguson, began its own investigation, demanding internal documents related to Media Matters’ methodology for evaluating media sources and its finances.

The investigation was part of a broader F.T.C. inquiry into whether several groups that work to identify online disinformation were colluding with advertising firms to direct money away from disfavored outlets. Conservatives saw the issue as central to what some labeled a “censorship industrial complex.”

A federal judge in Washington ultimately determined that the F.T.C.’s investigation of Media Matters presented “a straightforward First Amendment violation.”

But the fight was costly for Media Matters. In addition to paying legal fees, the group said it had self-censored articles to avoid further scrutiny from the agency. (It is still defending itself against Mr. Musk’s suit.)

In court papers, NewsGuard said it drew attention in part because it had given a low rating to the conservative site Newsmax, which is run by an ally of Mr. Trump’s, Chris Ruddy. Mr. Ruddy had complained that ad agencies were relying on NewsGuard ratings to withhold money from right-leaning outlets like his.

The F.T.C. took another tack that NewsGuard said affected it directly, related to the merger of two of the country’s largest advertising holding companies, Omnicom and Interpublic Group. The F.T.C. entered into a consent decree with the newly joined company barring it from broadly using ratings like those published by NewsGuard to withhold ad spending from certain sites, among other things. (It could still follow individual clients’ requests to do so.)

In a lawsuit filed in February, NewsGuard said the provision effectively placed it on a blacklist, immediately causing it to lose business.

The F.T.C. ultimately dropped its investigations into both NewsGuard and Media Matters, saying it had achieved its goal of defending free speech through agreements with ad firms. It said it was fulfilling its mission of protecting consumers from anticompetitive behavior that “distorted the marketplace of ideas,” as Mr. Ferguson put it.

Dan Schneider, vice president for free speech at the conservative watchdog group Media Research Center, described the actions by the F.T.C. and the F.C.C. as a correction against abuses under the past two Democratic presidents. “Please, let’s not forget history and rewrite everything that went on before,” Mr. Schneider said.

But Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, a Democratic F.T.C. commissioner fired by Mr. Trump last year, said in an interview that the agency’s actions were “a perversion of the F.T.C.’s authorities in order to punish the speech of perceived enemies and reward perceived allies.”

‘Deeply Un-American.’ Much of the administration’s action has been led by Mr. Carr. The longtime F.C.C. lawyer is known to frequent the president’s golf clubs when Mr. Trump is there on weekends and often speaks to the president directly about his grievances with news outlets, according to people briefed on their conversations.

He has bent the F.C.C. to the president’s will, investigating the major broadcast networks by reviving largely dormant rules, like those against so-called news distortion — meant to punish the deliberate staging or distortion of a news event. Mr. Carr has also pursued networks for their diversity, equity and inclusion practices, inquiring whether they violate federal law and agency regulations, a tactic the administration has used to significant effect against universities and law firms.

Early on, Mr. Carr extracted extraordinary concessions from Skydance, the company run by the studio executive David Ellison, the son of the billionaire Trump ally Larry Ellison, as it sought to purchase Paramount, the parent company of CBS. To secure F.C.C. approval for the merger, Skydance agreed to end CBS’s diversity policies and appoint a monitor for news bias. (Mr. Trump has since shown a rooting interest in the Ellisons’ attempt to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN.)

Critics, among them F.C.C. chairs from past Republican administrations, have said Mr. Carr is exceeding his authority. Mr. Carr says he is simply following the law by requiring broadcasters to serve the public interest in ways that he says his predecessors had failed to do.

Mr. Trump is clearly pleased with Mr. Carr’s effort to solve the so-called fake news problem, as he put it in a speech in April at a private White House event ahead of the celebrations for America’s 250th anniversary.

“He’s keeping these crooked networks honest,” Mr. Trump said as he spotted Mr. Carr in the crowd, describing his appointee as “the most powerful man in the world.”

After Mr. Trump recently called for punishment of the NBC host Kristen Welker for reporting he did not like, and suggested F.C.C. action against the airing of “fake polls,” Mr. Carr responded by saying the agency was considering “a lot of actions,” including on “fake polls.”

No network has borne the brunt of the president’s ire as much as the Disney-owned ABC network.

Mr. Trump’s animus against ABC grew in 2024, when he sued over the anchor George Stephanopoulos’s characterization of the verdict in the defamation case brought by E. Jean Carroll, who accused Mr. Trump of sexual abuse. ABC settled the suit for $15 million.

In the president’s second term, his anger has increased as the ABC late-night comic Jimmy Kimmel has made him the regular butt of jokes.

Last year, the F.C.C. opened an investigation into the network’s diversity and inclusion hiring policies and revived a conservative group’s complaint over ABC’s 2024 presidential debate.

Early this year, the agency sought to require its talk show “The View” to follow so-called equal-time rules for political candidates, even though the F.C.C. previously agreed that the show qualified for an exemption.

In April, after Mr. Trump and the first lady demanded ABC fire Mr. Kimmel over a joke he made about her being an “expectant widow,” the F.C.C. started an early review of the federal licenses that ABC stations need to operate, years before they are set to expire.

The agency had never brought such a mass challenge to a major network’s station licenses. It said it was doing so because ABC was deficient in its responses to the diversity and inclusion inquiry.

ABC is now fighting the agency’s actions, which it called “deeply un-American.”

The network has asked a federal court to intervene immediately, arguing that Mr. Carr was effectively using the agency’s enforcement process to wage a “retaliatory campaign” that is already negatively affecting its programming decisions.

Out of fear of retaliation, ABC decided to carry live online a prime-time speech that Mr. Trump gave on election security, which it would not have otherwise done, and avoided certain bookings and video clips on “The View,” the network said in court papers.

It also reported onerous F.C.C. demands for documents, including staff communications from inside “The View” and internal ABC News editorial policies.

“It’s unprecedented to seek these records because they are part of the editorial decision-making,” Anna Gomez, the lone Democratic F.C.C. commissioner, said in an interview. “It’s all a strategy, and tools, to intimidate broadcasters into submission.”

Mr. Carr has called ABC’s suit meritless. This month, the F.C.C. moved to get the case dismissed, arguing ABC was simply trying to short-circuit an agency investigation while exaggerating harms to its speech rights.

‘Off the Charts.’ Trevor Timm, the executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a nonprofit group that tracks press freedom violations in the United States, said that the administration’s moves “have certainly risen to the level where they’re kind of off the charts.”

Government efforts to subpoena journalists and chill their reporting through threats are at the highest level since the foundation started tracking incidents in 2017.

And as a private citizen, Mr. Trump has filed lawsuits against a wide range of targets including the Guardian newspaper, the journalist Bob Woodward and the Pulitzer Prize board — legal battles often financed by his donor-funded political action committee.

Many of the moves have also drawn stern rebukes and concern from judges.

That was the case after the F.B.I. served a search warrant in January at the home of a Washington Post reporter and seized several of her devices, as part of an investigation into a contractor’s handling of classified material. In February, Judge William B. Porter chastised the government and forbade officials from immediately reviewing the reporter’s materials, saying to do otherwise would be “the equivalent of leaving the government’s fox in charge of The Washington Post’s henhouse.”

While weighing a suit Mr. Trump has personally brought against The Des Moines Register for a poll it published showing him behind in Iowa in 2024, a judge worried that allowing the suit to proceed could have “a massive, chilling effect.”

After a judge harshly questioned government lawyers in July over subpoenas for phone records and testimony from Times journalists who reported on the security capabilities of the new Qatari-donated Air Force One jet, the Justice Department withdrew the subpoenas.

At the time, David McCraw, the paper’s top newsroom lawyer, called the outcome “an important affirmation of our country’s commitment to a free press,” but added in a statement that the subpoenas “should never have been issued in the first place.”

In siding with The Times in a challenge to restrictions for reporters at the Pentagon, Judge Paul Friedman of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia wrote in March, “Those who drafted the First Amendment believed that the nation’s security requires a free press and an informed people and that such security is endangered by governmental suppression of political speech.”

After The Times initially prevailed in court, Pentagon officials sidestepped the ruling to again limit the access of journalists to the building. The Times sued again. This time, an appellate panel allowed a key new restriction to stand, at least temporarily — reporters must have escorts inside the Pentagon where they once roamed freely.

The rule remains in place while the legal fight presses on.

Jim Rutenberg is a writer at large for The Times and The New York Times Magazine. Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent for The Times, reporting on President Trump. Subscribe here.

Image: Photo illustration by resistbot.com

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With trademark optimism and high-velocity volleys of words, Monique Limón offered a confident if cautious assessment Thursday of how California is standing up to the ongoing political and legal assault from the Trump administration.

In her first extensive interview since the 2025-26 session of the California Legislature ended Sept. 1, Santa Barbara’s homegrown Senate President pro Tempore reflected on her first term in the post — one of the three most powerful in Sacramento — saying state government is aggressively countering a constant round of program cuts, legal actions and hostile rhetoric from the White House.

She acknowledged the difficulty of responding to unprecedented, unexpected changes in how the federal government deals with the state, but insisted California’s history shows it has weathered worse crises and will survive the Trump era.

“I don’t think we’re losing — I think we are defending ourselves,” Limón told Newsmakers. “We’re playing both offense — and all the defense that is necessary.”

“There is no point in this year where we have sat passively as a state…in response to what has come before us,” she said. “When there has been an incident, whether it is ICE at healthcare centers or at childcare centers or at schools, we have responded to it.

“So we have been active agents in ensuring that the California values and laws that are in place remain in place. And we are doing it legally, through the court system, through the merits we have as our state laws allow us to,” Limón added. “We are a state that has seen many challenges over the last 175 years, and we will remain strong…Any setback is temporary.”

In a wide-ranging interview, Limón discussed how the state is fighting the administration’s moves against long-settled protections for California’s coastline, from ordering the restart of offshore oil pumping and transport in Santa Barbara County to plans for sweeping new oil leases and a political strike at the Coastal Commission.

She also talked about what it’s like dealing with a governor simultaneously running for president, her relationship with the man expected to succeed him, and the collapse of a legislative package meant to balance the interests of consumers, insurers and utilities amid a climate-driven wildfire crisis.

And she spoke about how her high-pressure, nonstop job has affected her family and herself — and what she might do when her term ends in 2028.

“It is not a hundred percent clear what I will do next,” Limón said. “But I’m a person who understands that I’ve been given this honor by the people that I represent, and it’s been a great honor to represent them…in the state Capitol.

“And what happens in 2028 is to be determined,” she added.

Check out our complete interview with state Senator Monique Limón via YouTube below or by clicking this link. Our podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, or on SoundCloud. TVSB, Channel 17, airs the show every weeknight at 5 p.m. and at 9 a.m. on weekends. KCSB, 91.9 FM, broadcasts the program at 5:30 p.m. on weekends.

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As the dust settles on last week’s big mayoral debate, the team that produced it will bring you similar events in coming days, featuring the candidates for Santa Barbara’s three open city council seats.

The three debates, to be co-moderated by Josh Molina and the genial host, will be recorded over the next week in the studios of TV Santa Barbara, to air on Channel 17 and the YouTube channels of Newsmakers, the News-Press and Josh’s “Santa Barbara Talks” podcast, soon after.

