Laura Capps and the Consolidation of County Control

At a recent gathering of the Santa Barbara Republican Club at Mulligan’s, longtime radio host and government watchdog Andy Caldwell delivered a pointed critique of local power dynamics. His target: Supervisor Laura Capps and a Board of Supervisors that, he argues, is steadily amassing authority well beyond its elected districts.

“Laura Capps is going to become a 900-pound gorilla in South County politics, if she isn’t already,” Caldwell told the audience. The board oversees a government spending $1.6 billion annually with roughly 4,400 employees, touching everything from jails and roads to countywide elected offices such as sheriff, district attorney, treasurer, tax collector, and auditor-controller. While supervisors are elected by district, their influence increasingly reaches across the entire county.

Caldwell highlighted what he sees as a pattern of centralization. He expressed suspicion that the board, particularly Capps, sought to undermine Auditor-Controller Betsy Schaffer, potentially folding the department into the CEO’s office or elsewhere. “What we have proof of,” he continued, is deeper dysfunction in the sheriff’s department, where overtime has exploded to $19 million. Deputies use a board-approved “pyramiding” system—taking sick or vacation days before working extra shifts—to inflate pay, with 35% of some paychecks now coming from overtime.

“Part of that’s the board’s problem, and actually it’s all the board’s problem,” Caldwell says, “because the board didn’t fund the sheriff enough over the years, but secondly, they are the ones that approved the memorandum of understanding that allowed the deputies” to do the pyramiding in the first place.

The March Toward Total Control

This feeds into a broader decarceration push. Influenced by what Caldwell described as a “very incredibly woke public defender named Tracy Macuga,” the board has worked to divert up to 50% of cases from jail. When the sheriff proved insufficiently aligned, they turned to Sacramento. Former Supervisor Brett Hart sponsored legislation to remove jail authority from the sheriff. The bill, initially allowing supervisors to appoint their own jail administrator outright, was later softened but still raises questions of reporting lines and control.

“This is part of this march through the institutions where they’re just trying to have total control,” Caldwell warned. “We believe this board, and especially Laura, is so power hungry.”

Caldwell reserved special criticism for Capps’s sway over First District Supervisor Roy Lee. “She’s a monster,” he said bluntly. “I’ve never seen this in my 35 years—she literally leads him.” As an example, after marijuana proved controversial in the district, Capps organized a workshop on the issue in his very district. Lee, whom Caldwell called “the nicest guy in the world” but “over his head” and “a puppet,” offered little resistance. “She controls the first district” as well as the second.

Hallmarks of Totalitarianism

Drawing on George Orwell, Caldwell framed these manoeuvres as symbols of tyranny. “All tyrannies rule through fraud and force. That once the fraud is exposed, they must rely exclusively on force.” He offered two California examples. In the Los Angeles mayoral race, incumbent Karen Bass led on election night, yet Democratic Socialist Nithya Raman saw her votes surge 190% in subsequent counts—a meteoric rise that outpaced both the incumbent and Republican challenger Spencer Pratt. Caldwell pointed to ballot harvesting as the likely driver, noting the difficulty of investigation.

That difficulty in investigating government wrongdoing has only grown. After citizen journalist Nick Shirley exposed roughly $170 million in fraudulent ghost hospice and daycare operations, California passed AB 2624, the “Stop Nick Shirley Act.” Authored by Assembly member Mia Bonta, wife of Attorney General Rob Bonta, the law threatens citizen investigators with fines and prosecution for “intimidating” subjects. “This bill puts journalists at simple risk for investigating fraud and makes it harder to expose it,” Caldwell said. “It’s an intimidation factor; it’s a force to stop fraud investigations. We are living in a tyranny right now. This is the mark of tyranny, and they do it in the name of democratic values.”

Patronage Sustains the System

Supervisors control $50,000 to $100,000 annual slush funds with minimal scrutiny. Unions provide the bulk of campaign money—three-quarters in some recent supervisor races—while Project Labor Agreements steer major public projects exclusively to union contractors, despite only 10-15% of the local workforce being unionized.

“The insult to injury is the local halls are too small to fulfill the manpower requirements on the contract, so instead of hiring local workers that were non-union, we’re bringing in people from L.A. and Bakersfield to work on these projects,” Caldwell explains. Contracts for $150-million builds such as new jails and probation facilities come in 20-30% higher than competitive bids, crowding out local non-union labor and inflating costs for taxpayers already facing $500 million in deferred maintenance.

Bloated Pension Payouts Overburden Taxpayers

Pensions compound the fiscal strain. County workers enjoy guaranteed defined benefits far removed from private-sector risks. “Government employees get a guaranteed percentage of their final average highest salary for the rest of their lives with COLA,” Caldwell noted. A deputy with 30 years can receive 90% of final average salary for life, with taxpayers covering shortfalls. The county spends $180 million annually on pensions alone—part of salaries, benefits, and pensions consuming over half the $1.6 billion budget—while carrying hundreds of millions in unfunded liabilities.

Time to Get Involved

Caldwell urges direct engagement. Citizens can review the board agenda at countyofsb.org, pull items for public comment, and testify remotely for up to three minutes. With budget hearings approaching, he encourages scrutiny of six-figure salaries, union contracts, and deferred maintenance. “You can go physically, but if not, you can do remote testimony. Just start weighing in and checking them on this stuff.”

In the Fifth District race, Caldwell backs Maribel Aguilera against a hard-left opponent, warning Republicans against self-sabotage. “Influencing Republicans is like herding cats in a minefield of egos.” He stresses grassroots action: sharing strong reporting from outlets like the Santa Barbara Current. “How many of you read the Santa Barbara Current on a regular basis?” he asked. Many hands went up. “How many of you will share that? Commit to me here today, every week, if you find some outstanding articles that you like that you’ll share with ten or twenty people.”

Caldwell closed with a call for knowledge as power. “People don’t know what they don’t know, and it’s up to us to tell them.” In a county where independent voices face media silence and institutional resistance, exposing the mechanics of control—patronage, force, and centralized ambition—remains the first step toward accountability. With progressive tyrants like Laura Capps consolidating control and looming large, sustained, public scrutiny still offers the best counterweight.

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Lee Ohanian Proposes a Free-Market California Comeback

At a packed Timbers Road House on June 6, where Conservative Republicans of Santa Barbara County gathered amid an uncommon air of optimism, UCLA economics professor and Hoover Institution senior fellow Lee Ohanian delivered a pointed and energetic address. A UCSB alumnus with an extensive record advising the Federal Reserve, central banks and political campaigns, Ohanian avoids the familiar litany of California’s woes. Instead, he offers a data-driven, history-infused call to action: the state’s long decline is not inevitable; it’s reversible, provided leaders find the resolve to abandon failed policies in favor of proven, market-oriented solutions.

Ohanian, blending scholarly rigor with quick wit, had the crowd hooked from his opening remarks. In an era of Sacramento’s regulatory overreach, fiscal folly, and one-party hubris, his message sliced through the hall: the Golden State’s problems — from population hemorrhage to housing gridlock are policy choices, not foregone conclusions. And he arrived armed with history, hard numbers, and a practical roadmap that left attendees, including local Congressional candidate Bob Smith, energized for the battle ahead.

A Little Historical Context

”California grew like gangbusters between 1940 and 1970,” Ohanian recounts. “Its population tripled from about seven million. Pat Brown, the Democratic governor, knew what to do. He embraced growth.” Ohanian then paints a vivid picture of that postwar golden age: highways snaking across the landscape, hospitals and universities rising, opportunity blooming for waves of dreamers.

Today’s Sacramento? Permitting delays that stretch into decades, lawsuits weaponized as roadblocks, and red tape thick enough to strangle even the hardiest projects.

The audience ate it up with knowing nods.

On the state’s bleeding population, Ohanian pulls no punches. “California has experienced a massive net domestic out-migration,” he says, detailing how hundreds of thousands of residents and businesses have bolted for lower-tax, lower-regulation havens like Texas, Nevada, and Florida. “We face roughly this level of outflow every year recently,” he notes, driving home the brutal human and economic toll: families priced out of the market they once helped build, companies relocating headquarters, and a shrinking tax base.

High housing prices, underperforming schools, visible homelessness, and unreliable energy aren’t random misfortunes — they are engineered features of prolonged one-party dominance. Ohanian hammers this unsustainability with characteristic punch. “The top 1% are carrying this budget on their backs. How much longer can that last before the golden goose flies away for good?” California’s tax regime, he argues, punishes success, while the regulatory bloat operates “like a whole federal government on steroids” — suffocating innovation and accelerating the exodus.

Practical Environmentalism

Housing – that perennial third-rail crisis, earned a full-throated defense of supply-side sanity. “Housing affordability isn’t solved by more mandates; it’s solved by letting markets work — cut the impact fees, streamline ADUs, and watch supply catch up.” Then came one of his sharpest zingers: “California used to be the place where dreamers came to build. Now it’s where builders go to die….in hearings. We can fix that.”

Practical environmentalism emerged as another highlight. Ohanian rejects the ideology that kills local jobs while simply exporting emissions elsewhere, instead, he champions balanced, responsible approaches like onshore energy development. Education draws parallel scrutiny: urgent calls for school choice, credential reform, and nonpartisan solutions too often buried under bureaucratic layers. Infrastructure? Real needs like dams, roads, and deferred maintenance, trump performative green projects that ignore engineering and fiscal reality.

Ohanian grounds his analysis in personal roots, “I had the pleasure of growing up here,” he reflects, connecting his UCSB background and professional journey to a profound affection for California’s untapped potential. His PhD-honed expertise lends credibility that effortlessly crosses partisan lines.

As the luncheon winds down, Ohanian wraps with infectious optimism and distills a clear 2026 battle plan: deregulate housing, overhaul taxes and pensions, invest smartly in infrastructure, empower school choice, address homelessness with both compassion and accountability, and unleash private-sector dynamism.

For Republicans and concerned Californians weary of managed decline, it felt less like a lecture and more like a lifeline tossed from a rescue helicopter.

California has reinvented itself before — from Gold Rush chaos to Silicon Valley powerhouse. With clear-eyed leadership embracing Ohanian’s insights — pro-growth, pro-family, pro-opportunity — it can right itself again.

Professor Ohanian’s warm reception at the Timbers Road House proves that the hunger to save California exists, at least it does among those willing to listen and learn.

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When most people think of moral collapse, they picture places like Los Angeles or San Francisco. They picture open-air drug markets. Crime. Chaos. Lawlessness. Broken streets. Broken culture.

Nobody pictures Santa Barbara.

That is what makes this so interesting.

Because according to a recent article in the Santa Barbara Independent, Santa Barbara County has one of the highest arrest rates in California — including some of the highest juvenile arrest rates.

Read that again carefully.

Not Los Angeles. Not San Francisco.

Santa Barbara, our wealthy coastal paradise.

The city people associate with: wine tasting, Spanish architecture, ocean views, luxury homes, and tourism brochures.

Interesting.

Then I remembered another statistic.

The Santa Barbara–San Luis Obispo corridor has also been identified by Barna research as one of the most “post-Christian” regions in America in a 2019 study.

More “post-Christian” than cities many people commonly associate with moral decay and social dysfunction.

That should probably make people stop and think.

Because most Americans still assume moral collapse looks loud.

But what if it looks polished instead?

What if it looks educated? Affluent? Progressive? Beautiful?

Strange Times

President Donald Trump recently publicly declared: “This National Day of Prayer, we honor America’s enduring tradition of prayer, faith, and trust in Almighty God.”

He encouraged Americans to pray openly and reminded the country not to forget: “God’s role in creating, protecting, and sustaining the freest, strongest, most prosperous, and greatest country the world has ever known.”

He even encouraged Americans to celebrate faith openly, “especially on Shabbat,” as America approaches its 250th year.

Think about how strange that is for a moment.

A president publicly speaking about God, prayer, and Sabbath observance… while many churches barely mention them anymore.

I have attended churches that spoke less boldly about God than a president did.

That should probably concern people.

And perhaps that is also why Santa Barbara, one of the nation’s most “post-Christian” regions, has become filled with so many passionate Never Trump voices.

Because whether people support him or hate him, he openly speaks about God, prayer, faith, national identity, and America’s biblical foundations, in ways modern progressive culture increasingly rejects.

And maybe that discomfort says something larger about where the culture itself has moved.

One Nation Under God?

I have conversations with people all the time about America, our republic, and where our values came from. Most immediately resist the idea that this country was founded upon Judeo-Christian values. But then I ask a simple question. Why does our money say: “In God We Trust”?

Usually they laugh and say: “Who even carries cash anymore?”

Fair point.

But then I ask another question.

Can you recite the Pledge of Allegiance?

Most cannot.

Not because it is difficult. Because many schools stopped saying it years ago. “One nation under God.” That phrase used to mean something. Now even mentioning God publicly makes people uncomfortable.

