Former Lompoc City Councilman Jim Mosby is someone who thinks highly of himself. Apparently, voters in the council district he lives in didn’t think so highly of him when they rejected him in a landslide election to represent them as their councilman.
Now he is running for mayor; maybe he thinks if he misrepresents his past record on issues that are important to voters, they’ll buy it.
In a recent Sun report, he said, “I’ve been paying attention and I’m invested in this community, and I see it drastically stepping backwards. We need to stop making excuses and come up with solutions. The last four years, we heard many excuses from the mayor and why things can’t get done. I’m a person who is solutions-driven; I know how to get it done.” (“Jim Mosby runs against Jenelle Osborne for Lompoc mayor,” Aug. 25)
Next, he said, “The safety of the public is definitely a priority. We need to not just say that public safety is a priority, we need to prove it and adjust the budget to show that. It’s also safety in recreation fields; our soccer fields are in horrible state and conditions,” he explained.
Once again, we can look to the public record; in 2017 when he was a council member, he presented a 12-point budget manifesto that “included reshuffling, reducing, or eliminating certain staff positions, returning some executive salaries back to 2014 levels, reducing some departmental budgets to 2015 levels, and eliminating the economic development department altogether.”
Somehow, he feels that he is more qualified to run a city than any of the city staff professionals with decades of experience in these matters.
Taking a step backward, he also championed budget cuts to “provide the savings if the fire marshal was moved back as one of the three battalion chiefs.”
The position of fire marshal had been created by a unanimous vote of the City Council when they approved the Fire Department master plan a few years before that. He couldn’t comprehend that the two functions (fire marshal and operations battalion chief) are totally different and require different skill sets to perform their duties. Both jobs require the full attention and energy of the person doing them.
The fire marshal has some serious public safety responsibilities, which include reviewing new construction plans, physical inspection of properties, preparation of technical reports describing the conditions found, preparing legal documents when the owners fail to comply, investigating the cause of fires, and testifying in court, to name a few.
In September 2018 the city manager recommended three tax measures for the November 2018 ballot: a half-cent sales tax increase, a 2 percent increase in hotel taxes to 12 percent, and a 6 percent utility user’s tax. During a budget update that year, 20 vacant positions, half of them in public safety, were “frozen,” meaning that the police and fire departments couldn’t fill much-needed positions. In the next budget cycle, another $1.2 million would have to be cut.
Mosby, then a mayoral candidate, had a chance to participate in a solution, but he declared that any effort to increase taxes is dead on arrival as far as he is concerned. And it was as he who led an effort to make sure it didn’t reach voters on the ballot. Thus there were fewer police officers and firefighters available.
Two years later, he changed his mind and supported putting a 1 percent tax measure to a vote. The intent of the measure and how it was presented to Lompoc voters was that if approved, revenues from the measure starting in the following fiscal year would be used to fund current public safety needs.
After the measure passed, despite Mosby’s insistence that it wouldn’t, he then led what amounted to a bait-and-switch. Mosby convinced a council majority to instead fast track a paydown of the CalPERS public safety retirement debt incurred over several decades.
City residents saw no tangible improvements or revenue for staff improvements in public safety or any other general fund programs until a later infusion of COVID-19 relief revenue allowed some one-time infrastructure improvements.
Does this convince you that he really thinks “the safety of the public is definitely a priority”? To me it doesn’t because he led an effort that reduced funding for police and fire budgets in favor of an accelerated paydown of retirement debt. He says one thing but does another.
He also told the Sun that “the Public Works director said we need $5 million to improve the drivability and walkability of the streets. We need to focus revenues toward these critical areas before they completely fall apart.”
If he was “paying attention” to a Feb. 15, 2022, Public Works staff report to the City Council on the matter, he would have known that “that one-time expenditure of approximately $65 million to raise the cty’s overall system-wide pavement condition index average to 70 is in addition to an annual expenditure of approximately $8 million each year thereafter, to maintain the PCI of 70 (good), using industry standard methods.”
Mayoral candidate Jim Mosby has consistently misrepresented his own public policy history, has been consistently proven wrong on budget issues, and failed to consider the impact of his decisions on the safety of the public. He should not be your choice for elective office.
Ron Fink writes to the Sun from Lompoc. Send a letter for publication to letters@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Sep 8-15, 2022.