Starting tomorrow, the lineup will be:

District 4. Jason Dominguez, Genevieve Taft-Vazquez, Devon Wardlow and Monte Wilson are running to represent the seat currently held by mayoral candidate Kristen Sneddon, which includes the Upper East and the Riviera. They are scheduled to meet face-to-face-to-face-to-face tomorrow.

District 5. Ian Baucke, Cevin Cathell and James Zurlinden, competing for the seat now held by mayoral contender Eric Friedman and representing Upper State, San Roque and nearby neighborhoods, are confirmed to debate next Wednesday.

District 6. Jason Carlton, Gabe Escobedo, Anabella Lehne and Alexander Stoeber, who are seeking the seat now held by Meagan Harmon, representing downtown, Oak Park and nearby neighborhoods, are set to go in the second half of a doubleheader we’ll be recording next Wednesday.

In the meantime, here’s one more look at last week’s mayoral debate featuring Friedman, Sneddon and Wendy Sims-Moten.

More election campaign content.

Newsmakers’ Candidate Conversations. To offer Santa Barbara voters early introductions to contenders for four City Council seats, including Mayor, in the Nov. 3 election, Newsmakers published one-on-one interviews with the candidates over the summer. Here is a guide to the interviews.

Mayor

• Eric Friedman, candidate for Mayor, June 28.

• Wendy Sims-Moten, candidate for Mayor, Aug. 13.

• Kristen Sneddon, candidate for Mayor, Aug. 17.

District 4

• Monte Wilson, candidate for District 4 council seat, June 23.

• Jason Dominguez, candidate for District 4, July 6

• Genevieve Taft-Vazquez, candidate for District 4, July 16.

• Devon Wardlow, candidate for District 4, July 21.

District 5

• Cevin Cathell, candidate for District 5, July 23.

• Ian Baucke, candidate for District 5, July 26.

• James Zurlinden, candidate for District 5, Aug. 3.

District 6

• Gabe Escobedo, candidate for District 6, July 13.

• Alexander Stoeber candidate for District 6, Aug. 3.

• Anabella Lehne, candidate for District 6, Aug. 26.

• Jason Carlton, candidate for District 6, Aug. 28.

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With soaring music! And titles! All 1:13:36 of it!

As leading candidates Eric Friedman, Wendy Sims-Moten and Kristen Sneddon head into the final eight weeks of the campaign, the debate serves as a first touchstone for voters seeking more information about contenders who want to be their next mayor.

The balance of power at City Hall is up for grabs, with the at-large mayor’s office, plus three neighborhood district council seats, on the Nov. 3 ballot.

Check out the complete debate via YouTube below or by clicking this link.

The event also is available audio-only via our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or SoundCloud.

TVSB, Channel 17, airs Newsmakers TV every weeknight at 5 p.m. and at 9 a.m. on weekends. KCSB, 91.9 FM, broadcasts our program at 5:30 p.m. on weekends.

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It’s received wisdom in the world of professional politics that many more people receive their information about a political debate from the coverage and commentary that follows it than from the event itself.

So Topic A on this week’s edition of Newsmakers TV was teasing out the multiple strands of political narrative likely to flow from Thursday night’s face-to-face-to-face encounter featuring mayoral candidates Eric Friedman, Wendy Sims-Moten and Kristen Sneddon talking politics and policy before an outsize crowd at the New Vic Theatre.

Amanda Velasco, who covered the event for the News-Press, and Ryan P. Cruz, who did likewise for the Independent, join Josh Molina and the genial host — who co-moderated the affair — to offer a case study of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle risks and rewards of hosting a debate and then analyzing it.

The gang also breaks down the big City Council vote advancing the State Street Master Plan, discussing how the big unanswered questions about the project — not least, how it will be paid for — intersect with the mayoral and council campaigns, as Labor Day marks the unofficial start of campaign season.

Plus: a peek behind the curtain of what news organizations want to get out of sponsoring a debate; fun with numbers and fearless forecasting on the mayor’s race; and how it feels to write under the meanest of deadline pressures while colleagues all around you are yukking it up and stuffing pizza slices into their pie holes.

All this and more, right here, right now, on Newsmakers TV.

Check out the latest episode via YouTube below or by clicking this link. Our podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, or on SoundCloud. TVSB, Channel 17, airs the show every weeknight at 5 p.m. and at 9 a.m. on weekends. KCSB, 91.9 FM, broadcasts the program at 5:30 p.m. on weekends.

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Eric Friedman called for a citywide vote on an advisory measure about rent control Thursday night, as chief mayor’s race rival Kristen Sneddon said she would oppose such a move because the contentious matter is too complex to put on the ballot.

Former school board president Wendy Sims-Moten, who joined the two incumbent City Council members at the first mayoral debate of the campaign season, also said she would favor putting the question to voters — but only if City Hall first carried out an extensive “education campaign” in the community.

“Put it on the ballot,” declared Friedman, drawing the sharpest contrast that emerged between the three major candidates for mayor at the debate, which drew a pre-Labor Day crowd of more than 200 people to the New Vic Theatre.

The long-debated rent stabilization ordinance is expected to gain final council passage on a sharply divided 4-to-3 vote as early as this month, with Sneddon in favor and Friedman opposed.

Putting a rent control advisory question on the ballot was one of several major distinctions over key policy issues that surfaced at the spirited but civil debate, marking the informal kickoff of the fall campaign, two months before the Nov. 3 election.

The trio of contenders also expressed clear differences on the future of State Street, downtown development and the city’s tangled finances, while fielding questions about their public records and how they have dealt with mistakes they have made in office.

Newsmakers co-founder Hap Freund was on the scene on Thursday night, and captured the key exchange over the rent control issue. Watch it on YouTube below, or by clicking this link.

The debate will be Topic A on this week’s episode of Newsmakers TV, to be recorded and published Friday, featuring a panel of journalists who witnessed the event: SB Independent staff writer Ryan P. Cruz, News-Press reporter Amanda Velasco and her editor Josh Molina, who co-moderated the affair with the genial host.

The debate was co-sponsored by the News-Press, Newsmakers and TVSB, which recorded the 70-minute event and will release a full production next week, when we’ll also post the complete video.

Image: The scene at Thursday night’s mayoral debate, which kicked off the fall campaign season before a crowd of more than 200 at the New Vic Theatre. L-R: Moderators Josh Molina and Jerry Roberts; candidates Eric Friedman, Wendy Sims-Moten, Kristen Sneddon (Kate Ford photo).

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(Editor’s note: Gloria Steinem was many things: feminist icon, pioneering activist, piñata for right-wing talk show loudmouths and MAGA haters. Newsmakers’ huge respect for Steinem, however, was always for her efforts as a journalist: a founder of Ms. Magazine, she made her bones as a freelance writer, and widely published her singular brand of reported commentary throughout her long life. This splendid obituary, via gift subscription, captures the sweep and scope of her work. /jr).

By Katherine Q. Selye /The New York Times

Gloria Steinem, the feminist crusader who galvanized the modern women’s movement, helping millions of women develop a sense of self-worth and gain a measure of equality at home, at work and in society at large, died on Wednesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 92.

Her death was announced in a post on social media, which did not give a cause.

Calling herself “an entrepreneur of social change,” Ms. Steinem helped usher in sweeping cultural transformations across virtually every facet of American life, from the boardroom to the courtroom to the bedroom.

For more than half a century, she personified the women’s movement and became its most enduring symbol; her tinted aviator glasses and curtain of streaked-blond hair parted in the center made her one of the most recognizable women in the world.

She was an unlikely revolutionary. Growing up a transient in the Midwest, she was 10 when her parents divorced and she was left to mother her mentally anguished mother — a formative experience that reverberated throughout her life. She had scant formal education until sixth grade; her big dream, as a budding tap dancer, was to become a Rockette.

But she read voraciously, graduated from college with honors and believed fiercely that women should be able to live whatever life they chose.

Her own feminist awakening didn’t come until her mid-30s, when, as a journalist in 1969, she attended a “speak out” of women discussing their illegal abortions. Charismatic, articulate, media savvy, deeply empathetic and a workaholic, she evolved into a political and cultural force.

She led protests and consciousness-raising sessions, wrote essays and delivered speeches, delved into political organizing, helped establish rape crisis centers and shelters for battered women, founded numerous groups that promoted women and had the Midas touch when it came to raising money for their causes.

And she and a cadre of feminists had the audacity to start a publication that flew in the face of traditional women’s magazines, examining topics like abortion, domestic violence and equal pay for equal work. The first glossy national periodical to be created, owned and run entirely by women, Ms. magazine, founded in 1971, sought to capture and channel a rising sense of female empowerment and eradicate the sexist assumptions that permeated the culture.

The magazine served as the movement’s manifesto, an incubator for social transformation and a blueprint for action. As such, it helped embolden women as they fought blatant discrimination and harassment in the workplace and unspoken oppression, and sometimes outright abuse, at home.

“When we started, there was not even a term for sexual harassment,” Ms. Steinem often said. “It was just called life.”

Decades after the movement dissipated and progressive women faced renewed setbacks, Ms. Steinem continued to push for their rights and equality. Indefatigable, she wrote essays and lectured into her 90s, and the news media never stopped seeking her opinion. She was the author of nearly a dozen major nonfiction books; her latest, “An Unexpected Life,” is scheduled for publication in late September.

Despite her fearless public persona, Ms. Steinem was somewhat diffident, initially terrified of speaking in public and wrestled with a lack of self-esteem.

She was also insecure about her looks. She said in an interview for this obituary in January 2026 that she wore her large aviator glasses and cloak of long hair partly to hide her face. “What I felt like inside,” she wrote in “Revolution From Within,” her 1992 book about self-esteem, “was a plump brunette from Toledo, too tall and much too pudding faced.”

Even as she personified the women’s movement, Ms. Steinem defied the stereotype of “women’s libbers” as sexless, humorless and dateless. She led a glittering social life and enjoyed relationships with many high-voltage men, including Mike Nichols, the director, and Mort Zuckerman, the real estate and publishing mogul. In the 2026 interview, she called Franklin A. Thomas, the pathbreaking president of the Ford Foundation, the love of her life, the man with whom she felt most in sync.

But she spurned marriage (mostly) and remained child free, a choice she said she never regretted.

“Not for a millisecond,” she said at 82. “Not everybody with a womb has to have a child, like not everybody with vocal cords has to be an opera singer. It’s a choice, and it’s a wonderful choice, but if everybody has to do it, it’s no longer a choice.”

Her lifestyle and unapologetic feminist beliefs made her a lightning rod, adored (though not always) by liberals, demonized (always) by conservatives. She and other single women were caricatured as man-hating, bra-burning lesbians intent on upending the social order and destroying the American family. When Ms. Steinem appeared on “Larry King Live” in 1990, a female caller memorably told her to “rot in hell” for what she had wrought.

Much of the hostility toward her was public and overt — especially with the rise of the religious right and the conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly — but it was also woven into the fabric of her everyday life.

While the male-dominated news media all but anointed Ms. Steinem as the movement’s spokeswoman (to the annoyance of its many other leaders and of the decidedly anti-hierarchical Ms. Steinem herself), it simultaneously patronized and marginalized her as a rebel with a pretty face.

When she was first job-hunting in New York, an editor at Life turned her away. “We need a reporter,” he told her, “not a pretty girl.” An editor at The New York Times Magazine propositioned her, she said. Clay Felker, the editor of New York magazine and Ms. Steinem’s mentor, said he gave her an assignment because she had “great legs.”