And I understand why.

Because God has been systematically erased from public life for decades.

The Bible removed from schools. Prayer removed from schools.
Moral absolutes removed from schools. And replaced with what?

Government. Politics. Activism. Identity. Entertainment. And the religion of scientism.

The Religion That Replaced God

Yes, religion.

Because people treat theories about the origin of life and the universe as unquestionable doctrine even though nobody observed them and nobody can recreate them.

Meanwhile the Bible, mocked endlessly by modern culture, has more historical preservation, manuscript support, external references, archaeological correlation, and first-century documentation than most ancient writings humanity accepts without hesitation.

Interesting how standards change depending on what people want to believe.

The Bible even warned about this long ago.

Jesus rebuked religious leaders for elevating human tradition above the commandments of God: “Full well ye reject the commandment of God, that ye may keep your own tradition.”— Mark 7:9

And Paul warned:

“For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears.” — 2 Timothy 4:3

Is that not exactly what modern society does?

People no longer ask: “What is true?”

They ask: “What makes me comfortable?” “What offends me least?”
“What allows me to keep doing what I want?”

Truth is no longer treated as something eternal. It is treated like a customizable product.

Change the Language

Redefine morality.

Rewrite biology.

Ignore history.

Mock Scripture.

Celebrate rebellion.

Punish discipline.

And then society wonders why confusion, disorder, addiction, violence, depression, and lawlessness continue growing.

Maybe the issue is not that people no longer believe in anything.

Maybe the problem is they replaced God with themselves.

The Founders Warned About This

George Washington warned:

“Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”

John Adams warned: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Think carefully about what they meant.

The Constitution limits government power.

But limited government only works when people govern themselves morally.

What happens when they do not?

You need: more laws, more enforcement, more surveillance, more regulation, more government control.

Because internal restraint disappears.

And what replaces it?

Entitlement. Pleasure. Self-interest. Lawlessness. Moral relativism.

Thomas Jefferson described the teachings of Jesus Christ as:

“the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.”

Even Woodrow Wilson later stated: “America was born a Christian nation.”

California’s Moral Confusion

Now look honestly at California. The state increasingly rewards lawlessness while burdening lawful citizens. Illegal immigration is subsidized while taxpayers struggle under crushing costs. Shoplifting laws became so weak businesses flee entire neighborhoods.

Drug addiction and mental illness consume public spaces while politicians call inaction “compassion.” Children fail academically while graduation rates magically soar.

How does that math work?

Kids cannot read at grade level…yet nearly everyone graduates?

Abortion?

Modern science acknowledges that a distinct human life begins at fertilization.

Yet California law justifies the killing of that innocent life, and voters continue supporting politicians who defend it.

And churches?

Mostly silent.

Morals? Accountability? Sanctity of life?

What exactly are we teaching the next generation?

Which Commandment Made Society Worse?

Tell me honestly:

Which of the Ten Commandments made society worse?

Do not murder? Do not steal? Do not lie? Honor your parents?

Which one is destroying civilization?

Seriously.

Which one?

People love mocking Christianity while simultaneously benefiting from the moral framework Christianity helped build: human dignity,
justice, human rights, individual worth, personal accountability.

Those ideas did not emerge from nowhere.

The Vacuum Left Behind

And now?

We have generations raised without God, without discipline, without civic identity, without moral anchors, and without any shared understanding of truth.

Then people act shocked when society starts unraveling.

Maybe the problem is not mysterious after all.

Maybe moral collapse does not always look like San Francisco.

Maybe sometimes… it looks like Santa Barbara.

Maybe a nation that removes God from its schools, removes morality from culture, removes discipline from homes, and removes accountability from public life…

should not be shocked when disorder fills the vacuum.

A republic cannot survive when freedom becomes detached from responsibility. When truth becomes subjective. When comfort matters more than character. When people demand rights while rejecting the moral restraint required to preserve them.

The founders understood this.

That is why they spoke constantly about virtue, morality, religion, and self-government.

Not because they believed human beings were perfect.

But because they understood exactly the opposite is true.

A free society only survives when people willingly govern themselves internally before government is forced to govern them externally.

And once a people no longer answer to anything higher than themselves… history shows government eventually steps in to fill the void.

Maybe that is why so many Americans feel something is wrong even while surrounded by wealth, entertainment, technology, and comfort.

Because deep down, people know material prosperity alone cannot hold a civilization together.

Not forever.

And perhaps the most dangerous part of all is this:

Moral collapse rarely announces itself loudly at first.

Sometimes it arrives quietly.

Politely.

Progressively.

One removed prayer.

One compromised truth.

One redefined moral standard.

One silent church.

One generation at a time.

Until eventually people wake up surrounded by the consequences…
wondering how a beautiful nation became so broken.

“Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin is a reproach to any people.” — Proverbs 14:34 (KJV)

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What does the American Flag mean to you? How do you react when viewing others burn it? What does our flag represent to the world?

After the Civil War, Flag Day was created to commemorate the adoption of the Stars and Stripes as the official flag of the United States by the Second Continental Congress on June 14, 1777.

Our Flag honors pivotal moments in the founding of our country, its national symbols from wartime patriotism in the 18th and 19th centuries into an annual observance in the 20th-21st centuries. It replaced the Union Jack, representing a constellation of a new nation, what we stand for, with the stars symbolizing unity between the states: 13 originally, 50 today.

The idea of observing the creation of the flag’s anniversary emerged during the Civil War to rally patriotic support for the Union. A century later, the Flag promoted patriotism and helped Americanize immigrant children. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson issued a presidential proclamation designating June 14 as Flag Day. In 1949, Congress recognized it a day of observance. Today, it’s all but forgotten.

Our Family Flag’s History

My Great Grandfather George D. East was a 23-year-old laborer in Indiana when he answered the call to preserve the Union in September 1861. He served as an enlistee, then as Color Corporal in Company C of the 27th Indiana Volunteer Infantry, a role that placed him at the center of the battle line, responsible for the regiment’s Union Flag. His handwritten diary describes military life, leadership, and battles protecting the flag. Indiana’s 27th is stillremembered for several reasons including 1) tall enlistees referred to as ‘giants,’ and 2) discovering one of the most important intel documents in war history: General Robert ELee’s cigars wrapped in Lee’s battle plan for Antietam. The Union prevailed four days later due in part to Lee’s Lost Intel.

• The Battle of Antietam (1862): Marched the Colors into the bloodiest single day in American history. During the brutal fighting in the West Woods, East was severely wounded by a gunshot to his left thigh. Historical records confirm that he was celebrated by his peers for having “saved the flag” during the carnage of “losing all color guards killed or wounded with 128, a third killed in our small Regiment.”

• The Battle of Gettysburg (1863): Later, on July 3, while participating in the suicidal charge across Spangler’s Meadow against Culp’s Hill, he was struck in the right thigh by buckshot with balls at close-range during intense combat. Again celebrated for “saving the flag” as Color Corporal.

• General Sherman’s Campaign To Atlanta: Now surrounded by Confederates in enemy country, twice severely wounded, East was promoted, and placed on Guard Duty, where hard fighting pursued daily “until the City fell into our hands.” Later he helps historians document each battle; his lengthy diary a sketch of “the humble part I took in the War of the Rebellion.”

East’s war sacrifices at the front protecting the flag resulted in a lifelong commitment to the Union and to our flag. He famously required all his children and grandchildren to memorize and recite the Gettysburg Address at July 4th celebrations from Kansas to California. Flag protocols were taught.

After the war, East went from pioneer to politician as elected County Commissioner to Treasurer and Livery Stable owner until age 85.

His flag always proudly hung as his reminder of survival, sacrifice, honor, freedom, liberty, and opportunity for a boy with deceased parents and only $18.50 in his pocket who humbly served with valor.

Today, I know Greatpa East would be as sickened as I am to know that Eastside Santa Barbara elected DSA endorsed Council Rep Wendy Santamaria purposely shows up late to every City Council meeting in rejection of the American Flag and all it represents.

Why do her constituents hate America as represented by our flag? Why do some not respect and honor our American flag?

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I was homeless before I knew what that meant. The place I remember most is Lake Tulloch – doing my homework by flashlight, shivering, my shoulders searing from sunburn so deep we packed it in mustard to draw the heat out. The smell of mustard is still the smell of those nights. I would lie there dreading the morning, working out how I’d get to school: walking if we were close enough, or knocking on doors in whatever community we’d landed in, asking whether anyone had a car and a few minutes to spare.

We moved so constantly, all over California, that I was held back in the first grade. The fear of being held back again made me independent. I learned to get myself to school, because school was where I wanted to be. It was warm. It had a hot breakfast and a hot lunch, and when my friends weren’t going to eat theirs, I stashed the extras. The classroom was the most stable thing in my life, so I held onto it with everything I had and made sure I excelled no matter what. That brought me to the land of opportunity, Santa Barbara, to study Political Science at UCSB and find a better way so others don’t have to experience hopelessness.

That is the first thing I need you to understand before I say a word about policy. A person without a home is not a person without hopes and dreams.

But hope is not the whole story. I grew up close enough to every kind of homelessness to know they are different countries, even when they share the same riverbank.

There is not one kind. There are three. Santa Barbara keeps trying to solve all three with a single answer, and then we act surprised when that answer doesn’t hold up.

The have-nots simply lack the resources to climb out or stay out. A medical bill, a lost job, a rent increase they couldn’t absorb. They are not broken. They are short. Given a bridge, they cross it, and they stay across. I was one of them. My bridge was a classroom and a hot tray of food.

The can-nots are different. Mental illness, or some other condition nobody chooses, keeps a stable life out of reach, and no amount of deciding will change that. Telling them to do better is telling a man with a broken leg to walk it off. What he needs is a doctor, and what they need is treatment from people who stay long enough for it to take.

Then there are the will-nots, who get offered the bed, the program, the caseworker, and still say no to a different life for themselves. Some of them love the open road more than they could ever love a lease. Others are so deep inside a drug that nothing the rest of us can offer competes with the next high. Nobody likes talking about this group, which is exactly why somebody should.

Trapped In Between

I won’t pretend the categories come with clear borders. People drift between them, and I have watched it happen. Soft boundaries don’t excuse us from defining the problem, and our city’s ledger shows what refusal of definition costs. Recently, Santa Barbara put around $1.65 million into services that actually move people off the street, and an estimated $6.5 million into cleaning up after the problem: enforcement, encampment removal, and repairs. Four dollars are spent on consequences for every dollar spent on a cure. We pay that bill every year, and every year the street looks about the same.

So, what would it mean to ask which problem we’re solving? For the have-nots, mostly money and speed. Rental help that arrives before the eviction notice does so because keeping a family housed costs a fraction of what it takes to rehouse them later. The can-nots need treatment first, then housing built around the treatment, with staff on site rather than a tent, and our belief in their recovery. The will-nots are the hard part. What they need from us is accountability, and I want to be careful with that word, because I don’t mean punishment. I mean a consequence with a door to an incentive.

I’ve watched that work from up close. My mother got clean only after a consequence finally landed, with a way out attached. The judge told her at her parole hearing that she was on her last strike. She had to choose between her old ways, landing her back in prison and misery, or her freedom and kids. It wasn’t easy to clutch her hand and feel the tears running down my face before going back to sixth grade the next day. But looking away from the needed change felt like watching someone slowly drown and calling it respect.

Now that she chose her freedom and our relationship, I know the hard thing turned out to be the loving thing. People hear the word “accountability” and hear coldness. I hear it as giving somebody a chance to choose a different path back to us.

When you hear the next homelessness proposal, ask one question: which of the three is it for? If the answer is all of them, it is probably built for none of them.

What moves a person out of any category is hope – a future worth standing up for. I found mine in a warm classroom, over homework finished by flashlight in the cold. The people I love found theirs in their own time. The people on our streets are homeless, not hopeless. Almost no one is beyond return.

•••

Alexander Stoeber is a Santa Barbara real estate agent with Compass. Homeless through much of his childhood and displaced again in high school, he graduated and moved to Santa Barbara to earn his degree in Political Science from UCSB. He now helps people find housing.

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Ten miles south of Rancho del Cielo where Ronald Reagan signed his landmark tax relief bill something refreshingly un-Santa Barbara happened this last Friday at Sable Offshore Corp’s Santa Ynez oil facility.

No ribbon-cutting platitudes. No performative protests. Just Sable’s Jim Flores, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum standing with oil workers and subcontractors — the folks who keep this county’s lights on and cars moving —speaking blunt truths while the national press corps fished unsuccessfully for their next “Big Oil Bad” headline.

You know the tired local script all too well. The same NGO-government chorus that shrieks in horror at every barrel of domestic crude somehow never notices the tankers hauling Iraqi oil halfway around the world to California’s shores – or the local natural seeps that oil production helps contain.

