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.