She broke through with a witty exposé, “A Bunny’s Tale,” for Show magazine in 1963. Squeezing into a too-small, electric-blue satin corset, with a bow tie at her throat and a pair of satin rabbit ears bobbing on her head, she worked undercover as a cotton-tailed waitress at the Playboy Club in New York. Her article was praised for revealing the degrading work conditions in that male-fantasy cocoon. But she regretted writing it, for a time anyway, because some used it to dismiss her as frivolous.

One was the journalist Gay Talese. In her 2015 memoir, “My Life on the Road,” Ms. Steinem recalled that Mr. Talese said of her in 1964: “You know how every year there’s a pretty girl who comes to New York and pretends to be a writer? Well, Gloria is this year’s pretty girl.”

But it was as a writer — journalist, columnist, essayist, author — that Ms. Steinem made her name. She also had a knack for pointed aphorisms.

“The truth will set you free,” she liked to say, “but first it will piss you off.” (Variations on this theme have existed since the Bible; Ms. Steinem popularized this one and used it as the title of a 2019 collection of essays.)

Another: “Self-esteem isn’t everything — it’s just that there’s nothing without it.”

One of her best-known quips was about aging.

When a reporter remarked, “Oh, you don’t look 40,” she responded with characteristic bluntness: “This is what 40 looks like! We’ve been lying for so long, who would know?”

Some of the achievements of the women’s movement — greater economic independence, more legal rights and protections, inroads into all levels of virtually every profession, more men sharing domestic responsibilities — may be taken for granted today. But they were unimaginable when the movement began.

And for Ms. Steinem and many others, that struggle never ended.

Women still earn less than men for the same work (81 cents for every dollar made by a man, according to the 2024 census). The Equal Rights Amendment, prohibiting discrimination on account of sex, was belatedly ratified but is still not part of the Constitution. The 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, a central goal of the movement, was overturned in 2022; some states went on to reverse or curtail other hard-won reproductive rights. No woman has been elected president. Anti-female bias remains entrenched.

“I feel proud, and I feel mad as hell,” Ms. Steinem told The Times in 2022. “We are still dealing with the same issues.”

‘The Big Click’. Ms. Steinem, who grew up in the Midwest, began her career in New York as a freelance writer in 1960. By 1968, she had become a co-founder of New York magazine. Writing a monthly political column, “The City Politic,” she found her voice.

Her column led to political advocacy. She marched with Cesar Chavez, the head of the United Farm Workers, who was revered until reports emerged in 2026 that he had sexually abused girls and women. She served as treasurer of the legal defense fund for Angela Davis, the revolutionary Black feminist who was in prison awaiting trial for murder, and was later acquitted. Ms. Steinem supported Norman Mailer in his losing campaign for mayor of New York in 1969 and briefly considered running for city comptroller on the ticket with him. (Despite Mr. Mailer’s notorious sexism, she did not regard him at that point as an enemy of the women’s movement.)

She was jolted into feminism that year when she reported on a group of women in Greenwich Village discussing their illegal abortions. Angered that they had been made to feel like criminals, Ms. Steinem, who had had a secret abortion in England in 1957, wrote her first openly feminist essay, titled “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation.”

At that moment, she viewed herself as part of something bigger than herself. “It was the big click,” she said in “Gloria: In Her Own Words,” a 2011 HBO documentary. “It transformed me.”

Ms. Steinem addressing a conference in 1979. She overcame a fear of public speaking to lecture around the world.Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Her essay appeared just as the women’s movement, sparked by Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” (1963), was gaining steam. The book, which alerted society to women’s frustrations and stifled ambitions, was an instant best seller.

Three years later, Ms. Friedan co-founded the National Organization for Women, whose statement of purpose said, “The time has come for a new movement toward true equality for all women in America.”

Women were second-class citizens, with few legal rights, little financial independence and no autonomy over their bodies. They needed a man’s signature to get a credit card or a bank loan. States had a “marital exemption” that allowed a husband to rape his wife without fear of legal consequences.

In 1971, a powerhouse group of feminists — Ms. Friedan, Ms. Steinem, Representatives Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm, both Democrats from New York, and others, including Jill Ruckelshaus, a prominent Republican activist — founded the National Women’s Political Caucus to advance the Equal Rights Amendment and elect women to public office.

Activist women were starting to gather in small groups all over the country, including at Ms. Steinem’s shared one-room walk-up apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. (She eventually bought the unit, which occupied the second floor of an 1880s brownstone; she acquired other floors over time and lived there for the rest of her life.)

It was in her living room that she held some of the first organizational meetings for Ms. magazine. She and several like-minded women wanted to create a publication that would speak to women’s lives in a way that the women’s magazines, devoted mainly to tips on beauty, how to catch a man and 25 exciting ways to make a hamburger, did not.

The magazine’s founders did not invent the term “Ms.,” an honorific that signified a woman’s individual identity regardless of her marital status. It had been seeping slowly into usage since the early 1900s. But by branding their magazine with it, they elevated the title into the nation’s lexicon and gave women a calling card.

The first issue was published in December 1971 and ran as an insert in the year-end issue of New York, thanks to Mr. Felker, who financed and promoted it.

The first full stand-alone issue came out in January 1972, again with Mr. Felker’s backing. The cover article, “The Housewife’s Moment of Truth,” explored the conflicts inherent in juggling work and home life. It also notably featured a signed list of 53 well-known women who acknowledged that they had sought illegal abortions — among them, the tennis star Billie Jean King, the singer Judy Collins, the playwright Lillian Hellman and the historian Barbara Tuchman.

Though the magazine appeared on newsstands in January, it was labeled “Spring” so that if it didn’t sell, it wouldn’t look stale. But all 300,000 copies sold out in eight days, thousands of letters from grateful readers poured in, and Ms. began publishing monthly that July.

Skeptics abounded. Harry Reasoner, a prominent television news anchor, dismissed the whole enterprise, saying, “I’ll give it six months before they run out of things to say.” (He subsequently apologized.) President Richard M. Nixon denigrated the term “Ms.,” wondering aloud to Henry Kissinger, “How many people really have read Gloria Steinem and give one shit about that?”

The magazine attracted prominent writers, including Alice Walker, Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison and Vivian Gornick. It covered a range of topics, including sisterhood, gender-neutral child rearing, battered wives and maternity leave. It rated political candidates by their stands on issues that were important to women.

For a time, Ms. thrived. But the expanding women’s movement — never a monolith — splintered into factions and faced backlashes (see the divisive feminist sex wars over pornography in the 1980s). Schisms divided the magazine, too. Anger was often directed at Ms. Steinem, whom some saw as a fence-sitter, trying to please everyone. More radical women and some women of color found the magazine wishy-washy and not inclusive enough, and they broke away.

Among the messier dramas of the period was one that developed between Ms. Friedan and Ms. Steinem.

The two shared certain goals, including equal pay, more women in public office and legalized abortion. But Ms. Steinem also sought broader cultural and social change that included liberating women from media stereotypes and recalibrating the power dynamic between men and women. Significantly, she also wanted to expand the movement beyond the white, middle-class housewives of its early days — those inspired by “The Feminine Mystique” — to include younger women, working women and women of color, as well as lesbians and other marginalized groups.

Ms. Friedan saw the focus on sexual politics as a distraction and famously warned that including lesbians (the “lavender menace”) threatened the movement’s goal of achieving mainstream acceptance. (She later supported lesbian rights.)

But the real tension between them was personal. Ms. Friedan, 13 years older and widely acknowledged as the “mother” of second-wave feminism (the first wave was driven by suffrage), was being eclipsed by the more popular and photogenic Ms. Steinem, a media darling, and Ms. Friedan resented it.

“There is more than one voice in this movement,” Ms. Friedan said icily at one point. She began attacking Ms. Steinem publicly, calling her a feminist “chauvinist,” accusing her of trying to profit from the movement and dismissing her abilities, saying: “The media tried to make her a celebrity, but no one should mistake her for a leader.”

Ms. Steinem told HBO in 2011 that Ms. Friedan had resented “anybody who threatened her ownership of the movement.” Ms. Friedan, she said, “didn’t really identify down, she identified up,” ignoring the needs of poorer, working-class women.

Their souring relationship was examined by Nora Ephron in a 1972 essay in Esquire that depicted Ms. Friedan as unhinged by her jealousy of Ms. Steinem, to the point that she no longer cared how her animosity hurt the movement.

Ms. Ephron, squarely on Team Steinem, cast Ms. Friedan as being on the wrong side of history.

Gloria Marie Steinem was born in Toledo, Ohio, on March 25, 1934, the daughter of Leo and Ruth (Nuneviller) Steinem. Her free-spirited father, whom she adored, was a peripatetic antiques dealer, a big dreamer with no money.

“He was always going to make a movie, or cut a record, or start a new hotel, or come up with a new orange drink,” Ms. Steinem told Time magazine in 1969.

For years, the family spent summers in Clarklake, a tiny rural town in southern Michigan, where her father ran a small dance pavilion and booked musical acts. When fall came, they traveled to warmer climes in a house trailer, stopping in towns along the way while her father peddled antiques.

Ms. Steinem grew up an itinerant with no full year of formal schooling until sixth grade. She said she learned to read from road signs along the highway and buried herself in books.

Her mother had been one of the first female reporters and editors at The Blade of Toledo. She loved the work and had continued doing it for a decade after marriage — after all, someone had to pay the bills. She also had an affair, and then a nervous breakdown, became addicted to a sedative and spent two years in a sanitarium, all before Gloria was born.

When Gloria was about 10, her parents divorced, and her 19-year-old sister, Susanne, left for Smith College in Massachusetts. Gloria and her mother moved into a condemned farmhouse in East Toledo where Ruth had once lived. Gloria’s life was consumed by caring for her mother, by then a meek and fearful woman who was addicted to sodium thiopental. She was “an invalid,” Ms. Steinem later wrote, “who lay in bed with eyes closed and lips moving in occasional response to voices only she could hear; a woman to whom I brought an endless stream of toast and coffee, bologna sandwiches and dime pies.”

Gloria shopped, prepared meals and tended to Ruth for seven years, until her senior year of high school, when they sold the house, saving the money for Gloria’s college tuition. Gloria spent her senior year living with her sister in Washington, D.C., while Ruth went to California, where she was cared for by her ex-husband.

While Gloria’s formal education had been severely lacking, she compensated for it by devouring books and reveling in words and ideas. She followed in her sister’s footsteps to Smith (also Ms. Friedan’s alma mater), where she majored in government. She graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1956.

Caring for her mother shaped much of her life, consciously and otherwise. This included her decision not to rush from New York to her father’s side in California after he was in a serious car accident in 1961.

“I felt a cold stab of fear that if I went to California, I would become my father’s caretaker, as I had been my mother’s — and never come back to my own life,” she wrote in her memoir. By the time she realized he was dying, it was too late. “I will never stop wishing I had been with him,” she wrote.

Her dysfunctional youth — mothering her mother — also colored her view of marriage and children, both of which she viewed as a trap. That fear kept her from settling down. By her own estimate, she spent half of her life on the road for more than four decades.