A trio of sturdy platforms — Hondo, Harmony, and Heritage — part of the Santa Ynez Unit (SYU), sit 5 to 9 miles offshore in the Santa Barbara Channel. Discovered in 1968 and developed by ExxonMobil, they once pumped around 45,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day before the 2015 Refugio spill – and the regulatory kibosh that followed – mothballed everything. Sable stepped in two years ago to revive this federal asset. Early results are already beating expectations: Harmony is flowing thousands of barrels daily, with full ramp-up targeting 50,000-plus. This isn’t green, taxpayer subsidized fantasy. It’s proven American infrastructure ready to slash foreign imports and supercharge California production.

Clean, Environmentally Friendly Oil Here for the Taking

Flores, fresh from a helicopter trip offshore, was upbeat: “You don’t get a project like this off the ground without help from everybody, top to bottom... We just came in from offshore, had a spectacular trip up there, and look forward to many, many years of great work here, trying to help provide the energy needs to the United States.” And on the local connection: “Sable is California... we’re going to be here forever.”

An energetic Secretary Wright shot straight to the point: “Energy is life, energy is national security, energy is economic security, energy is health, opportunity, and better lives.” On Trump’s agenda: “President Trump got elected to grow American energy production to benefit Americans through lower cost, through greater security... More energy means more jobs and lower prices seems like common sense.

“Why is it controversial?”

Why indeed…

Because it offends today’s coastal religion: “Gavin Newsom and too many other California politicians,” Wright notes, “want to be in fashion with the Chardonnay set in hoity-toity Marin (and for that matter, Santa Barbara) County. It’s very fashionable to be adamantly against common sense... We prefer to import that oil from Iraq and Indonesia and Ecuador... We prefer to make gasoline and diesel and all energy in California massively more expensive.”

Wright continued: “California imports over thirty percent of its electricity, holds the nation’s highest adjusted poverty rate, and remains heavily dependent on foreign oil, all while badmouthing oil and gas, which does not replace them.” On the Defense Production Act: “We did use the Defense Production Act, because California has thirty military facilities, more than any state in the country.” And on results of California’s decades long fascination with alternative energy, it’s a bust: “California gets over seventy-five percent of its energy from oil and natural gas... higher than the national average.”

Sable’s Oil Gummed Up by Frivolous Lawsuits

Doug Burgum, the man who turned North Dakota into an energy powerhouse, delivered the unvarnished physics lesson: “It’s about math, it’s about people, it’s about economics, it’s about physics. It’s not about ideology.” Low prices improve “everything about human prosperity.” North Dakota got richer and cleaner. Royalties from Sable alone will deliver over $3.3 billion to the Treasury. Pump prices? “$5.95 here versus $3.63 in New Jersey. That’s because of policies.”

I asked about ramping up federal oversight to cut through California’s regulatory spaghetti. Wright called the state an “exception” that has stunted development, noting that local production under strict American rules beats shipping emissions overseas. Burgum spoke of the Commerce Clause when one state’s ideology harms its neighbors.

Flores added some local flavor: “Why does asphalt cost four times more in Santa Barbara County than neighboring Ventura? Hmm, let’s see, they’ve got oil production in Ventura, and Santa Barbara County outlawed oil production.”

The national press, bless their hearts, stuck rigidly to script — stranded assets, future lease plans, and tanker contingencies — without seriously engaging any of the data or logic laid out before them.

Back in the real world, Sable remains mired in lawsuits from a cozy tandem of local officials and NGOs. Despite Sable’s recent court wins, Santa Barbara County Supervisors and the Coastal Commission keep throwing wrenches — denied permits, injunctions, penalties — all cheered on by their nonprofit allies.

This is classic Santa Barbara: platforms operating under tough American standards that produce cleaner energy than the imports we depend on are treated as an existential threat. The result? Families paying through the nose at the pump, military bases reliant on foreign suppliers, and genuine environmental progress sacrificed for performative gestures that simply move the mess somewhere else.

Wright, Burgum, and the Sable team, offered a better script: abundance over subtraction, physics over fashion. It’s long past time our County Supervisors, the Coastal Commission, and the nonprofit industrial complex ended this expensive charade. The physics aren’t going away — and neither are the $6 gallons.

Nearly 45 years ago, on a ranch not far away, Ronald Reagan defied a similar “cult of malaise” with his landmark 1981 tax cuts. Critics sneered then too. Yet what followed was 92 months of continuous economic growth — the longest peacetime expansion America had seen at the time.

The right side of history belongs to the doers. If only the trolls would get out of their way.

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To counteract the recent actions of the State of California and its “War on Oil,” which pose an economic, societal, environmental, and most importantly, a National Security threat to the United States of America, we suggest an Executive Order to bring all California oil and gas operations as well as refinery and pipeline operations under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Government. Based on numerous independent studies and extensive discussions with producers, refiners, and pipeline operators, we have concluded that this could result in:

· Incremental (new) crude oil production ranging from 532,000 to 935,000 barrels of oil per day from California over a five-year period.

· Total estimated 732,000 to 1,135,000 barrels of oil per day in California production over a five-year period, inclusive of incremental production.

· Reduction or substantial elimination of foreign oil dependency and imports over a five-year period, resulting in energy independence.

· Reduction or substantial elimination of the $80 million a day in payments to foreign suppliers for crude oil imports.

· A 4% to 7% increase in total U.S. crude oil production over a five-year period (at current rates), thereby strengthening U.S. energy independence.

· Reduction in import-related air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions due to an increase in in-state crude oil production and a proportional decrease in polluting imports and use of foreign-flagged maritime tankers over a five-year period.

· Reduction in naturally occurring and avoidable air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. California has thousands of naturally occurring onshore and offshore oil leaks that seep from the ground every day. Since the leaking oil and gas (seepage) is not being diverted into producing wells, it causes extensive local pollution and contributes to global warming. The La Brea Tar Pit in Los Angeles is perhaps the most famous of these. Producing oil domestically is an environmental imperative as well as national security necessity.

· Increased employment and state and local tax revenues over a five-year period.

· Increased federal tax, fee, and royalty revenues.

The implementation of this Executive Order to bring all oil and gas operations, as well as refinery and pipeline operations, under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Government could dramatically increase California’s oil production. Tens of billions of barrels of recoverable oil remain in California, representing untapped strategic and economic resources for both the state and the U.S.

Over a five-year period, with federal management, oversight, support, accelerated permitting, and standard regulation, California could generate 532,000 to 935,000 barrels of oil per day (BOPD) in incremental (new) production by rapidly developing known fields in the following regions:

San Joaquin Basin

In total, the San Joaquin Basin (SJB) represents approximately 145,000-225,000 BOPD of incremental production potential. The SJB produces over 70% of California’s onshore oil, over 80% of which is heavy oil requiring steam flooding to enhance oil production. Developing the basin’s prolific Diatomite reservoirs, which are currently unproducible due to the state’s de facto hydraulic fracturing ban, could significantly increase the SJB’s production of medium and light oil, adding 65,000-100,000 BOPD. Under a DPA framework, 15,000 BOPD could come online within one year, and up to 100,000 BOPD could be achieved from the Lost Hills and Belridge diatomite reservoirs.

Thousands of formation water disposal permits are also currently being held up by the state and impeding additional oil production in the SJB and statewide. Additional light oil recovery from deeper Stevens and Monterey reservoirs via CO2-based enhanced recovery, combined with heavy oil projects currently suspended in state permit purgatory, could add a further 80,000-125,000 BOPD.

Offshore Santa Barbara County

Offshore development could triple to quintuple the current production from offshore California, adding significant incremental production to the 52,000 BOPD already coming from the Santa Ynez Unit, which could ultimately produce up to 100,000 BOPD as a result of the DPA order in March 2026.

The Santa Barbara Channel and adjacent Santa Maria Basin offshore trend represent one of the largest undeveloped domestic oil opportunities remaining in California. Significant hydrocarbon resources remain in both state and federal waters, much of which may be accessed from onshore drilling locations using modern extended-reach drilling technology. Broad, aggressive redevelopment across the Santa Barbara Channel and Santa Maria Basin offshore trends could potentially support incremental regional production of approximately 130,000-270,000 BOPD over a five-year period.

The South Ellwood Field

Offshore from the UC Santa Barbara campus is a particularly intriguing drilling target. Much of the South Ellwood field is relatively undeveloped, with over 600 million barrels of recoverable oil remaining. Furthermore, the seeps above the reservoir are among the largest contributors to air and marine pollution in the area. Historical production from the field demonstrably reduced seeps here, leading to meaningful reductions in the toxic gases and other hydrocarbons being naturally released into the ocean and air through seeps.

Extended-reach drilling from land can be used to tap the reservoir today without platforms or large footprint infrastructure, and incremental production of 50,000-100,000 BOPD could be realized in five years. A new land drilling island and a short pipeline extension would need to be constructed, and a permit to produce under state lands would need to be issued.

Los Angeles and Ventura Basins

Development of the Los Angeles and Ventura Basins could triple their current production. Over a five-year period, coordinated redevelopment of all Los Angeles and Ventura Basin fields could add 115,000-165,000 BOPD of incremental production. The Los Angeles and Ventura Basins remain one of the largest mature urban oil provinces in the United States and still contain substantial remaining recoverable hydrocarbons within existing giant fields.

Most opportunities are characterized by low geologic risk, low development costs, extensive existing infrastructure, nearby refining capacity, and well-understood conventional reservoirs. With political stability provided by the DPA and the removal of state setback rules, the basin would attract development capital. The United States Geological Survey (Gautier et. al, 2012) estimates between 1.4 and 5.6 billion barrels of remaining recoverable oil, principally medium and light, exists in the Los Angeles Basin spanning both Los Angeles and Orange Counties.

Beverly Hills and Downtown Los Angeles

The Beverly Hills and Downtown Los Angeles area is a particularly strong drilling target because, after 100 years of production, the reservoirs are still more than 80% full of oil on average. A study (Gautier, 2018) found that over 1.5 billion barrels of recoverable oil are present in the area and its immediate vicinity. There are five drilling/production ‘islands’ in the region, some of which are inside buildings. With modern drilling, seismic, and steering technology, the deep reservoirs can be tapped several miles from these existing islands without massive infrastructure buildout or greenfield development. An active program in the heart of Los Angeles could add approximately 25,000-50,000 BOPD within five years. The drilling would also reduce pollution and methane emissions from toxic seeps in the area, like the La Brea Tar Pits.

Central Coast

Development in the Central Coast region, comprised of the onshore Salinas and Santa Maria Basins in Monterey, San Luis Obispo, and Santa Barbara Counties, could apply modern, Canadian-style, low-footprint advanced development techniques (including multilateral wells, high-density pad drilling, and improved reservoir imaging) to increase recovery factors and well productivity, potentially allowing the region’s current oil production to increase by 4-8x, adding 40,000-75,000 BOPD of incremental oil production.

Achieving this production potential within a five-year period requires federal authority to cut through the permitting delays, setback restrictions, and regulatory bottlenecks that have stalled development across all these regions. The resources and infrastructure are well understood. What has been missing is the regulatory certainty that only federal jurisdiction can provide.

Figure 1 below illustrates the potential for 532,000 to 935,000 barrels of oil per day in new, incremental production, by region, that could be achieved if the federal government were to implement this suggested Executive Order and assert jurisdiction over California oil and gas operations.

The Santa Ynez Unit’s current production of approximately 52,000 BOPD, already underway following Presidential EO 14391 in March 2026, is reflected in the low estimate for that region. Figure 2 contrasts California’s projected baseline production of 200,000 BOPD in five years under continued state management and current decline rates with total projected production under federal intervention, illustrating that the proposed Executive Order could increase California’s total daily oil output to between 732,000 and 1,135,000 BOPD over five years, approximately 3.5x to 5.7x the projected baseline.

Figure 1. Incremental California Oil Production Enabled by Federal Intervention (BOPD)

Figure 2. California Oil Production: Without vs. With Federal Intervention (BOPD)

California’s Reliance on Foreign Oil is Dangerous and Dirty

Implementing the suggested Executive Order to bring all oil and gas operations, as well as refinery and pipeline operations, under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Government is in the best interests of the nation and those of California. As demonstrated by recent events, California’s reliance on foreign oil producers is fraught with risk and exposes California and the nation to the actions of foreign players whose interests are adverse to the nation. Furthermore, California’s policies contribute to increased global pollution, greenhouse emissions, and financially support foreign regimes such as Russia.

