Santa Barbara County supervisors increase salaries 48 percent, push back on Andy Caldwell

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After reaching out to what he said was 70,000 to 80,000 Santa Barbara County residents about the Board of Supervisors’ proposed salary increase, Andy Caldwell told supervisors that they didn’t have the “consent of the governed.” 

“Think of the people who are struggling with inflation right now. What you are doing is a slap in the face … to your constituents,” he said during the Feb. 25 meeting. 

In the weeks between the supervisors’ Feb. 11 and 25 meetings, Caldwell—executive director of the Coalition of Labor, Agriculture, and Business—questioned the proposed 48.8 percent pay raises in emailed newsletters, in Facebook posts, on the radio, and in published commentaries. He called the position of supervisor a part-time job where they could work as much or as little as they want and divert constituent calls to local city council members.

“I don’t know about you, but the way I figure, people should run for office because they want to serve the public’s interests not their own personal interest,” Caldwell wrote in the newsletter. “It is sad to say that too many people these days run for office for all the wrong reasons. Some people want power. Others want to be a career politician.”

The raises were part of a package of salary increases for the county’s elected department heads and set supervisors’ salaries at 70 percent of what superior court judges make, bringing their salary up from around $115,000 a year to a little more than $171,000. The moves were intended to ensure that the county’s pay scales were comparable to those in similar counties as well as commensurate with the private sector, County Human Resources Director Kristine Schmidt said. 

“Supervisors have to step away from their careers, their career progressions, and their own businesses to be able to serve,” Schmidt said. 

Reasonable salaries, she said, enable highly qualified individuals to come forward to serve and makes it so the position doesn’t rely on those who are independently wealthy. 

Supervisors voted 3-1-1 on the raise—with 4th District Supervisor Bob Nelson dissenting and 1st District Supervisor Roy Lee abstaining—but not before pushing back on Caldwell’s allegations and comments. 

Supervisor Steve Lavagnino from the 5th District said he had received “a million emails” as a result of Caldwell’s push and possibly lost some longtime friends. 

“You should be so happy, you’re relevant again,” Lavagnino said, adding that the people who emailed him were upset and misinformed by the information that Caldwell disseminated. “What was in there was misleading at best, I would say. … I want my constituents to understand exactly what we do and what they’ve been told what we do.” 

He wondered why, if the job was so easy, more people didn’t run for office. Often, supervisors run unopposed for their positions, including the last three times that Lavagnino ran for reelection. 

He added that his colleagues put in way more than 40 hours a week. In addition to their monthly board meetings, they attend events, take constituent calls at all hours of the day, serve on a variety of commissions and committees, make site visits for proposed projects, pore over pages and pages of information before their meetings, and are on call for emergency events like natural disasters.

“I realize that 90 percent of the people yelling at me had no idea what my job position was,” Lavagnino said. “This job will eat you up and spit you out, and I don’t know what salary that equates to. … This wasn’t a great two-week period of my life.” 

In 2015, Lavagnino voted against a similar proposal. An independent committee of six residents studied the issue and made a recommendation for how supervisors’ salaries should be set. Schmidt, the head of county Human Resources, said that the ad hoc committee recommended supervisors be paid at the market median, which at the time was about $124,000. 

If the proposal had gone through, Schmidt said, supervisors would be approaching the salary that was proposed in February 2025. Because they didn’t approve it at the time, supervisors were making 32.8 percent below median and less than their chiefs of staff. Lavagnino said that if the 2015 proposal had been adopted, the board wouldn’t be in the position it was—voting on their own raises. 

“I voted against it at the time because I didn’t think it was the right time. The truth is I found out 10 years later that the timing’s never the right time,” he said. “Now I only have a short time left to fix something so that the next person who sits in this job doesn’t go through what I had to go through for the last two weeks.” 

Fourth District Supervisor Bob Nelson also said that it had been a difficult couple of weeks, especially for the North County supervisors, because they share “a base of constituents and residents who COLAB speaks to.”

“The well has been poisoned with my constituents, and that’s what has made this difficult to deal with,” Nelson said. “Even a 1 percent raise, I believe at this point, would makes us seem self-serving, especially with the information that’s out there.” 

It’s important that future boards won’t have to go through this process, 2nd District Supervisor Laura Capps said, adding that the misinformation campaign just means that supervisors are going to have to work even harder to strengthen the bond between the public and the government. 

“But we’ll work harder. We’ll bring it back,” she said. 

“People are hurting, so I don’t mean to dismiss all of this as disinformation. People are financially hurting and that’s why it strikes a chord,” Capps said. “When people get a sliver of information that isn’t the right information, it strikes a chord. … To kind of use that is really sad.” 

This article appears in Mar 6-16, 2025.