She kept quiet about the trauma of her childhood for years. Given her upper-crust manner of speaking and precise diction, she sounded like a child of privilege; in fact, she lived in fear of hitting the skids at any moment.

“I had always worried that I might have inherited something,” she told The New Yorker. “That I’d start disappearing into the street in my nightgown, the way she had.”

To India and Back. During her senior year of college, Ms. Steinem planned to marry her boyfriend, but then decided against it. She would have been settling down and having children, she realized, only because that was what society expected.

She said in the 2026 interview that she saw marriage “not as a beginning but as an end”— an end to her identity, an end to whatever she might want to do with her life. She left her engagement ring under her fiancé’s pillow — “This was not an act of courage,” she said — and “fled,” in her words, to India in early 1957.

On her way, she stayed in London while awaiting her visa and discovered that she was pregnant. She managed to get an abortion. The alternative, she said, would have been going home, marrying the wrong person and living a life that wasn’t hers.

She was drawn to India, just a decade into its independence, by the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi. She had won a Chester Bowles Asian fellowship to study there, but she quickly abandoned her classes. Wearing a sari and carrying only a towel, a cup and a comb, she walked through southern India with followers of Gandhi, absorbing lessons about “talking circles” and grass-roots organizing.

After returning to the United States, she spent a year in Cambridge, Mass., as a director of the Independent Research Service, a nonprofit educational foundation that recruited and provided government support for American students to attend Communist-run youth festivals in Europe. The magazine Ramparts subsequently reported that the foundation had been partly funded by the Central Intelligence Agency, and Ms. Steinem came under criticism from the left. She dismissed the entire venture as harmless, telling The Times in 2016 that no one in the C.I.A. had ever told her what to do or say and that she had never reported to the agency.

She moved to New York in 1960 and began working as a freelance journalist. At the time, women were not taken seriously as writers; she wanted to cover politics but was stuck with celebrity profiles and fashion.

Still, she was prolific. Her articles appeared in Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Family Circle and Life, among other magazines. She was a contributing editor at Glamour and New York.

As her profile rose and she became increasingly visible, she wrestled with an unexpected problem: an almost pathological fear of public speaking. She dreaded standing at a podium alone, afraid that her mouth would go dry. Her solution was to bring speaking partners with her. One was Dorothy Pitman Hughes, a forceful activist who ran a child-care center and expounded on issues of race, class and motherhood in roiling debates about feminism. A 1971 photograph of the two, their fists raised in solidarity, became an iconic image of the era.

At the same time, Ms. Steinem moved comfortably in the sophisticated milieu of New York’s intelligentsia and dated powerful men. In addition to New York stars like Mr. Nichols, Mr. Zuckerman and Mr. Thomas, they included J. Stanley Pottinger, a prominent civil rights lawyer in the Nixon and Ford administrations. Most remained her devoted friends and public supporters long after the romances faded.

In 2000, Ms. Steinem overlooked her antipathy toward marriage and wed David Bale, a social justice activist born in South Africa (and the father of the actor Christian Bale). She was 66. She initially denied rumors that she had married him because he needed a green card, but years later conceded that this had been the case. The marriage lasted for three years before he died in 2003, at 62, from brain lymphoma.

Ms. Steinem had faced her own recurring battle with cancer (breast), starting in 1986, after which she suffered from total exhaustion and depression and underwent psychoanalysis. She then spent several years writing and rewriting “Revolution From Within: A Book of Self Esteem.”

It was her first long public look at herself, and it disappointed some feminists, who saw her introspection as a retreat from much-needed social activism. The writer and editor Deirdre English, reviewing it for The New York Times Book Review, wrote: “The strategic vision of social revolution here has all but been replaced with a model of personal recovery.”

Interviewers were nonplused that a woman as seemingly self-confident and purposeful in public as Ms. Steinem was beset by a lack of self-esteem.

“I was a neglected child, so I guess I didn’t think I existed,” she explained to the BBC. “And if you’re treated badly, you come to feel you’re a bad person, and to some extent, even a very good thing like being a social activist can be a drug, you know, that keeps you from going back and looking at yourself. You keep trying to fill up this emptiness, which, of course, can’t be filled up with anything external.”

“Revolution From Within” wasn’t the only time that she disappointed her natural allies.

Over the years, her defense of Bill and Hillary Clinton landed her in political hot water. In an opinion column in The Times in 1998, she defended President Clinton against numerous sexual allegations, saying that his advances toward various women had not been unwelcome or coercive.

She enraged many again during the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries, when she said in a television interview that young women were supporting Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont over Mrs. Clinton because “when you’re young, you’re thinking, ‘Where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie.’” She eventually apologized and said she had misspoken.

Writing and Organizing. Ms. Steinem devoted much of her life to writing. One of her best sellers was “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions” (1983), her first collection of essays. Other books included “Marilyn: Norma Jean” (1986), a sympathetic portrait of Marilyn Monroe, whom she found fascinating in her vulnerability and complexity, and “Doing Sixty and Seventy” (2006), a reflection on women and aging.

She hated wasting time and rarely did. Having cared for her mother for so long, she said, she felt a compulsive need to be useful. But as a writer, she said, she should have challenged herself more.

“I continued for too long to do things that I already knew how to do,” she told HBO. “Or to write stories that I was assigned instead of fighting for stories that I couldn’t get, or doing ones that I thought were important on my own. The wasting of time is the thing I worry about the most. Because time is all there is.”

But writing, she knew, was not a waste of time. “Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else,” she said.

She spent a great deal of time tending to Ms. magazine. It reached its peak circulation in 1989, with 540,000 subscribers, but its finances were constantly in peril, and it went through a series of owners. In less than a decade, its circulation fell to 200,000, and the owner threatened to close it.

That was more than Ms. Steinem could bear. Cobbling together a group of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, she formed Liberty Media for Women, which acquired Ms. for $3 million. In 2001, the Feminist Majority Foundation took over and kept the magazine alive, though its influence — and its brand of feminism — had waned significantly; the magazine now publishes quarterly.

Over time, Ms. Steinem traveled less, and her apartment became more of a home. For years, it was simply a place where she dropped her suitcase. But after she acquired another floor in the brownstone, she brought in comfortable furniture, painted the walls a deep, warm yellow and festooned the space with accent pillows. She covered nearly every available inch with framed photographs, posters and memorabilia, making her walls a showcase of a life spent on the front lines of the women’s movement. Architectural Digest published a feature on her home in 2024.

“Gradually, the rooms that I had used mostly as an office and a closet were filled with things that gave me pleasure,” she wrote in her memoir. “I had a kitchen that worked, a real desk to spread papers on, and a welcoming room where visiting friends could stay, something I’d always wanted as a child when I was living with my mother in places too sad to invite anyone.”

Ms. Steinem is survived by what she called her “chosen family” — her close friends. Her mother died in 1981, and her sister, Susanne Steinem Patch, in 2007.

Her home is part of her permanent legacy. Ms. Steinem put it in a trust with Gloria’s Foundation, which acquired another floor of the brownstone, so that women could continue to meet, organize, write and stage “talking circles” there, as Ms. Steinem often did. The foundation’s website says that the home and its contents will remain “a living organ of the feminist movement.”

That movement was repeatedly declared passé during Ms. Steinem’s lifetime. Nevertheless, she persisted.

“At my age, in this still hierarchical time, people often ask me if I’m ‘passing the torch,’” she wrote in “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions.” “I explain that I’m keeping my torch, thank you very much — and I’m using it to light the torches of others.”

Images. (L) Cover of the inaugural issue of Ms. Magazine, 1971 (Smithsonian); Ms. Steinem (AARP).

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By Cassandra Ensberg /FAIA Architect, LEED AP

With the city of Santa Barbara facing depleted reserves, persistent budget pressures and an increasingly expensive vision for State Street, the City Council has a choice: double down on a costly plan the city cannot afford or embrace a simpler path toward financial recovery, downtown revitalization, and much-needed housing.

Yes, there is a way out of this mess - it is easier than one might imagine - the Deus Ex Machina Moment!

Before the easy answer – let us start with a few key points:

1. A healthy balanced budget is not just a good idea, it is vital! And, yet, in this year’s budget review hearings, all except three elected officials (Mayor Randy Rowse and Councilmen Eric Friedman and Mike Jordan) somehow “went blank” and approved reserves to be used to balance the budget. The entire contingency reserve was depleted and $6 million of emergency reserves were tapped into. So now is time we all pray that El Niño shows up late and treats us kindly.

2. Affordable housing is, and must be, a top priority – but, with insufficient funds, it is pretty hard to justify contributions to the Local Housing Trust Fund, even though it is needed.

3. Possibly interesting, but the nonessential State Street Master Plan studies to change our once amazing Central Business District / El Pueblo Viejo has cost somewhere north of $2 million for consultants, experiments, and years of time by staff, council, and others. And an additional $92,000 was just recently approved to cover a Master Plan cost overrun (another split council vote).

4. Temporary closure of our main street is one thing, multi-year “lock down” is something else and has resulted in a dysfunctional Public Right of Way as follows:

a. Loss of customers = Loss of sales for businesses and tax revenue for the city.

b. Altered flow limited customer visibility and access that benefitted some businesses at the expense of others

c. Access for all was reduced without proper Americans with Disabilities Act compliant accessible public transit, i.e. municipal buses

d. Loss of community parades, loss of overall attractiveness and quality, drop in property values, and general degradation of the cherished El Pueblo Viejo Historic District.

e. Broad community frustration by citizens and businesses feeling ignored, sidelined, and abandoned by a majority of city leaders who could not or would not consider or recognize that prompt reopening of the street is the simplest cost- effective solution to restore essential access for use of the Public Right of Way and for businesses to recover from six years of shut down. Adding to the frustration is that there is no opposition to possible changes to State Street once fully designed, funded and approved.

‘City Council will meet at 2 p.m. Tuesday (Sept. 1) with the ninth agenda item being the adoption of the final State Street Master Plan and an amendment of Title 31 of the Municipal Code. City administrator Kelly McAdoo and city master planner Tess Harris are recommending, essentially to:

• Approve changes to State Street estimated to cost $96 million. Could it be more?

• Remove the sunset clause in Title 31 section of the city ordinance to make the temporary conditions of State Street permanent.

This is time and cost we cannot afford right now.

A common sense proposal. I believe the ridiculously simple solution and responsible action that would make (almost) everyone grateful and able to breathe again, is to pass over the (directed by council) staff recommendations and move swiftly to restore and recover:

• Allow Title 31 to lapse and promptly reopen State Street as the most fair and best option for the city and our businesses financial recovery. Graciously accept and thank the community member who previously offered to cover the cost to slurry and stripe the street.

• Focus on realization of housing in the Central Business District - direct Master Plan work to focus exclusively on a simple less costly Storm Water Management solution and identify and develop a plan for utility upgrade requirements.

Cass Ensberg is a Santa Barbara architect, artist and co-founder of Ensberg Jacobs Design, a full service architectural firm. She serves on the city's Historic Landmarks Commission and founded the Kids Draw Architecture youth program.

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(Editor’s note: Along with our singular coverage of Santa Barbara, Newsmakers periodically re-publishes high-quality, pro-democracy journalism from around the internets. Today we’re presenting Jamelle Bouie’s analysis of recent, complex legal action surrounding Donald Trump’s bid to disrupt the midterm elections. /jr).