To effectuate the delivery of new, incremental production to market (refineries) will necessitate two additional supporting and essential Executive Orders. The first supporting Executive Order would direct the restarting of the San Pablo Bay pipeline. This 200,000+ BOPD pipeline transports crude oil from Central and Southern California to the San Francisco Bay Area. The pipeline has functionally collapsed due to a lack of sufficient in-state production. The second supporting Executive Order would direct PBF Energy’s Martinez refinery, a 157,000 BOPD facility currently receiving substantial amounts of imported crude via maritime delivery, to prioritize California-produced crude oil delivered via the San Pablo Bay pipeline over imports, at a ratio to be determined. As the federal government would be directing PBF to shift away from imported crude oil toward California-produced crude oil, appropriate offsets for any crude cost and transportation differentials would be provided as needed to ensure the order does not impose undue financial burden on refinery operations.

Conclusion

California’s oil and gas industry accounts for around 8% of the state’s GDP, but critically, it is the first 8% upon which all other industries rely. Without oil, the other 92% would be impossible to attain. Without petroleum, asphalt cannot be made, roads cannot be paved, and steel cannot be produced. Without gasoline, natural gas, and diesel fuels, California agricultural production would be a fraction of what it is today. EVs may ultimately replace internal combustion engines, but in California today, fully electric vehicles account for less than 7% of the cars on the road. EV growth has also slowed dramatically since federal subsidies were removed. Moreover, there are no viable alternatives at scale for replacing jet fuel as well as many petroleum-based products and petrochemicals.

While the state may wish and try to mandate that oil demand would drop precipitously, the data show a modest overall annual decline in demand that is not accelerating, thus requiring in-state production, transportation, and refining, for decades to come. In fact, jet fuel consumption is increasing significantly.

Responsibly developing California’s crude oil resources and preserving its pipelines and refineries are essential to ensuring the economic viability of the state, reducing consumer prices and state debt, improving social outcomes, resolving environmental issues, and maintaining the national security of the U.S. By invoking the suggested DPA discussed herein, and issuing Executive Orders to the Department of Energy and Department of Interior, the President can ensure crude oil and fuel security for California and strengthen national security and the U.S. military force readiness for generations to come.

•••

About the Authors

Mike Stoker: Environment, Energy & Agriculture Attorney (ret.), former Southwest Administrator US EPA; Former member of Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors, and currently President & CEO Santa Barbara County Taxpayer Advocacy Center.

Dr. James W. Rector: Professor of Geophysics and Energy, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Department of Earth and Planetary Science; Senior Faculty Scientist, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Michael Mische: Associate Professor of Professional Practice, Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California; Senior Faculty Researcher, Oil and Gas Zage Business of Energy Initiative

Joseph Silvi: B.S. Environmental Engineering, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UC Berkeley; Energy Researcher and Environmental Advocate

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Increasing California’s In-State Crude Oil Production is Critical

California has created a local oil and fuel supply crisis that is causing negative socio-economic impacts throughout the western United States and serious national security implications for the entire country. In this column, we present a suggested Executive Order for the President and Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, designed to address this crisis by substantially increasing California in-state crude oil production and preserving essential infrastructure, thereby stabilizing consumer prices and ensuring U.S. force readiness and national security.

California’s Oil Paradox

This state has been a leading producer of crude oil and refined fuels for over 150 years and is ranked sixth in terms of proven reserves of oil. If offshore areas are included, California has more potentially recoverable oil than any other state, including Texas and Alaska. California was the top crude oil producer in the world during the 1920s, supplying over 29% of the world’s oil needs and nearly 40% of U.S. production. Over the past 50 years, California’s political pressures and regulatory costs have mounted, and crude oil production in the Golden State began a long, torturous decline that has accelerated dramatically in the last seven years.

Since January 2019, new drilling permits in California have dropped by over 90%, in-state crude oil production has plummeted by 44%, and crude oil imports from petro-nations such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, and Ecuador now make up over 60% of California refinery oil sources. Even though, as we will show, California is awash in oil underground, it is now more dependent on foreign oil than any other state.

The decline in in-state production and replacement by imports has been by design. Obstructionist laws and procedures have recently been implemented by both state and some local governments, making it nearly impossible to produce oil in California today. This “War on Oil” has all but destroyed small, independent California oil producers, has hurt thousands of workers who make their living in the California oil industry, and dramatically reduced state tax and royalty revenue.

The precipitous drop in domestic production has also caused a halt to crude oil flows in the San Pablo Bay crude oil pipeline system, which historically transported over 200,000 BOPD of Central and Southern California production to San Francisco Bay Area refineries. Today, the remaining Bay Area refineries are completely dependent upon maritime tanker imports, and all in-state production goes south to Bakersfield and Los Angeles refineries.

Foreign Crude Suppliers versus In-State Producers

The shutdown of 20% of California refining capacity in 2025-2026 has increased California’s overall gasoline, jet fuel, and other refined product imports from a historical 3-7% to nearly 25%. The recent Iran conflict added fuel to the fire by exposing the issues associated with California’s overreliance on imports. Gasoline and jet fuel prices in California have risen far more than in the rest of the nation. California “exports” over $80 million a day to foreign suppliers of crude and refined products.

These foreign crude suppliers have it easy compared to in-state producers. They are not required to comply with or maintain operations consistent with California’s “environmental leadership” standards for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, pollution, health and safety, and labor employment practices. For example, Iraq – California’s largest supplier of crude – is one of the world’s worst gas flaring offenders.

Many of Iraq’s flares are substandard and have released massive amounts of benzene, a known human carcinogen, into the air of nearby villages in a region known as “The Cemetery.” This has caused widespread, terminal cases of leukemia, especially in children. Iraq’s wetlands have also been severely damaged as companies use massive quantities of freshwater to boost reservoir pressure.

Ecuador, which exports the majority of its Amazon crude oil to California, has clear cut, polluted, and critically damaged, millions of acres of the biodiverse Amazon Rainforest, and has violently and forcibly displaced native tribes from their ancestral lands to make way for largely unregulated oil production.

These operations are increasingly dominated by Chinese state-owned oil companies including CNPC and Sinopec. Ecuador’s Armed Forces violently evicted the A’i Cofán people from their territory to make way for drilling and production which ultimately supplies California. Shortly thereafter, Eduardo Mendúa, the indigenous leader who organized the resistance, was shot 12 times and killed outside his home.

Moreover, pollution and emissions associated with shipping the crude oil 6,000 to 8,000 miles, and gasoline (sometimes more than 12,000 miles) is not incorporated in California pollution and emissions accounting.

Finally, stringent environmental rules implemented in the 2010s have dramatically decreased emissions from producing wells and associated facilities in California. Today, natural seep emissions dwarf production operations emissions by a factor of 100.

Ironically, oil production is the solution to reduce these seep emissions by reducing reservoir pressure and leakage.

National Security Concerns

California is essential to the national and economic security of the United States and the defense of the Indo-Pacific region. Major military installations located in California include the Pacific Fleet based in San Diego, United States Marines stationed at Camp Pendleton, Naval Base Ventura County, Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, United States Coast Guard stations located inland and along the state’s 840-mile coastline, and United States Air Force bases, including Beale, Edwards and Travis as well as the Vandenberg Space Force Base.

California’s military installations sit as the vanguard of U.S. forces directly facing potential nuclear adversaries such as North Korea, Russia, and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and transnational terrorist organizations in the Philippines, Malaysia, Iran, and the Middle East.

Military installations in California need stable sources of fuel, which means it must be domestically produced and refined, not imported. Forward U.S. bases cannot rely on fuel shipments or crude oil from the Middle East or on refineries in Asia to prosecute and sustain military operations. However, California has communicated its desire to rely on imports and phase out its domestic production, soon creating a direct and unequivocal national security threat to the U.S.

The President began to address this potential problem when, on January 20, 2025, he issued Executive Order 14156 (Declaring a National Energy Emergency), under the National Emergencies Act, and pursuant to the powers endowed upon the President by the Defense Production Act (DPA) of 1950. Subsequently, on March 13, 2026, the President issued directives under the DPA to Department of Energy Secretary Christopher Wright, instructing Sable Offshore Corporation to begin production of crude oil located in federal waters off the California shoreline in Santa Barbara County.

Recent Federal Actions

Presidential authority to address matters of national security is created through the interaction of legislation and presidential directives, including Executive Orders. Specifically:

Defense Production Act

Codified as P.L. 81-774, 50 U.S.C. §§4501, as amended, the Defense Production Act (DPA) of 1950 provides the President of the United States with broad authorities and powers in matters related to domestic industry and national security. The DPA provides the President with three important powers: 1) the power to direct and expand production and supplies, 2) the power to prioritize and allocate resources to ensure and enhance national defense, and 3) the power to direct, create, and enter into contracts and agreements with private industry.

Executive Order 14156

This order found that America’s inadequate energy production, transportation, refining, and generation capacity constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the nation’s economy, national security, and foreign policy. It emphasized that our nation’s current inadequate and intermittent energy supply leaves us vulnerable to hostile foreign actors and poses an imminent and growing threat to the United States’ prosperity and national security. The President declared in the Order that purchases, purchase commitments, financial support for the development of production capabilities, or other action pursuant to Section 303 of the Act are the most cost-effective, expedient, and practical alternative methods for meeting this need to increase domestic petroleum production, refining, and logistics capacity, including exploration and production, gathering and transmission pipelines, storage, and marine terminals, are industrial resources, materials, or critical technology items essential to the national defense.

Executive Order 14260

Titled Protecting American Energy from State Overreach, this executive order instructs the U.S. Attorney General to identify and legally challenge state and local environmental laws that burden domestic energy production. The order asserts that regional restrictions on fossil fuel development conflict with federal authority and violate the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. By targeting restrictive local permitting frameworks and state emissions caps, this action establishes the federal policy framework required to pre-empt state interference in national energy supply chains.

Expanded Actions

Subsequent to Executive Orders 14156 and 14260, the federal government, at the direction of the President, has taken a series of essential steps to expand domestic and California petroleum production under the DPA. These actions were necessary for national security and collectively signal a significant shift toward energy independence and federal intervention in oil and gas operations, particularly in states with restrictive permitting regimes such as California. Key developments include:

March 3, 2026, Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinion confirming that the President, and by delegation, the Secretary of Energy, may lawfully order domestic oil and gas companies to produce products under the DPA.

March 13, 2026, Presidential Executive Order 14391 delegating DPA authority to the Secretary of Energy; a Department of Energy (DOE) Executive Order directing Sable Offshore, Inc. to commence production at the Santa Ynez Unit despite the absence of state approvals and an active state court injunction.

April 20, 2026, Presidential Memorandum to Executive Order 14156 establishing federal policy support for expanded domestic petroleum production, refining, and logistics capacity.

•••

Tomorrow’s (Saturday) follow-up column will focus on total energy production in places such as Beverly Hills, Ventura, offshore Santa Barbara, downtown Los Angeles, elsewhere in the state and why it’s so important to Drill, Baby, Drill once again in order to save the Golden State.

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Public employees are hired with a fundamental promise to the taxpayer: to execute specific, defined, duties that serve a broader community mission. Santa Barbara County Superintendent of Schools Susan Salcido has publicly stated that she welcomes input as an opportunity to improve.

The reality, operating behind closed doors under her administration, however, tells a starkly different story.

Public employees must be able to do the job they were hired and described to do; if they are systematically prevented from executing those responsibilities, the mission of the organization fundamentally fails. At the Santa Barbara County Education Office (SBCEO), a broken operational model has emerged under Superintendent Salcido’s leadership that perfectly illustrates this failure, one where taxpayers are effectively being double-billed because the administration refuses to manage its own workforce.

This crisis begins at the top. When executive leadership lacks the capability, technical literacy, or willingness to effectively empower their own teams, they frequently turn to outsourcing as a crutch. Under Salcido’s administration, Associate Superintendent Steve Torres and IT Manager Sheryl Pognant have built a system that actively sidelines highly qualified internal specialists.

Rather than cultivating internal expertise, this leadership team quietly hands over critical infrastructure functions to a private contractor. Internal staff were explicitly hired with job descriptions that require them to manage and secure the organization’s network, yet they are often locked out of the very systems they were employed to protect.

The financial waste of this practice is staggering. The agency pays its internal salaried staff to perform specialized work, but simultaneously pays an external vendor up to $225 per hour to actually do it. That external vendor is paid a massive premium to execute the exact same responsibilities explicitly written into the internal staff’s job descriptions, such as basic firewall administration and network configuration. Taxpayers are footing the bill twice: once for the sidelined public employee who is left severely underutilized, and again for the high-priced private consultant.

This reflects a deeper, systemic stagnation that plagues the broader government sector: the widening gap between what an agency needs to function and what its leadership is capable of understanding. Under Salcido’s administration, job descriptions for top administrative roles remain woefully out of date, referencing obsolete programming languages rather than modern operational necessities. When an organization’s listed duties no longer align with modern realities, and when leadership’s capabilities no longer meet their duty requirements, the entire agency stagnates.

