If things weren’t spicy in Buellton before the November election—with a sitting City Council member running against the sitting mayor—they are now.
The council is split down the middle, with two council members on one side and the newly elected mayor and another council member on the other. They couldn’t decide on who to appoint to fill the 4th District seat vacated by David Silva, who beat out Dave King to become the city’s mayor. Now the city is hosting a special election so residents can decide who to put there.
But it’s not happening until August, and it’s going to cost the city $35,000.
“The only reason we’re doing this is because you didn’t do your four-year term, and that’s a fact,” 3rd District Councilmember John Sanchez told Silva at the Jan. 23 meeting. “I thought it was a stupid idea for you not to finish your four years because you didn’t fulfill your four-year promise, and I knew that we would have to do this.”
Damn! Shots fired.
Meeting attendees booed and shouted from the galley as the conversation on the dais got heated. Sanchez insinuated that voters are stupid and didn’t realize that there would be a vacancy if Silva was elected mayor. If they did, he added, Silva wouldn’t have been elected.
Councilmember Elysia Lewis told the audience to calm down, but she should have told her fellow elected officials to chill out instead.
Silva was pissed! Obviously.
“Your No. 1 goal seems to be to mitigate an election result you disagree with,” he told Sanchez.
And indeed, that is what it seems like. This whole little circus is pretty normal on City Council daises. Council members run for mayor before their terms are up. It happens! Maybe Sanchez should have run for mayor too?
And maybe they need to take a page out of Lompoc’s new mayor, Jim Mosby’s, book and deliver “hugs not handcuffs” to one another. He actually wants local law enforcement to do the opposite of that and deliver transients and unhoused folks to Santa Barbara County jails in handcuffs for their audacity!
“There’s a new mayor on the block here, and my attitude is zero tolerance to the insanity that’s going on with multiple felonies that are happening out here,” Mosby said.
Meanwhile 3rd District Santa Barbara County Supervisor Joan Hartmann is ready to provide the folks living in the Santa Ynez Riverbed with services, housing, and help.
“Rivers just aren’t a safe place for people to live, so clearing them I think is a moral imperitive,” she said. “We have to have someplace, though, for them to go. We can’t just say, ‘disappear from the face of the earth.’”
The two elected officials couldn’t be further apart when it comes to how to deal with the issue in Lompoc, and somehow, they’re going to have to work together.
While Hartmann said the county’s been actively engaged in “solving the homelessness issue in Lompoc,” Mosby accused the county of “turning a blind eye to it.”
Ouch! I wonder if Hartmann is wishing that she’d supported Jenelle Osborne a little more in her reelection run last year.
The Canary puts extra hot sauce on spicy politics. Send some to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jan 30 – Feb 9, 2025.