By Jamelle Bouie /The New York Times

So far, the president’s plot to subvert the integrity of the midterm elections looks like this.

Issue a rule requiring states to give lists of mail-in voters to the Postal Service if their citizens hope to receive mail-in ballots. Knowing that this is a blatantly unconstitutional seizure of the states’ prerogative to run their own elections, count on a federal court to block the rule.

Then challenge the injunction, arguing — under the Supreme Court’s “Purcell principle” — that it is too late to make any adjustments to voting procedures, and that the new rules should be treated as the status quo. Then hope that the Supreme Court accepts the argument that the new rules are the status quo and therefore can’t be blocked.

This would leave states that rely on mail-in voting scrambling to accommodate the new rules, leading to the kind of chaos that might keep voters from casting a ballot in the first place. And in states that reject the rules, the administration can tar the results as fraudulent.

None of this would stop the public from electing a Democratic majority, but it could give that majority the taint of illegitimacy — and even tee up a situation where new members are challenged in the next session.

It is important to say that there is no way to know, at this point, if any of this will actually work in the end. But it clearly is the plan.

To wit, last week the Supreme Court paused a lower court injunction on the proposed ballot rule, writing that it had not been formally issued yet by the U.S.P.S., so the states that sued could not demonstrate harm.

Since then, the Postal Service has issued its rule and a Federal District Court has issued a temporary restraining order, blocking implementation. The administration has appealed this decision, and the Supreme Court is set to hear the case on the merits in a number of weeks, if not days.

From there, the court will have to decide whether it will follow the Constitution — which clearly leaves election administration to the states, unless Congress intervenes — or contrive again to contort the law and give the president a win, allowing him to pursue his irrational crusade against mail-in voting and giving him the tools — if not to sabotage the midterms outright — then to create chaos and disruption.

I would not put much faith in the Supreme Court, but we’ll see what happens.

The big picture. The details of what is happening here are important — that’s why I laid them out — but it’s also important to step back and make a more fundamental point: the president of the United States is engaged in a conspiracy against the voting rights of the American people, which is to say that the president is engaged in a conspiracy against the Constitution itself.

And this is part of a larger effort, spearheaded by the most fanatical of his allies, like Stephen Miller, to end the American republic and supplant it with an authoritarian regime in which President Trump holds sovereign authority over the whole nation.

It is important to say, as well, that this is all out in the open, as plain as day.

Life under Trump during his second term is defined by the aggressive use of unaccountable executive power, from illegal taxes — in the form of tariffs — and wars to the military occupation of American cities and a roaming deportation force used to terrorize entire communities.

Thousands of people have been kidnapped in the street and whisked away to squalid detention centers, where dozens have died. Many thousands more, including some American citizens, have been deported, sometimes to countries they’ve never seen or visited in their lives.

The president has wielded his power against colleges and universities in a concerted effort to destroy the nation’s capacity for scientific research and weaken any institution capable of generating independent knowledge.

The administration continues to assault the First Amendment: both the freedom of assembly and the freedom of the press. Not a single member of this White House appears to believe in the public’s First Amendment rights or in its right to choose its own political leadership.

The attitude of the president and his advisers is that the 2024 election was an enabling act for a constitutional revolution, in which rule by the people was replaced by the Führerprinzip.

That the intent is clear does not mean it is the reality on the ground.

I believe Trump has failed to accomplish authoritarian consolidation. But he has ripped an enormously damaging Trump-size hole in the constitutional order, and a future president with autocratic designs will have every tool he needs to push the envelope even further.

That’s why, should Democrats capture a majority, they must make the reconstruction of the American political order their first priority. That includes an impeachment trial against President Trump, if only to emphasize the gravity of his conspiracy against the Constitution.

Americans hate the idea of looking back. But we have to if we want any hope of moving forward.

Times columnist Jamelle Bouie writes about current events from an historical context. Subscribe to his newsletter here. Reprinted via gift subscription from Aug. 29, 2026 edition of the New York Times.

Image: Photo illustration by Democracy Docket.

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Electrical contractor Jason Carlton ran for Santa Barbara City Council in 2021, finishing third in a four-way race with 9.67 percent of the total vote.

This time, the small business owner says, he’s certain the results will be different.

“I plan on winning this time,” Carlton said in a Newsmakers interview. “I have a game plan. I have people behind me this time. I have the data points (showing) people that vote and don’t vote. And I have a younger group of people out there that are excited to have somebody that sees their views.”

Campaigning with a few specifics — an expansive system of automatic bollards as a panacea to fix State Street, for example — and a healthy dose of political bromides — “we need to find a way to invite businesses downtown” — the 52-year-old Carlton has joined the four-way race to replace the termed-out Meagan Harmon in City Council District 6, representing downtown, Oak Park and nearby neighborhoods.

State of play. His path to victory is uncertain in a crowded if wide-open field that includes Democratic Party favorite Gabe Escobedo, financial services professional Anabella Lehne and realtor Alexander Stoeber.

What differentiates him from the others, he said, is his “real world sense.”

“Being a small business owner, I understand what it takes to make all these numbers work because I’m signing the front of the check, not the back,” he said. “A real world sense - I have real world skills here. I’ve worked in the trades forever. I understand how construction works. I understand how our roads can be made. I can understand how things get put together and the order they need to be in so we can save money, real money.”

He learned from his last campaign, Carlton added.

“What I realized the last run is that money was everything about…locking down the seat. Policy is definitely part of it, but it seemed like the individual that had the most money, basically they won,” he said.

“And I would like to see if we can raise more money this time, but bring it back to a grassroots campaign, where I have more locals and residents supporting me, because I think that the City Council is basically the interface between the city and the public, and there seems to be a lack of communication between the two,” he added.

In our conversation, Carlton spoke in detail about what he sees as opportunities to construct low-cost housing by building on city-owned property, and offered a biting critique of the Community Development Department’s processes.

“It’s gotten worse,” he said. “The prices of the permits and everything goes up, and then your access to get to the city has gone down. So they used to be open five days a week. Monday through Friday, it was eight to five o’clock. Now they’re open Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday to 12, and then Thursday to five, and then they’re closed every Friday.

“So again, for lack of a better term, this is what a bankruptcy company looks like - where the cost is going up and the service is going down,” he added.

On the issues. In the Nov. 3 election, the balance of power at City Hall is on the ballot, amid races to replace retiring Mayor Randy Rowse and three termed-out neighborhood district representatives on the seven-member council. Our conversation with Carlton is the latest in a summer-long series Newsmakers is doing with candidates for council and mayor. In the interviews, we ask the candidates for their views on four key issues.

Here’s a glimpse at what Carlton had to say about them, lightly edited for clarity.

Rent control. “I would vote against it…because the tailside of this is, if a landlord can’t get their value out of the property, they’re not going to put money into it. So you basically create a situation where you take these properties, and they could be beautiful one year and because you’re on rent control, they can only raise the rent so much, so they stop putting money into it. And so there is a side effect to rent control…I haven’t seen it work in California yet.”

State Street. “So my immediate answer is we need to clean it. We need to light it. We need to make it safe. We need to patrol it. Without that, nothing else matters. I mean, you can’t say we have a walking promenade when you have an e-bike going 25 miles an hour down the middle of it doing wheelies. So I think that that situation needs to be handled first…What I see in Europe all over the place when we go, we’ve gone to Italy, France, we just came back from Barcelona, is a automatic bollard system. And the thing I love about this bollard system, and we watched it happen…Taxi pulls up, the bollard drops, the guy goes in, picks up his client and drives back out. It goes effortlessly.”

Budget. “I can’t attest to what I don’t know because I’m not in financing. I think that there should be an audit of our finances and find out what we’re spending and where we can make cuts. I think it’s a combination in spending and revenue issues.”

Ranked choice voting. “I like the idea… I’ve always said between the two parties, I always feel like I’m voting for the lesser of two evils. And so I had four or five choices and I could rank choice…start with my favorite and still realize I’m still voting for somebody I like even if the person at the top didn’t win.”

Check out our conversation with Jason Carlton via YouTube below or by clicking this link. Our podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, or on SoundCloud. TVSB, Channel 17, airs the show every weeknight at 5 p.m. and at 9 a.m. on weekends. KCSB, 91.9 FM, broadcasts the program at 5:30 p.m. on weekends.

Newsmakers’ Candidate Conversations. To offer Santa Barbara voters early introductions to contenders for four City Council seats, including Mayor, in the Nov. 3 election, Newsmakers is publishing one-on-one interviews with the candidates over the summer. Here is a guide to the interviews.

Mayor

• Eric Friedman, candidate for Mayor, June 28.

• Wendy Sims-Moten, candidate for Mayor, Aug. 13.

• Kristen Sneddon, candidate for Mayor, Aug. 17.

District 4

• Monte Wilson, candidate for District 4 council seat, June 23.

• Jason Dominguez, candidate for District 4, July 6

• Genevieve Taft-Vazquez, candidate for District 4, July 16.

• Devon Wardlow, candidate for District 4, July 21.

District 5

• Cevin Cathell, candidate for District 5, July 23.

• Ian Baucke, candidate for District 5, July 26.

• James Zurlinden, candidate for District 5, Aug. 3.

District 6

• Gabe Escobedo, candidate for District 6, July 13.

• Alexander Stoeber candidate for District 6, Aug. 3.

• Anabella Lehne, candidate for District 6, Aug. 26.

• Jason Carlton, candidate for District 6, Aug. 28.

The tragic death of an English bulldog puppy in a wading pool at an Eastside doggie day care last month raised questions about the care and supervision provided to pets at the facility.

Now bigger questions suddenly have emerged about whether the facility should have been operating at all.

On a new episode of Newsmakers TV, News-Press reporter Kaitlin Sweeney returns to discuss details of her investigative reporting about permit documents for Santa Barbara’s Camp Canine, amid lingering questions about what city officials knew — and when they knew it — concerning the outfit.

Ryan P. Cruz breaks down the big fight over Santa Barbara’s automated license plate reader program, as serious concerns for public safety clash with big questions about data breaches and privacy — and whether federal immigration officials could obtain the data from City Hall’s now-former vendor.

Sofia Wallace has the scoop on a big real estate sale in Goleta, where an L.A. firm paid $11.2 million to purchase Old Town’s Kellogg Square retail center, leaving residents and small business owners asking what’s next — at a time when hundreds of new housing units are being built or are in the pipeline.

And Josh Molina has the latest from the campaign trail, as races for Santa Barbara mayor and city council heat up — with questions being raised in District 5 about front-runner Ian Baucke’s employment with state Senate President pro Tempore Monique Limón, and whether it passes the smell test for him to keep the government patronage gig if he wins election.

Plus: Four cheers for the return of flag football season, hurrah, hurrah …

Check out the latest episode of Newsmakers TV via YouTube below or by clicking this link. Our podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, or on SoundCloud. TVSB, Channel 17, airs the show every weeknight at 5 p.m. and at 9 a.m. on weekends. KCSB, 91.9 FM, broadcasts the program at 5:30 p.m. on weekends.

Image. R.I.P. Bruce (Santa Barbara News-Press).

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Born and raised in Santa Barbara, Anabella Lehne brings a poignant and powerful origin story to her upstart campaign for City Council.