Outsourcing Staff Duties is Breach of Public Trust

And instead of aligning the job to the description or updating the organization’s capabilities, this administration has chosen to protect a broken system. When inquiries are made and public records requests are filed to follow the money, the agency hides the receipts. Under the administration’s direction, Ms. Pognant, Mr. Torres, and their legal counsel use heavy redactions to obscure basic spending details, equipment models, and vendor involvement. They rely on vague excuses to justify their secrecy, using public records laws as a shield to sweep mismanagement under the rug rather than opening their books to the community.

We must look at this from a broader perspective. This level of opaqueness and inefficiency under Superintendent Salcido is not just an IT problem; it is a profound breach of public trust. When the public assumes their tax dollars are funding capable public servants carrying out their defined roles, only to discover those duties are being outsourced at premium rates due to internal leadership failures, skepticism about government takes root.

Today, technology is too critically important to be mismanaged in the dark. Public service is a responsibility. When an administration prioritizes protecting a broken status quo over capable, transparent governance, it fails the community it was built to serve.

Core Concern: Efficiency and Effectiveness

As I reviewed CompuVision’s billing patterns over the years, I noticed a recurring theme: purchases that approached, but rarely exceeded, competitive bid thresholds. While staying under bid limits is legally compliant, it raises questions about whether we’re achieving the best value for taxpayer dollars.

The concern isn’t that CompuVision’s services are, in total, unnecessary, but rather that we’re not exploring whether the same outcomes could be achieved more cost-effectively. When invoices

consistently land just under procurement thresholds, it suggests a concerted effort to work projects based on the upper limit vs. based on the need.

More troubling is the overlap between expensive external labor and the job descriptions of internal staff. When we pay $175-$250 per hour for vendor technicians while our own certified staff, already on payroll at $40-$55 per hour, are prevented from performing the same work, we’re essentially paying twice for the same service. This isn’t just inefficient; it’s demoralizing to professional staff who watch vendors perform the duties they were hired and trained to do.

•••

Victor McConnell is a former SBCEO Computer/Network Technician who advocates for infrastructure modernization, strict taxpayer accountability, and equitable resources in public education.

•••

SBCurrent’s Primary Endorsements Here.

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1 DAY

NOTE FROM BOB SMITH

If you have not voted yet, we need you now.

* Avoid Mail Delays * Please do not use regular mail at this point.

Instead:

• Drop your ballot in an official white ballot box

• Take it directly to your county elections office

• Vote in person at an authorized voting location

Every ballot matters in a low-turnout primary, and we are close enough to beat Democrat turnout if Republicans finish strong over these final days.

Please also contact friends or family members you know who have not voted yet. We need all hands on deck. Thank you!

PROUDLY RUNNNING FOR

CALIFORNIA’S 24th CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT

Read more

The Masks Are Off

My name is Alex Jones, and yes, I’m the guy behind the “Clowns and Cake Eaters” political ads shaking up Santa Barbara County politics.

And before the usual crowd of consultants, insiders, and pearl-clutching political elites, begin another week-long meltdown, I want to take this opportunity to apologize.

To absolutely no one.

Because the truth is simple. Santa Barbara County politics has become a circus. The same connected insiders. The same activist politicians. The same people lecturing working families while living lives completely disconnected from them.

So, I made ads that reflected reality.

Apparently calling politicians clowns is now more offensive than politicians voting to give themselves raises during economic uncertainty. Apparently, satire is dangerous, but political arrogance is perfectly acceptable.

Interesting standard.

But before the establishment media rushes to paint me as some outsider or internet troll, let me introduce myself properly.

My family has deep roots in this county. My great-great-grandfather, William Walter Twist, was the first Sheriff of Santa Barbara County. Ruth Twist became the first female postmistress in Santa Barbara County. I grew up in Santa Ynez in the same home my great-grandfather C.M. Jones and grandmother Magdalena Jones lived in over a century ago, a home that has been in our family for more than 100 years. They owned the C.M. Jones Garage, now known as the Johnson Building.

This county is not just a place I moved to.

It is home.

It is family history.

It is identity.

I am not a political consultant crafted in a laboratory somewhere in Sacramento or Washington, D.C. I am a local guy who grew up around ranches, small businesses, community events, and hardworking people trying to build a good life in one of the most beautiful places in the world.

And yes, politics has always been around my family.

My mother has been a political firebrand in Santa Barbara County for years. She served on local boards and ran for county supervisor twice. Most people locally know exactly who she is.

Nationally, however, she became known for something else.

My mother became one of the most recognizable faces connected to January 6 after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor trespassing charge related to attending the Capitol protest. Whatever your politics, what I watched happen afterward changed me forever.

I watched much of the local media reduce a complicated human being into a caricature.

There was no nuance. No fairness. No humanity.

Just a narrative.

That bothered me deeply.

Because my mother is many things. She is outspoken. She is intense. She is hilarious. She is creative. She is generous. She is hardworking. She is deeply human.

That experience opened my eyes to how powerful media narratives can become when a small group of people controls the conversation. And frankly, I got tired of watching conservatives and political outsiders constantly play defense while the other side dominated culture, messaging, creativity, and media.

So, I decided to fight differently.

Not with stale press releases.

Not with consultant-written talking points. But with humor. Satire. Creativity. AI tools. Video storytelling. Internet culture. Memes. Political art.

The political class wants you to believe these ads are somehow beyond the pale because they mock power. But political cartoons, parody, and ridicule have always been part of American politics.

If a silly AI-generated circus video rattles the political machine this much, maybe the problem is not the video. Maybe the problem is that the public is finally laughing at people who are accustomed to never being questioned.

And that is exactly why I’m launching The Whipping Post.

The Whipping Post is built on a simple idea: that people should have better tools than the political consultants. Not just politicians. Not just campaigns. The people.

A place where citizens can create, share, fund, and amplify political content. A place where ideas compete in public. A place where satire, criticism, storytelling, and creativity belong to everyone instead of being controlled by a handful of insiders.

For too long, political communication has flowed in one direction: from the powerful to the public. The Whipping Post flips that around.

The people become the storytellers.

The people become the producers.

The people become the publishers.

The people become the media.

The political establishment is upset about a few AI-generated clown videos. They’re missing the bigger story. The bigger story is that the monopoly on political communication is ending. Because this county does not belong to the consultants. It does not belong to the insiders. It does not belong to the clowns. It does not belong to the cake eaters.

It belongs to the people. And the people are finally getting a microphone.

****

Alex Jones is a fourth-generation son of Santa Barbara County, technologist, producer, director, entrepreneur, political satirist, legendary local athlete, and, according to highly questionable sources, the best dancer you know.

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3 DAYS

A NOTE FROM BOB SMITH

Friends,

Republicans are essentially tied with Democrat turnout on the Central Coast right now. That means this primary can absolutely be won if Republicans who still have ballots at home turn them in immediately.

If you have not voted yet, we need you now.

* Avoid Mail Delays * Please do not use regular mail at this point.

Instead:

• Drop your ballot in an official white ballot box

• Take it directly to your county elections office

• Vote in person at an authorized voting location

Every ballot matters in a low-turnout primary, and we are close enough to beat Democrat turnout if Republicans finish strong over these final days.

Please also contact friends or family members you know who have not voted yet. We need all hands on deck. Thank you!

PROUDLY RUNNNING FOR
CALIFORNIA’S 24th CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT

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For most of American history, the strength of the republic rested not on party machinery but on the character of the citizens who guided it. Parties were tools — not engines — and they functioned only when responsible men and women stepped forward to shape them. Today, many assume that platforms, strategy, and funding are handled somewhere “out there,” by distant institutions. But historically, these responsibilities belonged to the prominent citizens of each community.

This is not a partisan point. It is a civic one. A selfgoverning people cannot outsource the duties that make selfgovernment possible.

The Older Expectation: Noblesse Oblige

The principle behind this older structure is noblesse oblige — the expectation that those with education, resources, or public trust, owe a higher standard of conduct and service. The phrase entered modern usage in 1808, but the ethic is far older. It appears in Homeric leadership, in Roman civic life, and in the early American republic.

For generations, this expectation shaped American civic life. Prominent citizens wrote platforms, coordinated strategy, and provided the financial support that allowed parties to function. Ordinary voters participated by choosing among the visions presented to them — but the work of defining those visions belonged to those with the standing to do so.

This was not politics. It was civic duty.

How This Duty Was Forgotten

If noblesse oblige was once so central, why has it faded from public memory?

The answer is not moral decline.

It is structural change.

First, the institutions that once gathered prominent citizens — civic clubs, veterans’ groups, local newspapers — weakened. These institutions once reinforced shared standards of duty. As they faded, the sense of collective responsibility faded with them.

Second, the public gradually lost sight of its own expectations. Earlier generations understood that platform, strategy, and funding, were not abstract “party functions.” They were the work of real people in their own communities. As national organizations grew, many assumed that responsibility had shifted upward. They forgot that the system is people.

Third, the pace of modern life crowded out older civic habits. Nationalized communication replaced local deliberation. Entertainment replaced stewardship. The quiet virtues of responsibility and service were overshadowed.

Noblesse oblige did not fail.

It was crowded out.

Why Only the Prominent Can Carry These Duties

Certain responsibilities in civic life simply cannot be performed by the general public. They require:

• Experience to understand long-term needs

• Judgment to distinguish between what is popular and what is necessary

• Resources to sustain civic work

• Credibility to speak for the community

These qualities cannot be assigned by law. They arise from standing — the kind that comes from service, accomplishment, or long-term investment in the community.

This is why, historically, the prominent carried these duties. Not because they were entitled to them, but because they were responsible for them.

Why the Public Must Understand This

A healthy republic requires two things: prominent citizens who remember their obligations, and voters who remember to expect those obligations.

When either side forgets, civic life weakens. When both forget, the republic drifts.

Restoring noblesse oblige does not require new laws. It requires memory — shared memory.

A Closing Reflection

Santa Barbara has always depended on citizens who step forward not for attention, but for responsibility. That tradition is part of our heritage. It is worth remembering, and worth restoring.

This message is not for one side or the other. It is for all of us.

A republic endures when its prominent remember their obligations, and its public remembers its expectations. That is how civic life is steadied. That is how a nation — and a county — holds together.

•••

Joseph Graetch lives in Santa Ynez and submitted this short essay on civic responsibility, he says, “to remind readers of a civic duty that once guided communities like ours. It is not political and does not address any candidates or issues. It’s a piece about the older American expectation that influence carries responsibility, and how that expectation has faded across our culture.

“If you find it suitable for publication, I would be grateful.”

We do find it suitable for publication, and we thank Mr. Graetch for his contribution, and for the contributions of all the generous people who’ve come before and have left us the beautiful legacy that surrounds us.

•••

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4 DAYS

A NOTE FROM BOB SMITH

Friends,

Republicans are essentially tied with Democrat turnout on the Central Coast right now. That means this primary can absolutely be won if Republicans who still have ballots at home turn them in immediately.

If you have not voted yet, we need you now.

* Avoid Mail Delays * Please do not use regular mail at this point.

Instead:

• Drop your ballot in an official white ballot box

• Take it directly to your county elections office

• Vote in person at an authorized voting location

Every ballot matters in a low-turnout primary, and we are close enough to beat Democrat turnout if Republicans finish strong over these final days.

Please also contact friends or family members you know who have not voted yet. We need all hands on deck. Thank you!

PROUDLY RUNNNING FOR
CALIFORNIA’S 24th CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT

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Energy Production Is Not a Side Issue

California politicians have spent years treating energy policy as a political branding exercise rather than an engineering problem. The results are obvious to anyone paying an electric bill, trying to build a business, or wondering why affordability continues collapsing across our state.

Energy affects everything.

You cannot run a modern economy on unstable, expensive energy and expect the middle class to survive.

Major tech companies continue relocating their equipment to places like Austin, Tennessee, and Florida. It’s simply bad business to stay in California and pay double the national average for energy.

This is not an attack on renewables. They absolutely have a place. But California’s current renewable strategy is increasingly driven by political ideology rather than engineering reality.

Solar makes tremendous sense in many situations, especially for distributed generation directly on homes, warehouses, schools, parking structures, and commercial buildings, where electricity can be used locally. Generating power where it is consumed reduces transmission losses and offsets daytime demand without requiring massive new infrastructure.

That is practical engineering.

But California increasingly acts as if intermittent renewable generation alone can power a modern industrial economy at scale, around the clock.

It cannot.

California’s Grid Problem

Right now, California curtails enormous amounts of renewable energy because we cannot store it at scale.

Curtailment means we are literally throwing away electricity because the grid cannot use it fast enough, and we do not have the ability to store it for later use.

California currently throws away roughly 3,400 gigawatt-hours of renewable electricity annually, enough to power about 750,000 coastal homes for an entire year.

