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.
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.