A proud child of immigrants, the 43-year old Lehne was raised by a single mom, became a teen mom and a hockey mom, then refashioned herself over the years as a teacher, a law student and a family caregiver — before establishing a career as a small business operator who runs her own notary and financial services enterprise.

As of Aug. 17, she was officially certified as a candidate for the District 6 council race, a wide-open, four-way contest to replace the termed-out Meagan Harmon in representing downtown, Oak Park and nearby neighborhoods — a constituency that has the highest percentage of renters and the lowest rate of homeownership among the council’s six districts.

A close friend and ally of former council member Alejandra Gutierrez, Lehne (pronounced LEH-nay) in a Newsmakers interview offered a sharp critique of the incumbent council’s push for rent control, called for at least part of the eight-block State Street “promenade” to be opened to cars, and promised to bring a professional’s gimlet-eyed perspective to troubled city finances.

“I need to make some change,” she said when asked to explain why she decided to run for council in District 6. “So I’m not going to sit on the couch and just watch these things happen. I want to be part of it.”

“I grew up in District 6. I had my daughter from high school in District 6 — I’m your local,” Lehne added. “So if you want local, you want us to keep it Santa Barbara, hire me.”

Rent control conundrum. As a practical matter, one big challenge Lehne faces is convincing district voters — about 80 percent of whom are renters — that she would best represent their interests, despite her opposition to rent control in general and the rent stabilization ordinance now on offer at City Hall in particular.

She said that helping working-class families afford to stay and put down roots in Santa Barbara is a top priority of her campaign — but she fundamentally disagrees that rent control is an effective solution to achieving that goal. Government regulation of the market, she added, will work to constrict supply at a time when City Hall should move more vigorously to find ways to make it easier to build more housing.

“Santa Barbara will never stop being beautiful, but it’s also an expensive place and it’s not going to get any cheaper,” she said. “And I feel that … we don’t need to accept our families being pushed out, our small businesses being closed down. We need to focus on leadership that can focus on things that we can actually get done.”

“I am all for tenants — I’m a tenant myself — but we need to look at supply and demand,” Lehne told Newsmakers. “And if we are not motivating developers to make space for all of us who are already here, we will have less housing to go to.

“So let’s say my 18-year-old son at home eventually wants to leave the house and find an apartment. If there are no apartments, what happens? Next door normally would have been maybe a $2,000 apartment, but now because of the rent cap, no one is moving and no more buildings are being built. No more available space — of course that landlord is going to charge maybe $4,000.”

State of play. In the District 6 race, school board member Gabe Escobedo is the presumed front-runner, both because of his years of experience working on city issues and the organizational resources that come from his Democratic Party endorsement. His fundraising has lagged, however, as realtor Alexander Stoeber recently reported several major campaign contributions, and the fourth candidate in the race, electrician Jason Carlton, brings experience from having run previously.

Asked what differentiates her candidacy, Lehne responded, “I am born and raised here in Santa Barbara.

“I have had my entire life here volunteering and working here — I don’t plan to leave. I plan to stay here forever. So with that love and care, I do believe that people will see that I have the best interest of Santa Barbara in my heart,” Lehne said.

“Maybe people from out of town come in with other interests, to push to get onto bigger things outside Santa Barbara,” she added, an apparent indirect swipe at Escobedo, who grew up in San Bernardino County, settled here after college at UCSB and has made no secret of his desire to climb the local political ladder.

“I don’t want Santa Barbara to be used as a stepping stone. It shouldn’t be political. It should be, honestly, your neighbor on the city council,” Lehne said. “It shouldn’t be backed by any party.”

On the issues. In the Nov. 3 election, the balance of power at City Hall is on the ballot, amid races to replace retiring Mayor Randy Rowse and three termed-out neighborhood district representatives on the seven-member council. Our conversation with Lehne is the latest in a summer-long series Newsmakers is doing with candidates for council and mayor. In the interviews, we ask the candidates for their views on four key issues.

Here’s a glimpse at what Lehne had to say about them, lightly edited for clarity.

Rent control. “I do want to see protections for all of us. I do see the injustice, and I do see and hear … and it’s horrifying what some landlords have us go through, but I really doubt and question whether this ordinance is actually going to solve the problems and issues that we have as tenants … One issue with the ordinance is that we would have to have all our information in a database — safety with our information is a great concern to me … And on top of that are the startup costs … I’m terrified to hear what that is, and why are they not disclosing that? There shouldn’t be any hidden fees here. We should know what the fees are. If we go into this — while I definitely want tenant protections — what is the startup cost? Why do they keep dancing around that question?”

State Street. “As a local, I definitely do remember — it’s funny, because some people who are not from Santa Barbara say, ‘Oh, there’s no such thing as people just driving down State Street and looking at stores and saying, “Oh, I want to go there.” That doesn’t happen. You have to walk it all.’ Well, excuse me, that’s actually what we used to do back in the ‘90s. We used to go and cruise up and down State Street … That definitely was a culture here in Santa Barbara. Driving up and down State … I definitely miss it being open, so I agree with (mayoral candidate and council member Eric) Friedman, to have a smaller section be closed (to traffic).”

Budget. “I feel that we have been overspending. Our reserves — we’ve been touching them when we shouldn’t have been … So I feel that we need to be very careful with our future spending and make sure that we stay within what we can afford … I know some consultants and they’re very successful and very wealthy people, very amazing people, but I do feel that we could cut (consulting contracts). That is a very big cost, and we keep hiring consultants and not seeing results, or taking months to years with these consultants. So I know they have a lot to say and a lot of great input at times, but a lot of them don’t even come from Santa Barbara, so their studies are from bigger cities — or they don’t really have that love and care for our town. So if anything, we could probably find consultants at a better cost, or even just use our own resources and be our own consultants.”

Ranked-choice voting. “If it came with time (to consider details) and the cost was right — if we can afford it, why not? Let’s do it. I feel that that’s a great way to have people’s voices be heard.”

Check out our conversation with Anabella Lehne via YouTube below or by clicking this link. Our podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, or on SoundCloud. TVSB, Channel 17, airs the show every weeknight at 5 p.m. and at 9 a.m. on weekends. KCSB, 91.9 FM, broadcasts the program at 5:30 p.m. on weekends.

Newsmakers’ Candidate Conversations. To offer Santa Barbara voters early introductions to contenders for four City Council seats, including Mayor, in the Nov. 3 election, Newsmakers is publishing one-on-one interviews with the candidates over the summer. Upcoming interviews include council candidate Jason Carlton. Here is who we’ve spoken with to date:

Mayor

• Eric Friedman, candidate for Mayor, June 28.

• Wendy Sims-Moten, candidate for Mayor, Aug. 13.

• Kristen Sneddon, candidate for Mayor, Aug. 17.

District 4

• Monte Wilson, candidate for District 4 council seat, June 23.

• Jason Dominguez, candidate for District 4, July 6

• Genevieve Taft-Vazquez, candidate for District 4, July 16.

• Devon Wardlow, candidate for District 4, July 21.

District 5

• Cevin Cathell, candidate for District 5, July 23.

• Ian Baucke, candidate for District 5, July 26.

• James Zurlinden, candidate for District 5, Aug. 3.

District 6

• Gabe Escobedo, candidate for District 6, July 13.

• Alexander Stoeber candidate for District 6, Aug. 3.

• Anabella Lehne, candidate for District 6, Aug. 26.

The first major debate of the Santa Barbara mayor’s race is set for next week, as City Council members Eric Friedman and Kristen Sneddon and former school board president Wendy Sims-Moten face off at the New Vic Theatre.

The event marks the start of a 60-day sprint to the Nov. 3 election, as the mayoral contenders — along with 11 other candidates competing for three neighborhood district seats — will shape the new balance of power on the seven-member council.

Voters who would like to attend the mayoral forum, scheduled for 6–8 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 3, may reserve free tickets here. The event is co-sponsored by the News-Press, Newsmakers and TV Santa Barbara. TVSB will record the debate for later broadcast on Channel 17, and it also will be available on our YouTube channel.

News-Press editor Josh Molina and I will co-moderate the event and pose questions to the candidates. We’ll be asking about some of the key controversies facing the city — rent control, the future of State Street and city finances, among them — and if you have inquiries about other issues that concern you, please email them to us at newsmakerswithjr@gmail.com and we’ll do our best to include them.

In recent weeks, Newsmakers interviewed all three leading candidates for mayor — the only council office elected citywide — and you can watch or listen to those conversations here:

• Eric Friedman (6-28-26)

• Wendy Sims-Moten (8-13-26)

• Kristen Sneddon (8-16-26)

You can also find our interviews with most of the candidates running in Districts 4, 5 and 6 here:

District 4

• Monte Wilson, candidate for District 4 council seat, June 23

• Jason Dominguez, candidate for District 4, July 6

• Genevieve Taft-Vazquez, candidate for District 4, July 16

• Devon Wardlow, candidate for District 4, July 21

District 5

• Cevin Cathell, candidate for District 5, July 23

• Ian Baucke, candidate for District 5, July 26

• James Zurlinden, candidate for District 5, Aug. 3

District 6

• Gabe Escobedo, candidate for District 6, July 13

• Alexander Stoeber, candidate for District 6, Aug. 3

We’ll be speaking with the remaining candidates who will appear on the ballot soon.

Image: (L-R) Sims-Moten, Friedman, Sneddon.

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By Adrian Carrasquillo /The Bulwark

ICE’s new investment - a purchase of thousands of electric-shock gloves—sounds like something out of a dystopian movie. And it turns out that the likely logic behind the purchase is disturbing.

According to an acquisition-planning form published by the Department of Homeland Security last week, ICE is purchasing what it calls “a Conductive Distraction and De-escalation Device.” In reality, they’re wearable tasers.

While immigration czar Tom Homan emphasizes that the gloves—cartoonishly called “Generated Low Output Voltage Emitters” or “G.L.O.V.E.s”—will reduce the need for ICE agents to use lethal violence, critics already suggest the move is actually more about optics and what agents can get away with.

More discreet than a taser or a gun, the gloves are ideal weapons for the age of social media video. There’s no swing, no jab—just the laying on of hands. Agents will be able to use the devices to shock whomever they deem “disorderly” with less risk of being the subject of the type of video that goes viral or results in messy lawsuits.

The weapon’s manufacturer calls it an “invisible partner.”

Compliant Technologies, the company that makes the gloves, pitches itself as an alternative to lethal violence. “By providing non-lethal alternatives, we aim to create a safer world for everyone involved,” the company’s website reads. “We believe this technology can lower liability, lessen risk, and create a more amiable atmosphere for the general population and those who protect and serve us.”

This peaceful image is undercut by the site’s visual of a powerful electric current flowing behind the gloves, looking like the aftereffect of Thor charging up in an Avengers movie.

Homan seems to agree with their de-escalatory claims. “It’s another device to help someone get compliant when they are not,” Homan told Fox & Friends last week. “You can’t just go from zero to one hundred, right, and the first thing you go for is lethal force.”

ICE’s planned purchase is between $10 million and $20 million, which, at the rate the Omaha Police Department¹ was quoted by Compliant Technologies for the same model last year, could put well over 12,000 gloves in and on the hands of ICE agents.²

Jason Houser, who served as ICE chief of staff in the Biden administration and still maintains connections within DHS, told me he believes the gloves will be in use on the street before the end of the year, and agents will be using them in field training. A senior DHS official told NBC News they expect ICE to have the gloves in a little over a month.