At the same time, much of our nighttime electricity still comes from imported natural gas because long-duration storage technology does not yet exist at the scale required to power a state like California overnight.

Battery storage is not simply a matter of “building more battery facilities.” The technology required for massive state-level, multi-day energy storage at an affordable scale does not yet exist in a mature form.

That means California is simultaneously:

• dumping power we cannot store

• importing power we cannot reliably generate

• paying some of the highest electricity prices in America

That is not an intelligent energy policy.

California’s primary problem is not environmental. It is an engineering and governance problem.

Natural gas, hydroelectric, and nuclear plants, do not require massive grid-scale battery storage because electricity demand is matched directly to continuous turbine generation in real time.

In a world increasingly driven by advanced technology, energy systems, AI, cybersecurity, and computing, we need more elected leaders with genuine STEM education and practical engineering experience. Very few elected officials today have meaningful backgrounds in those fields, even as they govern some of the most technologically complex systems in human history.

What Are Small Modular Reactors?

This is where Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) enter the conversation.

SMRs are not the giant nuclear plants most people picture from the 1970s. They are dramatically smaller, safer, modular, and more advanced. Many designs can be factory-produced and transported in sections, rather than requiring massive, custom-built mega-projects.

That matters enormously in California, where land costs, permitting, environmental lawsuits, and seismic concerns make conventional infrastructure both difficult and expensive to build.

And unlike intermittent generation, SMRs provide stable baseload electricity around the clock. No sunset problem. No weather dependency. No emergency imports. No massive curtailment.

Why SMRs Make Sense for California

California’s future electric demand is increasing dramatically.

Artificial intelligence, desalination, electrification, aerospace, advanced manufacturing, and data centers, all require enormous amounts of reliable electricity.

You cannot power that future entirely with intermittent generation and political slogans.

My proposal is straightforward: use federal partnerships, including those with the Pentagon, to position the Central Coast as a national prototype for advanced SMR deployment by leveraging existing federal infrastructure and military bases such as Port Hueneme and Vandenberg Space Force Base.

Why Federal Land and Defense Partnerships?

Because the federal government already safely operates complex nuclear systems, including advanced compact nuclear reactor systems aboard submarines and aircraft carriers. It can also bypass much of California’s bureaucratic paralysis that prevents major infrastructure from ever getting built here in the first place.

In plain English: California’s current energy policies are trapping the state in a cycle of instability, rising costs, endless delays, and political theater. Federal partnerships may be one of the few realistic ways to break through that gridlock and build the future.

And the Central Coast is uniquely positioned for it.

We should be leading the future of American energy, not importing expensive power while curtailing our own generation. This approach also aligns with our universities, which are already working on advanced quantum computing that requires enormous amounts of energy and can help produce the next generation of engineers needed to design, operate, and maintain these systems.

This technology also creates high-paying skilled trade jobs in plumbing, HVAC, construction, and electrical work. We can expand vocational and trade programs here on the Central Coast to support that workforce.

Let’s Talk About Nuclear Waste

Whenever nuclear energy is discussed, people immediately picture glowing green sludge and environmental catastrophe. That is decades of Hollywood imagery and political fearmongering shaping public perception.

Modern nuclear waste is highly regulated, heavily shielded, compact, and carefully monitored. In fact, the total volume of spent nuclear fuel produced by the United States can fit on one football field.

Meanwhile, many supposedly “green” technologies require:

• enormous mining operations and rare earth extraction

• massive transmission expansion requiring enormous amounts of copper that do not exist without strip mining

• huge material consumption

• enormous land-use footprints spanning thousands of square miles

Every Energy Source Has Tradeoffs.

The difference is that nuclear waste is contained, measurable, and managed. Much of it consists of elements such as uranium and cesium that can potentially be recycled or repurposed for medical, industrial, and future fuel applications.

Lastly, nuclear energy sidesteps much of the political warfare over emissions entirely. It has zero greenhouse gas emissions during operation.

Engineering, Not Political Theater

At the end of the day, energy policy should not be ideological. It should be practical.

• Use renewables where they make sense

• Use nuclear where it makes sense

• Use engineering instead of political theater

• Stay away from politically driven offshore wind projects that risk becoming another California mega-project defined by delays, lawsuits, cost overruns, and underperformance.

California cannot solve affordability without solving energy. And the Central Coast can help lead that future if we choose engineering reality instead of political theater.

•••

Bob Smith is a retired Navy veteran and candidate for California’s 24th Congressional District

•••

5 DAYS

A NOTE FROM BOB SMITH

Friends,

Republicans are essentially tied with Democrat turnout on the Central Coast right now. That means this primary can absolutely be won if Republicans who still have ballots at home turn them in immediately.

If you have not voted yet, we need you now.

* Avoid Mail Delays * Please do not use regular mail at this point.

Instead:

• Drop your ballot in an official white ballot box

• Take it directly to your county elections office

• Vote in person at an authorized voting location

Every ballot matters in a low-turnout primary, and we are close enough to beat Democrat turnout if Republicans finish strong over these final days.

Please also contact friends or family members you know who have not voted yet. We need all hands on deck. Thank you!

PROUDLY RUNNNING FOR
CALIFORNIA’S 24th CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT

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California’s property tax system, anchored by Proposition 13, has long been considered a safeguard against runaway taxation. By capping the base property tax rate at 1% of assessed value, it created predictability for homeowners and businesses alike. Yet today, even that limit deserves reconsideration—not upward, as some have argued, but downward. Reducing the rate to three-quarters of a percent or even one-half percent would impose needed discipline on government while empowering residents and revitalizing the state’s economy.

The core issue is not merely the rate itself, but what has happened to government spending over time. California’s state and local budgets have expanded dramatically, supported in part by steady and substantial property tax revenue streams. While public investment is essential for infrastructure, education, and safety, the growth of spending has increasingly flowed into areas that lack transparency and measurable outcomes. Billions are directed to non-governmental organizations and nonprofit entities whose effectiveness is often difficult to evaluate. Taxpayers are left to wonder whether their contributions are truly improving communities or simply sustaining bureaucratic ecosystems.

Nowhere is this concern more visible than in major urban centers such as Los Angeles. Despite massive expenditures aimed at addressing homelessness, public safety, and urban blight, many neighborhoods continue to struggle with crime, vagrant encampments, and deteriorating public spaces. Residents see firsthand the disconnect between funding levels and real-world results. Parks that should be safe for families are avoided, and public confidence in government stewardship is gone.

Accelerate Reform by Lowering Property Tax Rate

Advocates of maintaining or increasing current tax levels argue that more funding is the solution. However, decades of rising expenditures suggest otherwise. Without structural incentives to prioritize efficiency, additional revenue can enable complacency rather than reform. Reducing the property tax rate would reverse this dynamic and requires a CA referendum to enact it. By limiting the resources available, it would compel state and local governments to focus on core responsibilities—public safety, infrastructure, and essential services—while reevaluating programs that fail to deliver measurable value and end them.

This approach is grounded in a simple principle: scarcity drives prioritization. When government must operate within tighter fiscal constraints, it is forced to make difficult but necessary decisions. Wasteful spending, redundant programs, and ineffective initiatives are more likely to be scrutinized and eliminated. In contrast, an ever-expanding revenue base reduces the urgency for such accountability.

Lowering property taxes would also have a direct and positive impact on California residents. Homeownership remains one of the most significant financial commitments for individuals and families. Even modest reductions in property tax rates can translate into meaningful savings, increasing disposable income and improving financial stability. For small businesses, reduced tax burdens can free up capital for hiring, expansion, and innovation—key drivers of economic growth.

Slowing the California Outmigration Movement

Moreover, California continues to face a well-documented outmigration trend, with residents and businesses relocating to states perceived as more affordable and business friendly. High overall tax burdens are frequently cited as a contributing factor. By reducing property taxes, residents will send the state a powerful signal to commit to competitiveness and economic vitality. Retaining residents and attracting new investment would ultimately strengthen the tax base in a more sustainable way than relying on higher rates applied to a shrinking population.

Critics may contend that lowering property taxes would jeopardize funding for essential services. However, this assumes that current spending levels are both necessary and efficient. Californians question this assumption. Efforts to audit and reform government spending—sometimes described as a “Department of Government Efficiency” approach—seek to identify waste, fraud, and abuse within existing budgets. Supporters of reform, like Spencer Pratt, argue that significant savings can be achieved without compromising core services, simply by improving oversight and accountability.

The broader goal is not austerity for its own sake, but smarter governance. Taxpayers deserve confidence that their money is being used effectively, not diverted into programs that prioritize advocacy over results. Reducing the property tax rate is one way to restore that confidence by aligning government incentives with public expectations and the author has a state ballot initiative drafted that will do this.

California has long been known as the Golden State—a place of opportunity, innovation, and prosperity. Reclaiming that identity requires a willingness to rethink entrenched systems and challenge assumptions about taxation and spending. A lower property tax rate would not solve every problem, but it would represent a meaningful step toward fiscal responsibility, economic renewal, and greater accountability.

•••

Author and June 2 candidate J Brett Marymee is running for District 2 Board of Equalization and values your vote. He is endorsed by Reform California and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association. He seeks to serve on California’s top tax board to bring common-sense tax burden relief to all California residents.

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I was reading this pesky document the other day. It’s called “The Constitution.” For those who may not have heard of it, it’s the thing that pretty much guides our country through thick and thin. We are, after all, a “Constitutional Republic.” Oh yes, we “practice” democracy. But it’s that document, The Constitution, that actually directs us on how we operate.

Or at least it’s supposed to.

The folks who created it spent a lot of blood and treasure and divine guidance to refine that piece of paper down to its basic, critical essentials. It’s revolutionary. No other country is so pro-individual. You. Me. Being a fulfilled person… is to be free.

Now you don’t have to read the whole thing to understand what it means. In fact, it’s pretty simple. There’s a little preface that sets it all up. I actually memorized it in fourth grade. That was when in school you would actually learn things like history and math and English and, you know, useful stuff to get you through life.

Those kinds of things.

So, the short little bit of words I memorized is called “The Preamble” I’m going to recite it for you right now. Here goes.

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America”.

Pretty simple, Huh? But notice what it does say, and what it doesn’t.

What is does say, is that the entire purpose of our government is to protect us, so that we can be free to exercise our “inalienable “rights. Those are rights that are given by God, or whatever you wish to call a higher power. You can’t take them away. They’re yours.

Since those rights come from God, and not from “man” … ipso facto, government, under our Constitution, exists only to defend those basic principles. Not control them.

But here’s the zinger. Notice the phrase “Promote the general welfare.” Our founders were very particular in their choice of words and phrases. And therefor, “promote” the general welfare.

Not “establish.” Not “provide.” Not “insure.” Not “secure.” Just “promote.”

And what they intended with this very specific term, is that the government will do its best to create a secure environment for all citizens to be free to thrive and grow and prosper, and the government will cheer you on. That’s it. Not take care of you.

That’s where we’ve lost ourselves, and the founding principles of being an American. We’ve railroaded our government into a myriad of social service programs that create a dependency that was never intended. And it’s sick. And it’s criminal.

We have safety nets with non-profits and churches and communities for those truly in need. But government always messes things up.

Now obviously you’re not free to beat up your neighbor or burn down a building or steal from an institution or…. that’s the part that says: “Establish Justice. Insure domestic tranquility.”

But, call me naïve, doesn’t it seem these days that we’re demonizing and defunding our law “enforcers,” and coddling and funding our law “breakers,” in complete defiance of what our Constitution promises? And in the latter case, the scams and graft and theft through various government programs is by the billions with a “B.” Maybe even a “T.” If you pay taxes, you’re getting ripped off folks. And it’s all the fault of the scoundrels that “we” vote in to enforce the laws, not break them.

But break them they do. And it’s (to use an overused term), “systemic.”

So now we’ve got these really creepy and dangerous extremists running New York City and Seattle and Portland and Minneapolis and Chicago and Los Angeles and…. stop me, please. Who voted for them? They don’t like our country; they may even hate our country. They want to remake it into something it was never intended to be. And it’s doomed to failure. The money they squander through giveaways to stay in power is departing as they pontificate. Santa Claus is leaving with all the wealth.

And we all live with the consequences. You. Me. And our treasures: Our kids. Our grandkids. And those yet to come. Our future. “We” are screwing them over.

Is the pain bad enough yet? Then it’s time that you vote for sanity. For common sense. And stop voting for “feel-good failure.” Or, to quote the great Jewish behavioral scientist, Gad Saad, “Suicidal Empathy.” Misdirected compassion.

And here in California …well, I don’t want to name names, but…. don’t vote for Steyer or Becerra or Porter or Bass or Carbajal or…. the list is endless, and so is the damage they’ve inflicted because they pretend to be for you… but they are only for themselves and their corrupt ideology. Time for a “fundamental change” back to the fundamentals. Not too much to ask, is it? Just get the government out of the way and we’ll be more than fine. The Constitution will protect you and your freedom and the satisfaction of self-reliance, if you let it.

