Local artists, educators, and business owners were among the 40-plus public speakers who protested the Lompoc City Council’s initial decision to cut the Chamber of Commerce’s annual budget down from $108,000 to $60,000 in late June.
Their efforts swayed the council to maintain the former allocation, via a newly revised contract that became the focal point of a recent meeting with far more shoulder room than the June 17 hearing.
At the council’s July 15 meeting, nobody stepped forward to speak during public comment about the city staff’s proposed contract with the chamber for fiscal years 2025-27.
City officials however had a lot to say about the contract, which Councilmember Steve Bridge described as impossible for the chamber to comply with at the $108,000 threshold.
“I’m not suggesting that they’re not performing. I’m suggesting that we’re establishing clauses on this contract that they won’t perform,” Bridge said. “I don’t think it’s fair to put the chamber on a contract that they can’t perform, … and I don’t think we should set anyone in this city up to fail.”
Bridge argued that the contract’s scope was more appropriate for a $200,000 budget, which warranted alterations to match the $108,000 allocation, he suggested. Tourism promotion, for example, was an easy focus area to cut since it duplicates services other agencies already handle, Bridge said.
“At the end of this meeting, we’re going to discuss an organization that has $1 million in reserve for tourism promotion,” Bridge said, referring to the Lompoc Tourism Business Improvement District (TBID), also known as Explore Lompoc or Visit Lompoc LLC.
“We’re spending money on things that other people are doing and that just doesn’t make sense to me,” Bridge continued. “I think Explore Lompoc is much better equipped for doing tourism promotion.”
During a separate discussion later in the meeting, the council reviewed the TBID’s annual report for 2025, which described some of the agency’s sales and marketing initiatives: digital marketing, print advertising, social media engagement, media and influencer relations, promotional materials, and more.
The report also said that the TBID has $980,948 in reserve.
“I don’t believe this [TBID] was formulated for the group to accumulate such a large amount of revenue,” Mayor Jim Mosby said at the hearing. “That’s a lot of money sitting there that was collected to do something, and I don’t think it was collected to sit in a money market account or wherever it might be. … [The council] didn’t say, ‘Hey build a huge war chest and the money sits there.’”
In March 2024, a Santa Barbara County grand jury investigation targeted Lompoc’s TBID and found fault with its accounting practices. The jury asked Lompoc to establish a better system of checks and balances to monitor the TBID, which city staff refuted a couple of months after the report.
During the council’s July 15 review of the TBID’s 2025 report, Mayor Mosby asked staff to clarify some details about the city’s current contract with the agency and which financial info is available to the council without the need of a formal audit.
The current contract allows “the city to request pretty much any kind of financial information, receipts, expenditures, all the vendors that they use and give money to,” City Attorney Jeff Malawy told the council. “The city has the right to request that at any time from Visit Lompoc.”
Mosby then motioned for city staff to collect the TBID’s receipts and other records from the past five years.
“I’m not asking for anything greater than what’s already in the contract,” Mosby said. “They’ve been saying that, ‘Hey, we’ll give it to you if somebody asks for it.’ … I think what really needs to happen is, for the sake of transparency, we need to look at this.”
Mosby’s motion passed 5-0, while Bridge’s motion for city staff to work with the Lompoc Valley Chamber of Commerce on altering its proposed service agreement and return with a new contract passed 4-1 (Councilmember Jeremy Ball dissented).
“If they can tighten up with clarity what they can perform and deliver right now, I’m hopeful that you remain open to being agreeable to some finish line that keeps them open and funded,” Ball told Bridge before the vote. “That’s fine to say that tourism shouldn’t be included. I hear you. But they still get a lot of organic requests and calls about tourism-related things that they don’t necessarily just pass them off to the TBID.”
This article appears in Jul 24 – Aug 3, 2025.
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