“All this buying capability when officers aren’t trained to use these tools is very dangerous for the officers and the public,” Houser told me. “I know these tools from . . . when they were pitching them to us, and if you put your hands directly on their chest or certain body parts, in a situation where you’re putting your hands on an individual, they can be extremely dangerous.”

Deconstructing ICE claims. Let’s sort out some of ICE’s claims here, starting with the idea that the gloves are de-escalatory. What does that mean in the context of how ICE operates?

Compliant Technologies promises conductive distraction and de-escalation devices “within the Force Continuum to supplement existing tools” of clients such as ICE. A force continuum is a framework that describes an “escalating series of actions an officer may take to resolve a situation.” Strictly speaking, according to ICE’s “Firearms and Use of Force” directive, issued in late May, the glove should be used at the fourth stage of their continuum, “Hard Techniques,” to prevent the confrontation from reaching the fifth, “Deadly Force.”

ICE’s use-of-force guideline states:

Authorized Officers may use force, including intermediate force, only when no reasonably effective, safe, and feasible alternative appears to exist and use only the level of force that is objectively reasonable in light of the totality of facts and circumstances confronting the Authorized Officer at the time force is applied.

And they are allowed to use weapons like these only when empty-handed techniques are not enough to “bring a disorderly or violent subject under control.”

So much for ICE’s rules as written. But the obvious question here, given ICE’s track record over the last year and a half, is: Can an agency that deploys undervetted, overly aggressive agents and lies about its involvement in the deaths of both immigrants and U.S. citizens be trusted to deploy a weapon that leaves no physical trace? After watching David Brouillette, a violent ICE agent who never should have had a gun, kill Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine, does anyone believe the best of the best will be receiving and using these devices?

In ugly and sometimes deadly incidents, ICE agents and other DHS personnel have repeatedly failed to demonstrate the type of training and judgment that the G.L.O.V.E. user manual is clear the devices require:

The red “warning” label, the manual explains, means the instructions “May result in injury or death if not followed or observed.”

Some of these instructions, straight from the manual, include:

The G.L.O.V.E. SHALL NOT be deployed for any of the following:

• Verbal defiance or belligerence

• Punishment

• Torture. . . .

Avoid using the G.L.O.V.E. against certain portions of the population to include:

• The elderly

• Small children

• Pregnant women

• The severely handicapped

ICE’s track record. Again, given the agency’s track record, it’s hard to believe that ICE personnel will diligently follow these warnings—that they will recognize someone too old to be shocked, or people with underlying health conditions, or in mental distress, or even in the early stages of pregnancy.

And it is all too easy to imagine ICE agents exceeding Compliant Technologies’ instructions that “no more than two . . . G.L.O.V.E. devices should be applied at one time to a single subject” and for no more than 15 seconds.

Law enforcement departments that have started using these gloves have already seen some disturbing incidents. For example, there is a lawsuit underway in Kentucky where a man died after allegedly being shocked twenty-seven times by the gloves and thirteen times by a taser by correctional staff while in a Madison County jail. An internal investigation found two of the glove shocks lasted 99 seconds and 45 seconds each, vastly exceeding the recommended 15-second limit.

The Compliant Technologies manual for the G.L.O.V.E. says users “must be trained and qualified on this tool” and describes a “certification” that’s “good for two years.” Users who don’t go through the training and re-up it every two years will be “disqualif[ied] . . . from using the device” until they do so, as far as the company is concerned.

But while this sort of manufacturer’s requirement can be meaningful in liability disputes, a government agency’s own training requirements before deploying the device might be very different. Without seeing the exact language of ICE’s procurement contract, it’s impossible to know whether the agency agreed to abide by the company’s certification policy. ICE is reportedly still developing its own training protocols around the gloves.

Unanswered questions. There are still so many unanswered questions here: Will the gloves be used in ICE detention centers or on the streets or both? Will they be used only on targets accused of violent crime? Did Compliant Technologies lobby for the contract?³

But listen, don’t worry about any of that, suggests Homan.⁴

Again, when thinking about how this device will be used, we have to start with ICE’s track record. To borrow a phrase, past performance probably will be indicative of future results.

Kelly McCarthy, police chief of Mendota Heights, a small town in Minnesota, spoke to members of Congress earlier this year about federal agents’ lack of professionalism when they descended on Minneapolis.⁵ She told me she does not expect these gloves to de-escalate ICE confrontations.

“Any tool, it depends on who is using it, and I don’t think they have the trust of people to be asking for more money for this. Why would we trust you’re going to use this tool ethically when you don’t use others ethically?” she said.

Some ICE agents already carry tasers, which break the skin and override the nervous system with shocks of up to 50,000 volts. In February ICE outlined its request for a $220 million purchase of over 17,000 tasers (and unlimited cartridges) over five years, quadrupling its current stock of tasers. So what, actually, is the use case for these gloves?

McCarthy thinks she knows why ICE wants gloves rather than tasers.

“Tasers are much more evident in their use. If you shoot me with a taser, people will see it. There is limited use, the cartridges are expensive, they leave behind AFIDs [Anti-Felon Identification tags], which are numbers that correlate back to the taser so you can tell who used it.”

The stun gloves, however, leave behind no physical evidence. They do record data about their usage—but given ICE’s track record about, for instance, the use of bodycams, there’s little reason to expect the data about G.L.O.V.E. use to be rigorously maintained and released.

“If I knew they had these gloves, I wouldn’t even let them get close to me,” McCarthy said. “I don’t think they’re going to de-escalate. I think they’re going to escalate situations.”

The fight for civil rights. Democrats, civil rights groups, and immigration advocates say they plan to fight back against ICE’s deployment of the shock gloves with lawsuits.

While electric-shock gloves might seem inherently cruel and unusual (and on those grounds perhaps a violation of the Eighth Amendment), Karen Tumlin, the founder and director of the Justice Action Center, told me that it’s more likely litigation would focus on due process rights.

“You don’t need a law degree to know why this is bad, you just need to know what ICE has been doing in the last year and a half,” she told me. “If there ever was an agency that needs less force and less ability to use force in cruel ways—instead of more tools to inflict suffering—it is ICE.”

Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.) is working with civil and human rights groups like the Center for Victims of Torture, the ACLU, and Physicians for Human Rights, to open a congressional inquiry via a letter to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin next week, calling the gloves “a uniquely dangerous tool for unaccountable abuse.”

Ramirez, whose office previewed the letter to The Bulwark, will call on Mullin to cancel the contract and ban the use of the gloves. Outlining these policies could open DHS up to civil rights litigation, which is the goal of the groups.

“Using surveillance tech and tools of torture, DHS has already proven its capacity to perpetrate state-sanctioned abuse and arbitrary cruelty,” Ramirez told me. “All the more reason they should not possess devices with the power to inflict ‘sudden death,’” she said, citing the manual’s warning that the gloves could exacerbate the effects of underlying health conditions on their targets.

The news of the gloves led New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York Attorney General Letitia James last week to deem their use likely illegal and threaten future lawsuits should they be used on New Yorkers.

“That appears to me on its face to be a violation of civil rights to cause that kind of physical harm to an individual regardless of what the offense may be,” Hochul said, adding that laws the state passed this year would hold ICE agents accountable for violating constitutional rights.

James said she is reviewing ICE’s plans for the gloves and would prepare to sue.

“It appears to be arbitrary and capricious. It appears to be in violation of a number of laws including our Constitution, [and] the Administrative Procedure Act,” James said. “Of course we are outraged.”

Immigrant rights activists I spoke with said states don’t have to wait to legislate and litigate on the gloves, although they acknowledged that previous state laws relating to ICE—like the laws passed in California and a handful of other states requiring ICE agents to remove their masks—have done little to change the agency’s behavior.

Dystopian nature. A CONSTANT THEME in my conversations with ICE critics this week was the gloves’ dystopian nature.

“This kind of stuff does shock the conscience at a time when people are getting quite numb,” Chris Newman, the legal director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network and an attorney for Kilmar Ábrego García, told me. “Forget that the new ICE hires are the January 6th protesters, they’re clearly incompetent to begin with, and a selling point of these gloves is to help incompetent agents.”

But Newman also pointed out that purchases like this can be boondoggles. For-profit companies can and have shaped federal immigration laws and policies.

“Part of what has gone off the rails in the last twenty-five years is immigration policy has been made through procurement,” he added. “I drive along the border all the time here in San Diego; these guys are bursting at the seams with new squad cars and military gear.”

Whatever the case, these gloves continue ICE’s dehumanization of migrants, critics, and brown people generally, treating potential violators of a civil offense—unlawful presence in the United States—as criminals needing heavy-handed punishment.

“This is civil immigration enforcement. The vast majority of these people have lost TPS or legal status, and now they’re going to use these capabilities that the military would normally use against national security threats on them?” Houser said.

It keeps coming back to ICE’s obsession with doing whatever they want with zero accountability.

“It’s cruelty with a purchase order,” Murad Awawdeh, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition, told me. “Why does an agency that claims it has nothing to hide want a weapon that leaves no evidence?”

To the Editor,

I feel compelled to share with all this serendipitous image spotted while driving (that’s right!) from a city meeting at the David Gebhardt Room this week. How more accurately could our current reality be conveyed — “Caution, and good luck!”

P.S. please remember that driving downtown these days requires special knowledge, and is not recommended for visitors or anyone who hasn’t lived here over 40 years.

Sincerely,

Cassandra Ensberg /Artist, FAIA Architect, LEED AP

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As California’s public school population steadily declines, Santa Barbara Unified School District teachers welcomed their youthful scholars back this week with a concerted campaign to reduce the brain rot inflicted by tech devices.

Julianna Lozada covered back-to-school proceedings for the News-Press and joins the gang on a new episode of Newsmakers TV to reprise her reporting on the biggest challenges and initiatives facing the district — at a time when two of five school board seats are on the ballot, raising the stakes over education controversies and for the tenure of Superintendent Hilda Maldonado.

Nick Welsh, always a ray of sunshine on the local news beat, discusses his good-news story detailing how Santa Barbara is outpacing other counties around the state in providing crucial, publicly funded child care services, and also breaks down the fond farewell accorded the county’s outgoing Chief Executive Officer Mona Miyasato, who is departing amid a flood of other retirements by administrators representing decades of experience and institutional knowledge.

Josh Molina, who has been industriously interviewing the 876 candidates running for Santa Barbara mayor and city council, joins the Angry Poodle and the genial host for a spirited round of heavyweight punditry, just over two months before Election Day.

Plus: Nick’s mysterious disappearance from the Zoom shot; Josh’s unseemly bid to steal clicks from Newsmakers by using an actual professional podcast studio; Jerry’s unprecedented streak of not ranting about rent control or e-bikes reaches two.

All this and more, right here, right now, on Newsmakers TV.

Check out the latest episode via YouTube below or by clicking this link. Our podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, or on SoundCloud. TVSB, Channel 17, airs the show every weeknight at 5 p.m. and at 9 a.m. on weekends. KCSB, 91.9 FM, broadcasts the program at 5:30 p.m. on weekends.

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By Nora Wallace

On Monday, security police held five news reporters at gunpoint at Vandenberg Space Force Base, a violation of the spirit of the Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of the press.