•••

(John Summer is just a regular guy who believes in goofy things like Family, Country, and God. If that’s not your thing, then you’re living in the wrong place. Maybe head to the north pole? But Santa won’t take care of you. He’s left town.)

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Santa Barbara’s Air and Beaches are Being Fouled by Natural Seeps

Walk along the beaches of Isla Vista, Goleta, Santa Barbara, Montecito, Summerland, and Carpinteria, and you’ll hear the same confident refrain:

“Look at all this tar from those horrible oil platforms.”

It’s repeated so often that most Californians assume it must be true. Black tar on the sand? Offshore production. Oily sheen offshore? Offshore production. “Tar feet” at Sands Beach? It must be offshore production.

It’s not.

The oil currently washing onto the beaches around Isla Vista in Santa Barbara County comes from natural seeps at Coal Oil Point and the surrounding area in the Santa Barbara Channel — not from offshore production operations.

Not some of it.

All of it.

Several hundred barrels of it every day.

This is a scientifically verified fact, not some oil industry talking point. Decades of studies from organizations like the United States Geological Survey and UC Santa Barbara have located and characterized natural oil and gas seepage in the Santa Barbara Channel.

One of the world’s largest natural hydrocarbon seep systems is at Coal Oil Point, just offshore Isla Vista.

Seeps result from oil and hydrocarbon gases naturally moving upward from deep oil and gas reservoirs to the ocean floor through faults and fractures. In other words, the reservoirs are ‘leaky.’ The oil reaches the ocean surface, spreads with currents, and eventually washes ashore as tar balls and stained sand. The hydrocarbon gases vent continuously into the atmosphere, contributing to both local air pollution and global warming. The gases from the Coal Oil Point seeps are one of the largest contributors to air pollution in Santa Barbara County (according to the Santa Barbara County Air Pollution Control District). If every offshore platform and pipeline disappeared tomorrow, there would still be tar on those beaches next week, next year, and millennia from now.

Oil Slicks Over the Millenniums

Pervasive hydrocarbon seepage in the Santa Barbara Channel has been occurring for thousands of years. The local Chumash tribe used a substance called “yop” which is beach tar combined with pine pitch to waterproof their boats, called “tomols.” The Chumash people even historically traded the seep oil they gathered as a commodity. Spanish explorers in the 1500s copied the techniques of the natives and also waterproofed their boats. A later expedition in the 1770s noted the area’s extensive oil seepage.

Some of the first British explorers to come to California were awestruck by the offshore oil slicks and stench of hydrocarbons as they sailed past Coal Oil Point. During Admiral Vancouver’s exploratory trip along the California coast in the 1790s, he observed that: “the surface of the sea, which was perfectly smooth and tranquil, was covered with a thick, slimy substance, which, when separated or disturbed by a little agitation, became very luminous, whilst the light breeze, which came principally from the shore, brought with it a strong smell of tar, or some such resinous substance.”

None of this excuses events like the 1969 Santa Barbara spill and the 2015 pipeline spill at Refugio Beach. They were serious and damaging. But perspective matters. The 2015 spill was equivalent to around five days of natural seeps in the Santa Barbara Channel.

You read that right: five days.

In other words, natural seeps in the Santa Barbara Channel have caused the equivalent of over 700 Refugio oil spills since 2015.

Natural Seeps Now Outnumber Oil Production Emissions

And this is not just a Santa Barbara issue. While emissions from oil and gas equipment presented serious air and environmental quality issues decades ago, successful regulations and mitigation programs have largely put a stop to these problems. Recent work in the Los Angeles Basin (home to the La Brea Tar Pits, the largest onshore seep in North America) suggests natural seep emissions across the basin may now exceed oil-and-gas production emissions by roughly 100 to 1. Many of the attribution studies relating health problems to oil field proximity in LA may have mistakenly fingered current production operations rather than natural seeps and old orphaned wells.

And it gets worse (if you’re an opponent of oil production). Historical production from the South Ellwood field beneath the Coal Oil Point seeps reduced seepage rates.

Yes — you read that right — reduced.

And over 22 years from 1973 to 1995 the measured reductions were significant, around 50% overall.

The physics is straightforward: producing oil and gas lowers reservoir pressure. Lower pressure reduces the force pushing hydrocarbons upward through faults to the seabed. Moreover, producing hydrocarbons reduces the volumes available to seep from the reservoir. In theory, if you deplete the reservoir of a large fraction of their oil and gas, the seeps will never be a problem again.

On the other hand, if you leave a lot of oil and gas in the ground, it eventually leaks to the surface.

Since production was halted at Platform Holly in 2015 (with over one billion barrels of recoverable oil still remaining in the field), anecdotal evidence suggests that seeps and methane plumes have increased. Likewise, production of oil from platforms in the Southern Santa Barbara Channel anecdotally reduced seeps and tar on southern Santa Barbara County beaches.

Since offshore production was halted near Isla Vista, oil and tar on the beaches has significantly increased. This makes sense as the reservoir is no longer being depressurized and deeper hydrocarbon sources recharge the field.

Raising Uncomfortable Questions

Do environmental organizations fighting oil production really care about the environment?

Or do they simply hate the oil industry?

Because if the goal is reducing hydrocarbon emissions into the atmosphere and ocean, reducing natural seepage should matter too. Yet environmental groups continue portraying production companies as though they created the hydrocarbons spilling naturally into the ocean daily.

By blocking oil production associated with seep reduction, the State of California is prolonging natural toxic hydrocarbon emissions.

That raises another uncomfortable question: could the State face legal liability for obstructing a feasible seep-remediation strategy? If state agencies knowingly block federally authorized projects capable of reducing hydrocarbon gas emissions and seepage near populated areas, the legal argument may shift from “environmental protection” to knowingly preventing mitigation.

Imagine the irony. For decades, environmental activists insisted that oil production caused the pollution on Santa Barbara County beaches. A future lawsuit could argue the opposite: stopping production worsened naturally occurring pollution.

Someday, we will all be driving EVs, and oil won’t be nearly as valuable. However, the seeps will still be there, and if the State of California gets its way, we will never produce the oil beneath them, even though we now have the drilling technology to access the oil from locations onshore without the need for offshore platforms.

Future generations will continue to have dirty air, and tar balls will continue to foul Santa Barbara’s beaches.

So, the next time you go to the beach at Ellwood, UCSB, Goleta, Santa Barbara, Montecito, Summerland, or Carpinteria, and you experience tar balls on the beach and oil slicks in the water, thank your local environmental, anti-oil company friends for having that wonderful experience.

Congratulations environmentalists. You‘re getting rid of the oil industry, but not the oil.

•••

About the Authors

Mike Stoker: Environment, Energy & Agriculture Attorney (ret.), former Southwest Administrator US EPA, former member of Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors, and currently President & CEO Santa Barbara County Taxpayer Advocacy Center.

Dr. James W. Rector: Professor of Geophysics and Energy, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Department of Earth and Planetary Science, Senior Faculty Scientist, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Michael Mische: Associate Professor of Professional Practice, Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California, Senior Faculty Researcher, Oil and Gas Zage Business of Energy Initiative

Joseph Silvi: B.S. Environmental Engineering, UC Berkeley, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Energy Researcher and Environmental Advocate

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Promoting Dynamism in Santa Barbara and the Central Coast

Last week, I asked a simple question: Who is our congressman politically?

This week, it is fair to ask an obvious follow-up.

What about Bob Smith? What are my solutions?

I am not running for Congress to be a career politician while the Central Coast becomes increasingly unaffordable for working families.

I am running because this district has extraordinary assets and people, and far more potential than what we see from Washington. Most importantly, I want our families and children to have a future here.

Too many young people are growing up believing they will never be able to afford a home on the Central Coast, raise a family, or build a meaningful career here. I do not accept the idea that decline, outmigration, and shrinking opportunity are inevitable.

And unlike many politicians, I have spent most of my career operating inside large complex systems where results mattered.

I worked on major defense acquisition programs, federal budgeting, and national security systems where schedules, execution, and outcomes mattered. You learned very quickly that complaining is not leadership. Delivering is.

My professional career has largely centered around one thing: integrating talented people, complex systems, and competing priorities into solutions that work. That is my superpower.

That is exactly what the Central Coast needs right now. Congress increasingly operates the opposite way.

Today, the out-of-power party often focuses more on undermining the party in power than on solving problems, because political dysfunction creates future campaign talking points.

Congress has struggled to pass full budgets on time since 1997. Major legislation increasingly only happens when one party controls the House, Senate, and White House simultaneously and pushes massive bills through on party-line votes, only for the other side to spend years trying to repeal it.

No successful military organization or major company could operate this way for long and survive.

Bringing Resources Back To This Area

I intend to immediately elevate the Central Coast’s level of federal influence and investment.

We are a high-value district operating below our potential. We contribute roughly $16,000 per person to federal taxes, which is well above the national average.

Roughly $8 billion flows back into the district through mandatory and discretionary federal spending. Most of that is baseline funding tied to defense missions, Social Security, Medicare, transportation formulas, and existing federal programs.

That money largely flows regardless of who occupies the congressional seat.

Think of that as the cake already being baked federally.

The real measure of congressional influence is the icing added on top: the additional investments, research partnerships, infrastructure funding, industry growth, and federal opportunities, a representative brings back to the district each year.

After that $8 billion comes back to the district in the normal budget, there’s about $5,000 per person left that we contribute to the federal budget. The measurable member-driven discretionary impact (The icing) is roughly $15-20 per person annually, totaling about $12-15 million. Influential congresspeople impact much more. The table below shows three other CA members of Congress from different parties.

Figure 1. Congressional Influence Tiers

This district and region possess force multipliers that most regions in America would love to have:

• Vandenberg Space Force Base

• Port Hueneme – only deep-water harbor between Long Beach and San Francisco

• University of California, Santa Barbara

• California Polytechnic State University

I will use these to aggressively pursue federal investments in aerospace, defense modernization, advanced manufacturing, energy infrastructure, AI, and research partnerships.

My goal is simple: bring more high-paying industries, more research partnerships, more infrastructure investment, and more opportunities back to this region.

I don’t need years of experience as a junior congressional member to learn Washington, D.C. I’m already formally trained in the budget and processes.

Affordability

Affordability is largely impacted by overregulation and energy costs. I will focus on reducing both.

California continues to pursue increasingly expensive and politically driven infrastructure concepts – such as offshore wind – while affordability continues to collapse. I intend to bring practical engineering back into the conversation. This is my skillset.

I do not support turning the Central Coast into another endless mega-project defined by delays, lawsuits, cost overruns, and political theater. I support reliable energy and water infrastructure built around modern engineering, stable baseload power, and long-term affordability.

Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) Are the Future

They provide emissions-free power, support desalination, strengthen grid reliability, and require far less land and transmission infrastructure than many current proposals.

Instead of high-density infill in areas that can’t support it or that impact agricultural lands, I will work to identify underutilized federal properties that can be transferred, redeveloped, or repurposed for housing, industry, and economic growth.

Old federal sites, deteriorating facilities, and unused land should not sit idle while working families cannot afford housing. For example, there are thousands of acres of unused federal prison grounds in Lompoc. Additionally, I will use Vandenberg’s increased activity to ensure the local infrastructure can support it without raising your taxes, as proposed.

At the same time, I will push for aggressive forest management, brush clearing, and fire prevention efforts before the Central Coast experiences a preventable wildfire disaster. This will bring down insurance costs.

The federal lands above Santa Barbara and Montecito have become dangerously overgrown. We have all watched what happened in the Palisades. Ignoring fuel loads is negligence, and Californians are paying the price.

Education and Workforce Development

I intend to rebuild the Central Coast’s education and workforce ecosystem around opportunity, STEM, vocational training, and industry partnerships.

The Central Coast already possesses two world-class universities. I will work to build stronger partnerships between universities, public schools, vocational programs, defense companies, manufacturers, and technology firms.

Students should see direct pathways from public schools to universities or vocational programs, to internships, to high-paying local careers.

I intend to build that kind of ecosystem here. UCSB receives about 1/10 of the federal investment that UCSD or UCLA receives. We will fix it with hard requirements tied to measurable community outcomes, workforce development, research, and economic growth.

Final Thought

The Central Coast does not need another politician focused primarily on surviving the next election cycle. It needs leadership focused on building something.

We have the talent.

We have the universities.

We have the defense infrastructure.

We have the geography.

We produce the food.

We have the opportunity.

What we lack is leadership capable of executing effectively and delivering measurable results that make the Central Coast affordable enough for working families and young people to build a future here again.

That is exactly what I intend to bring to Congress.

•••

Bob Smith is a retired Navy veteran and candidate for California’s 24th Congressional District.

