Longtime Santa Maria farmer Peter Adam has announced he’s running for 4th District Santa Barbara County Supervisor in the June 2012 election.
Adam is vice president of Adam Brothers Farming, a company known for its vegetables and for its well-publicized legal squabble with the county in the early 2000s. In the suit, Adam Brothers claimed county planners falsely designated some of its ag land as wetlands. A jury, and later a judge, agreed.
When asked if the suit influenced his decision to run for supervisor, Adam said, “Not really. It colors the way I feel about [government]—I can’t divorce myself from the thing—but that was a long time ago.”
He decided to run because “nobody is making the arguments I’d like to hear.”
Adam’s main concerns are public safety and maintaining county infrastructure.
“I see [public safety] being sacrificed in budget cuts all the time,” he said, adding that government shouldn’t be going to the public with tax proposals to pay for staffing.
“We’ve reached our saturation point,” he explained. “There’s no way to package [the tax] to get more revenue out of the taxpayers. I think the taxpayers are done. They don’t see government being good stewards of the money.
“Honestly, I see the economy staying very difficult for quite sometime,” he added. “It seems a lot of government officials are hoping for a miracle, but it’s not going to come.”
Instead of waiting for said miracle, Adam said, government officials at all levels need to reassess their priorities and streamline existing services.
When asked for an example, he said, “Building is too difficult in this county. There should be easier ways to access permitting than what we’re doing. Right now it’s a labyrinth, and you just can’t get through it. There are many, many costs to private enterprise and government. The process should be streamlined greatly.”
Adam also wants to look into privatizing more government services.
“I want to take a look a every interaction the county has with citizens and ask, ‘What’s the value of this?’” he said. “Value is something the private sector evaluates all the time, has to ask, ‘What am I doing better than my competitor?’ Unfortunately, government doesn’t have any competitors.”
Some other goals include developing industry, “getting the pension plan squared away,” and ensuring local government doesn’t overstep its boundaries.
“The scope of local government has to stay local,” he said, using a county-funded study on global warming as an example of misuse of tax dollars.
“Whether you believe in global warming or not—I’m a global warming denier; I live outside in the environment and some years are just warmer than others—that’s just not a county issue,” Adam said. “How many sheriff’s deputies or fire fighters would that [study] have paid for?”
Adam is a former director of the Santa Barbara County Farm Bureau, a board member of the Santa Barbara County Cattlemen’s Association from 2009 to 2010, and a past member of the Santa Barbara County Human Relations Commission.
This article appears in Dec 15-22, 2011.