I am absolutely incensed by this shameful spectacle, and it should outrage every citizen of Santa Barbara County who cares or is concerned by, the erosion of our sacred rights.

For 25 years as a Santa Barbara County reporter, Vandenberg was one of my primary beats. I drove through those gates countless times to cover launches, missile tests, ceremonies, accidents, wildfires, personnel changes and stories of national significance. I worked with Vandenberg Public Affairs and alongside several of the reporters and news organizations involved in what happened today.

According to an account by veteran Noozhawk reporter Janene Scully, journalists who had been invited to Vandenberg to cover a ceremony were traveling in a convoy behind a government vehicle carrying uniformed Public Affairs personnel.

They had identification. They had an escort. They were there because the military had asked them to be there.

Yet they ended up being held at gunpoint by military Security Police. When Janene called later and filled me in on what happened, I had to ask if she was joking. She absolutely was not.

Journalists are not the enemy. I understand perhaps better than most civilians that Vandenberg is not just another workplace. It is a classified military installation with extraordinarily important national security responsibilities. And given the state of the world right now, I absolutely understand the need for heightened vigilance and security.

But heightened security cannot become an excuse for a breakdown this serious.

Local journalists are not the enemy. They are professionals doing an increasingly difficult job --often with fewer people and fewer resources than ever -- because communities still deserve to know what is happening in the places where they live. Their work matters.

Reporters writing stories about or at Vandenberg routinely follow strict procedures to gain access and cover events. In the decades that I covered Vandenberg, no reporter that I know of ever disobeyed the rules to gain unauthorized access onto the restricted base.

The fact that young reporters at the beginning of their careers, veteran journalists and even military personnel could find themselves facing firearms while participating in an invited, escorted media event should concern every one of us.

It is an insult to the important role local media plays in our community.

A need for accountability. I hope there is a serious internal examination of how this happened, accountability for the breakdowns that allowed it to happen and assurances from base leadership that the journalists involved receive more than a shrug and an explanation that security comes first.

They deserve more than that for doing their jobs and trying to tell the story of Vandenberg’s national security role and its personnel.

And I hope the local media doesn’t just let this one go.

Lompoc resident Nora Wallace worked for 25 years as a reporter for the Santa Barbara News-Press.

Image: The gate at Vandenberg (KSBY).

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Kristen Sneddon, rejecting the maxim that Santa Barbara’s mayor is just a ribbon-cutting council member, says she would be a vocal and visible champion for the city, completing delayed projects and pushing back against the Trump administration.

Santa Barbara needs “a strong mayor in a weak mayor system,” the two-term council member said in an interview Sunday, implicitly criticizing retiring incumbent Mayor Randy Rowse as she asserted that the office has substantial unlocked potential — as a public bully pulpit, a hub of City Hall legislative strategy and a consensus-building clearinghouse for clashing community interests.

Sneddon told Newsmakers that most people believe Santa Barbara is headed in the right direction, based on her conversations with voters across the city, but want a mayor who will move ahead on “stalled out” projects like the State Street Master Plan and the endlessly debated rent stabilization ordinance — jabbing at chief rival and council colleague Eric Friedman for consistently voting with Rowse and blaming them for a lack of progress on bogged down city policies.

“People in Santa Barbara for the most part are happy with how things are, but they want to see motion, forward motion — they’re frustrated with how things get stalled out,” Sneddon said in her first in-depth interview of the campaign.

“In a weak mayor system, as we have, you need a strong mayor — a strong mayor who can make more of the position,” she added. “And I will say that it has not been fully embodied in the way that it could be.”

“I really believe that I’m the person for the moment right now,” Sneddon told Newsmakers.

Under Santa Barbara’s system of local government, the mayor is the only one of the seven city council members elected at large, with the others chosen in six neighborhood districts. Under the city’s “weak mayor” charter, it is City Administrator Kelly McAdoo, not elected officials, who wields direct power and authority over the bureaucracy and day-to-day management of more than 1,000 public employees and a total budget of $730 million.

But Sneddon said that as mayor she would be more assertive in working with the administrator, more collaborative in working closely with council colleagues about their concerns and legislative agendas, and more active in building community consensus by forming “a mayor’s cabinet of community members from different perspectives, different areas.”

“The mayor has the purview to set the agenda,” she said. “That is not something that has been done.”

State of play. Eleven weeks before the Nov. 3 election, the liberal Sneddon is still considered the front-runner in the mayor’s race, in part because she has the Democratic Party endorsement in a city with a heavily Democratic electorate, in an even-year midterm election that nationally will be a referendum on Donald Trump, whose public support has plummeted.

Friedman, however, shook up the race recently when campaign finance reports disclosed that he is outraising Sneddon 3-to-1. Sneddon also could lose votes to former school board president Wendy Sims-Moten, a fellow progressive who confirmed last week that she is running. Matt Kilrain, a waterfront denizen who won 131 votes in the 2021 mayor’s race, also is on the ballot.*

Among other factors, the long-running and contentious debate at City Hall over rent control — in the form of a rent stabilization ordinance scheduled to be back before council on Sept. 22, days before ballots are sent to voters — also could prove pivotal.

As a political matter, rent control is for Sneddon both a benefit and a liability. Although renters represent a majority of the city’s population, homeowners constitute a sizable portion of the electorate. With landlords and real estate interests expected to line up behind Friedman, Sneddon’s closest ally on rent stabilization is council member Wendy Santamaria — herself a tenant activist — who takes the most hardline positions on the issue and has become the most polarizing figure at City Hall.

With the council divided 4-3 on the issue, several of Sneddon’s comments were notable about several key issues involving rent stabilization, a month away from members casting decisive votes.

On the question of which units should be exempted from the ordinance, Sneddon offered a categorical statement in support of a list of exemptions proposed by the Housing Authority. On the question of what calculation should be used to determine a cap on rent increases, Sneddon said she is firmly committed to a 3 percent ceiling, but less so to using 60 percent of the Consumer Price Index as an annual alternative, which tenant groups favor. “I agree, 60 percent of CPI is hard,” she said. “And I’m hearing that a certain percentage, really 3 percent — I’ve heard, even from staunch people who don’t want to see this pass at all — that that would make the difference and make it doable.”

SB vs. Trump. Throughout the interview, Sneddon sought to contrast her vision of the mayor’s office with how Rowse has wielded it; notably, she said she strongly disagrees with the incumbent’s oft-stated belief that national and state issues should play no part in the business of city council, which instead should focus on clearly local concerns.

Sneddon said it is critical for elected officials to stand up publicly to the Trump administration on behalf of local residents menaced by the government’s mass deportation campaign and the brutality of immigration raids — as well as major cuts in federal programs for housing and other services.

“They are front and center,” Sneddon said of national political controversies and conflicts. “And right now, with the Trump administration, these issues with immigration and the terrorizing of people in our community — we don’t get to choose when to take that up. It’s here, front and center.

“I wish these weren’t things that were impacting Santa Barbara, or that we still got federal funding,” she added. “There are so many supportive services … the Housing Authority and Section 8 funding … mixed (immigration) status households that are going to lose their funding — we’re on the verge of hundreds of people who are going to lose their housing because of these (Trump) policies. And there are a lot of support services that are at risk.”

In the interview, Sneddon also reflected on her decade-long journey from political novice to City Hall insider; discussed her shifting relationship with the Democratic Party, which tried to force her out of her first race and now strongly backs her bid for mayor; highlighted her deep interest in climate, resilience and sustainability issues, which she said don’t get enough media attention; and blamed the current heated political atmosphere at City Hall on “problematic” rhetoric and “people making caricatures of each other.”

“I will say that what you’re seeing at council, at the public comments, or in the letters, are the two sort of polar sides,” she said. “But when I go door to door … I’m hearing from people who aren’t on this side or that side.”

“On all sides of this, we’re making caricatures of each other,” she added. “And if you step beyond that, we’re all neighbors and we’re in this community and we care.”

On the issues. In the Nov. 3 election, the balance of power at City Hall is on the ballot, amid races to replace Rowse and three termed-out neighborhood district representatives on the seven-member council. Our conversation with Sneddon is the latest in a summer-long series Newsmakers is doing with candidates for council and mayor. In the interviews, we ask the candidates for their views on four key issues.

Here’s a glimpse at what Sneddon had to say about them, lightly edited for clarity.

Rent control. “In the last nine years, rents have gone up 60 to 80 percent … senior women, the fastest-growing group newly experiencing homelessness. Vehicular homelessness in the county has gone from 600 people to 900 people. We’re losing working families, people can’t age in place … So this is one part of a multi-part approach and I think it’s really important — for property owners as well as for tenants, but the risks are much, much higher for tenants right now.”

State Street. “Every time it comes up — and I keep a tally — every time it comes up you have 70 to 80 percent of businesses, or the public, people, families who want to see it move forward … They want to continue to see it closed to cars, but improve the experience, take care of the e-bikes … have a block that is pedestrian only, no bikes at all. And my perspective is: we need to make movement, we need to have these things happen and be able to move forward. And until we actually try it, I don’t feel comfortable going back to 1997.”

Budget. Sneddon defended her decisive vote and the council’s 4-to-3 decision that effectively transferred several million dollars temporarily from budget reserves into a special housing fund, saying it was faithful to what voters wanted when they approved the Measure I sales tax increase. “As far as the money towards the Local Housing Trust Fund, it was basically on the ballot. That was part of the promise of Measure I, and to housing advocates who supported it and campaigned for it. Part of the promise of Measure I was that a small portion of that tax would go to affordable housing.”

Ranked-choice voting. Sneddon says she “fully supports” ranked-choice voting, as well as a system of runoffs among the top finishers in a primary, and putting the question of restructuring elections before voters.

Check out our full interview with Kristen Sneddon via YouTube below or by clicking this link. Our podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, or on SoundCloud. TVSB, Channel 17, airs the show every weeknight at 5 p.m. and at 9 a.m. on weekends. KCSB, 91.9 FM, broadcasts the program at 5:30 p.m. on weekends.

P.S. Apologies for confusion about 28 minutes in. Newsmakers had technical difficulty with Zoom app. Thanks to Harry Sneddon for IT rescue help.

* Correction: An early version of this post mistakently stated the number of minor candidates for mayor. There is one, not three.

Newsmakers’ Candidate Conversations. To offer Santa Barbara voters early introductions to contenders for four City Council seats, including Mayor, in the Nov. 3 election, Newsmakers is publishing one-on-one interviews with the candidates over the summer. Upcoming interviews include council candidates Jason Carlton and Anabella Lehne. Here is who we’ve spoken with to date:

Mayor

• Eric Friedman, candidate for Mayor, June 28.

• Wendy Sims-Moten, candidate for Mayor, Aug. 13.

• Kristen Sneddon, candidate for Mayor, Aug. 17.

District 4

• Monte Wilson, candidate for District 4 council seat, June 23.

• Jason Dominguez, candidate for District 4, July 6

• Genevieve Taft-Vazquez, candidate for District 4, July 16.

• Devon Wardlow, candidate for District 4, July 21.

District 5

• Cevin Cathell, candidate for District 5, July 23.

• Ian Baucke, candidate for District 5, July 26.

• James Zurlinden, candidate for District 5, Aug. 3.

District 6

• Gabe Escobedo, candidate for District 6, July 13.

• Alexander Stoeber candidate for District 6, Aug. 3.

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