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It didn’t begin well. My mom’s family moved to San Diego in 1940 from Colorado. It was a relief from working the coal mines in Crested Butte. California was truly a promised land.

And it was, briefly.

On Christmas Eve of that year, my grandfather, John, was walking home from his little general store on Mission Beach with the day’s till. He didn’t know he was being followed.

When he got home, two guys entered the house right behind him and demanded his money. They had a gun. My grandmother, Kate, and my little aunt, Nonie, and cousin, Shirley, were there. My grandfather resisted to protect them. And they shot him dead. Right in front of his family.

Christmas Eve.

Then we had this war thing, because the Europeans didn’t get their act together and stop an evil little dude with a funny mustache until it was too late.

We saved their asses.

We’re doing it again.

My dad and mom met where the Army Air Corps and the Red Cross came together in Germany. And thus, they created me.

So, I never knew my namesake, grandfather John. But I knew my family and San Diego and California. I would come to visit during my own family’s constant moves while in the Air Force. I would stay with my grandmother Kate in San Diego during each move. First, at the home in Mission Beach. Then on Georgia Street. Then Utah Street. And I would watch the Mickey Mouse Club on the little black and white TV. And Jack LaLanne. And Howdy Doody. And between each would be Cal Worthington selling cars beside some animal.

A few years later, I would visit my cousins in Torrance. And we would go to Anaheim in the ‘50s when Disneyland first opened. You would get a little booklet with tickets. After the A, B, C and D…. the “E” ticket was most special. That would get you onto the Matterhorn coaster or the Nautilus submarine. Both were marketed behind movies… like “Third Man on the Mountain” and “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” Smart Disney stuff back then. They basically created the ABC TV network with “Disneyland,” “The Mickey Mouse Club,” and “Davey Crocket.” Later on, my wife and I would enjoy gathering with Fess Parker (Davey) and wife Marcy and family at their Inn in Los Olivos each Thursday for “sing-alongs.”

Those were special times.

In the ‘60s, when my cousins moved up the hill to Palos Verdes and I was in my teens, we would drive down to Sunset Boulevard (The Strip) to cruise and check out the music. Lots of great music. The Troubadour. The Whisky. I hated the “Au Go Go” part. But it was a magical time. The Laurel Canyon crowd. Wow.

Some years later, when my dad retired with my mom to Santa Barbara, and I had my own family…. we would come to visit. Always basking in the California dream.

And finally, my own family got to live that dream when we moved to San Luis Obispo some 30 plus years ago. Yes, California was still a dream then.

Until it wasn’t.

What the hell happened?

I’ll tell you what happened.

A disease took hold in California. It started slowly. Like the Fauci virus. Almost imperceptibly. It was spawned during the ‘60s. We had a movement here, a movement there. Anti-war. The environment. Race. Rage against “the system.” Free speech at Berkeley with Mario Savio. Tom Hayden. Cesar Chavez (who’s out of favor now), Summer of “Love,” SLA. SDS. LSD. Beats. Freaks. Hippies. And Timothy Leary… who is still dead.

And a new media that picked it all up and spread the word.

Not much later, I became a part of that media and watched it devolve.

It started with Walter Cronkite. He was the elder statesman of TV news anchors back then. What “Uncle” Walter said, we believed. And when he began to question the war in Vietnam, we did too.

And that was it. There was no turning back.

And thus, began the transition toward something called “progressivism.”

Progressivism embraced every “noble” fringe cause. If you were into the environmental stuff… then progressivism was your home. How about gender stuff? You might be a progressive. Oh, then there is the identity thing. Hey y’all… I’m a progressive. And to prove it, check out my green hair or man-bun or nose ring. Or all together.

In California, I think it started with Governor Jerry Brown. He dated singer Linda Ronstadt. Love that girl. And who wouldn’t? So, Jerry gets a pass, even though he was quite different from his dad, another governor, Pat Brown, who was a Democrat but a common-sense dude. Jerry was… well, he dated Linda… so he gets my vote. Back then we made our decisions based on emotional, feel-good stuff which continues to this day. And, ultimately, we are paying for it.

Jerry Brown was a deep thinker… and had many great ideas. But because of his openness to new visions, he attracted lots of weirdos. And the weirdos started to take charge.

Yay. I voted for a Two-Spirited LatinX person of multi-cultural-color. Look at me, I voted for an LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ-er with a lazy eye. Hoopla! I voted for a non-binary one-legged hermaphrodite from Tasmania.

Pop the Champagne cork! Light off the fireworks!

Then during the past 20 years, a one-party system caused the “one-party,” – the Democrats – to start choking on their own vomit. They were, and are, drunk with power. And “power,” not common sense, is their guiding light. And so, we have absurd natural resource policies.

We’ve got plenty, folks. Gas. Water. Nuclear. But we’d rather buy dirty oil from other countries at a premium and, oh, tax the hell out of it to punish those who rely on it. Especially the poor among us. Go across the border to Arizona or Nevada and fill up your tank.

How about food costs? We’ve got plenty of fertile land in our “Breadbasket of America,” but no, we can’t use the ample water we have to irrigate the fields. We let it flow to the ocean. The Delta smelt comes first. We used to eat them at the annual firehouse smelt-fry fundraiser in Minnesota, they were so plentiful. And let’s not forget those houses and lives in the Palisades and Altadena that could have been saved, but weren’t, because we don’t “save” and protect what we have.

Water.

Good job, “Karen” Bass.

There’s the homeless issue. And drug addicts. Needles. Poop. And the corrupt social services system that scams billions for non-existent hospice patients and awards illegal homeless people with breast implants and sex changes and …. Dear God, what is wrong with you, California?

Crossover dudes beating up on girls in sports? Whatever happened to title IX? Who is protecting women? Real women?

Not California.

And what about the anti-Jewish crowd, and the supporters of the evil Iranian regime that murders its own good Persian people and has declared for almost a half century that they will destroy everyone around them and everyone in the Western culture, including us?

Let them have a nuke?

Are you nuts?

Answer: “Yes.”

And you would be the first to be hanged or thrown off a roof while wearing your keffiyeh and holding your “Resist” sign in your furry costume.

As William Shatner said to the costumed Trekkies at the Star Trek convention on an SNL skit…. “People, look at yourselves. Get a life, for God’s sake.”

Well, hopefully, as the great Sam Cooke sang… “A change is ‘gonna come.” If we’re smart. And use common sense. And understand that the California Dream will implode if we continue on this suicidal path. And that our rights come from God. Not government. Not Newsom or Schiff or Carbajal, or… good grief, Swalwell. It’s time that we “the citizens” take charge. Please vote (not more than once, even though it’s easy to do). And let’s take back our California dream.

•••

John Summer is an Emmy and multi-award-winning news anchor and investigative reporter who loves California and holds hope that it will return to its former glory and remove the tarnish from the once “Golden State.”.He has a lifelong stake in it… as do his children and grandchildren, who all reside here.

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California, once celebrated as a model of prosperity and innovation, now finds itself buried under a mountain of fiscal mismanagement and systemic corruption. The state that routinely boasted budget surpluses in previous years is now facing a multibillion-dollar deficit— a shortfall worsened not just by economic cycles but by persistent waste, outright fraud, and a troubling absence of accountability.

The Golden State’s finances have turned into fool’s gold, and its leadership, from the governor’s office down through bureaucratic agencies, bears direct responsibility.

When California had record surpluses — upwards of tens of billions in the early 2020s — it had a rare opportunity to shore up its pension liabilities, improve infrastructure, and reform healthcare delivery. Instead, those funds were spent as though the good times would never end. Massive social programs expanded with little oversight, and when fraud began to creep in, state agencies often ignored or downplayed it. Now the bill is due, and taxpayers are left footing it.

Fraud and Fiscal Decay

Some of the most egregious abuses have emerged from the social services sector. Hospice care fraud has exploded in California, with investigations revealing hundreds of sham operations billing Medicare and Medicaid for nonexistent patients or unnecessary care. Many of these entities were created solely to siphon public funds, exploiting gaps in oversight that state auditors and regulators failed to close for years.

Meanwhile, several homeless advocacy organizations — intended to be the moral backbone of California’s humanitarian mission — have been caught using taxpayer money for personal or political gain. Reports of executives pocketing relief funds, manipulating contracts, and even violating federal election laws have undermined confidence in both the causes they claim to champion and the politicians who enabled them. The state’s homelessness crisis has only worsened despite billions allocated to “solutions” that too often turned into slush funds.

Fraud is not just a moral collapse — it’s a fiscal one. Tens of billions of taxpayer dollars have been lost to unemployment insurance fraud, pandemic-era relief fraud, and false claims submitted to the state. Yet meaningful prosecutions remain rare. Without accountability, corruption becomes part of the operating procedure — normalized rather than punished.

Conflicts of Interest and Political Favoritism

The wildfire crises that have ravaged California have further compounded the state’s financial collapse. Rather than reforming utility regulation and holding Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) accountable for decades of neglected infrastructure, Governor Gavin Newsom’s administration stepped in with a bailout. This intervention, however, came with glaring conflicts of interest: Newsom had previous financial ties and political connections to PG&E board members and donors. Critics point out that a governor negotiating relief for a company whose failures caused significant environmental damage — while Californians pay the price — sets a dangerous precedent.

Fire-related liabilities have also produced an array of liens on state funds and insurance reserves, further straining finances. The cycle of wildfire, bailout, and bureaucratic crisis, continues, while ordinary Californians see higher electricity rates and growing debt.

From Surplus to Deficit — and No One Held Responsible

The shift from surplus to deficit has been breathtaking. After years of windfalls driven by booming tech tax revenues and federal aid, California’s coffers are now emptying rapidly. Declining personal income tax receipts, corporate relocations out of state, and ballooning entitlement spending have combined into what some economists call an inevitable “reckoning.” The underlying problem isn’t just economic—it’s political rot.

State leaders have consistently chosen short-term optics over long-term reform. When scandals surface, committees are formed, and press releases go out—but meaningful reform rarely follows. The state auditor’s reports gather dust, whistleblowers face retaliation, and insiders rotate between agencies and advocacy groups in an incestuous web of influence.

The Moral and Political Failure

California’s governance crisis isn’t limited to numbers on a spreadsheet. It reflects a deeper decay of public trust. The same officials who campaign on transparency govern behind closed doors. The same policymakers who decry inequality quietly allocate public money to their allies and favored networks. Fiscal irresponsibility is sustained by moral hypocrisy—and the people of California deserve better.

The fraud tied to state programs for the vulnerable—the sick, the homeless, the elderly—represents not only theft from taxpayers but also betrayal of those most in need. Every dollar stolen through hospice scams or homelessness “nonprofits” is a dollar kept from those who genuinely require support. Every bailout negotiated under questionable circumstances erodes public confidence further.

Time for a Clean Change

Politicians, like diapers, should be changed often—and for the same reason. California’s leadership class has grown too comfortable, too unaccountable, and too entangled in its own corruption to correct course. The bureaucratic inertia of Sacramento cannot self-police; it requires outside intervention, new leadership, and a public that demands precision, transparency, and results.

Fixing California will not be easy. It means prosecuting fraud, terminating corrupted contracts, and dismantling crony structures that reward loyalty over competence. It means ending the revolving door between advocacy groups and government offices. It means revising ethics and conflict-of-interest laws so that officials cannot enrich themselves or their friends at public expense.

It also means returning to fiscal fundamentals: balancing budgets honestly, investing in durable infrastructure and education rather than throwing money at short-lived programs designed for headlines to signal virtue and not deliver. Accountability and prudence must replace the current cycle of negligence and bailout.

California has always been a place of reinvention. It can be again—but only if voters and honest officials choose to clean house. The state’s budget deficit isn’t just a financial problem; it’s a moral audit of its leadership. And right now, California results stink.

•••

J Brett Marymee is endorsed by Reform CA as a candidate for District 2 State Board of Equalization, which covers 19 counties from Ventura to Del Norte along the California coast. He is on the June 2nd ballot. He is currently elected as a Director for the Santa Ynez River Water Conservation District, the Santa Ynez Community Services District, and appointed to the Eastern Management Area Ground Sustainability Agency.

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According to a recent poll by Politico, 61% of Americans believe that some cheating may have affected the 2020 election, and only 40% believe that the upcoming 2026 election is “unlikely to be stolen.”

Ouch.

That’s a leftist organization admitting that Americans don’t trust the election process.

Here in Santa Barbara, our elections are seriously flawed. In…

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Who is Salud Carbajal Politically?

Members of Congress do more than vote. They join caucuses that signal how they operate and what kind of legislator they are. On the far left, you have The Squad. On the far right is the House Freedom Caucus.

In the middle sit the Problem Solvers Caucus, a group designed to bridge the gap. Its structure is unique. Members…

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