Campaign Interviews: 19 Weeks to Go Before Election, Newsmakers Series Begins with District 4 Hopeful Monte Wilson
A former tech executive leads off our conversations about policy and politics with major candidates for City Council and mayor, amid SB's most consequential vote since advent of district elections.
The balance of power at Santa Barbara City Hall is at stake in the Nov. 3 election, as voters will choose a new mayor and three new City Council members.
With city finances awash in red ink, the future of downtown still uncertain, and tenants newly triumphant over landlords in a bitter battle over rent control, progressives seem poised to expand their current one-vote majority on the council.
The retirement of Mayor Randy Rowse, coupled with three of the seven council seats becoming vacant because of term limits, sets the stage for the most consequential city election since Santa Barbara adopted district elections a decade ago.
Today, Newsmakers begins an occasional series of interviews with candidates for council seats and contenders competing for the citywide office of mayor. We start with a conversation with retired tech executive Monte Wilson, who is running in District 4 to replace Kristen Sneddon, herself seeking to succeed Rowse.
In the coming weeks, we’ll be speaking with the major aspirants for mayor, as well as other candidates in these three districts:
District 4 (Riviera/Upper East), where Sneddon is now campaigning citywide after two terms on council.
District 5 (San Roque/Upper State). Two-term incumbent Eric Friedman, also running for mayor, will be our guest for next week’s one-on-one interview.
District 6 (Downtown/Oak Park). Meagan Harmon, a reliable Democratic Party ally first appointed to a vacant seat in 2019, is term-limited.
To be sure, it is still early in the political calendar, with 133 days left before the Nov. 3 election — and six weeks remaining for candidates to pull papers to run.
Nineteen Tuesdays before Election Day, however, it is also true that the campaign is already being shaped and defined by contenders, like Sneddon and Friedman, who have been raising money and meeting voters for months, and by a slate recently endorsed by the local Democratic Party, which formally backs its favorites early in the process in a bid to clear the field.
Amid this political landscape and the high-stakes policy matters that will confront the next mayor and council when they’re sworn in next January, here’s hoping these Newsmakers conversations prove useful as voters form their choices in November.
Meet Monte. Monte Wilson is a 68-year-old native of Peoria, Ill., who had a long professional career with Oracle and Adobe before moving to Santa Barbara 16 years* ago.
Since then, he’s become active with several nonprofits, notably the United Boys and Girls Clubs, and been an active helpmate to his locally raised spouse, who owns The Painted Cabernet studio, helping her navigate and survive the economic upheaval of the pandemic and City Hall’s shifting policies on State Street. (For the record, he also was the first candidate to reach out proactively to Newsmakers to discuss his candidacy - rivals Jason Dominguez and Devon Wardlow are on tap in coming weeks).
A business-friendly moderate, Wilson firmly opposes rent control and the complete closure of downtown State Street to cars, and favors aggressive economic-development policies and technological efficiencies over more tax increases in grappling with the city budget’s troublesome arithmetic.
Key quotes:
On rent control. “It’s punitive — it’s a punitive penalty, when we want to encourage people to develop more housing. I’m a big believer in creating incentives versus penalties, and I would much prefer to provide incentives to landlords that offer below-market rent, versus creating a punitive situation where it’s restricted…We’re solving the wrong problem, in my opinion…we’ve got to create more housing in a balanced and thoughtful way.”
On the budget. “One thing that I used to do when I was in the private sector is…do basically a zero-based budget review, where we’d say, ‘Let’s start with zero and build up what we need to do to operate this business, or this department, or this division.’ Sometimes that’s a good exercise. It’s hard. You can’t do citywide all at once…But those are the kind of questions that I think we need to be able to ask and look at from a bottoms-up approach on the budget…And that’s something that I’ve done more times than I can count.”
On State Street. “I’m against closing the street, but I’m very much for the bollards…In going through a very complex change like what we did with State Street, I would never change everything all at once — I would either change a small part of the organization a lot, or I would change the entire organization a little bit, but I would never change everything a lot. And that’s exactly what we did on State Street. So we really shouldn’t be surprised it kind of blew up on us.”
Check out our full conversation with Monte Wilson via YouTube below or by clicking this link. Our podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, or 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.
*Correction: An early edition of this post incorrectly stated when Monte Wilson moved to Santa Barbara. It was 16 years ago, not 11.