Santa Barbara County First District supervisor candidate Carole Lieff has dropped out of the race, she told Noozhawk this week.

“I feel I have accomplished what I set out to accomplish in my run for supervisor,” Lieff wrote in response to Noozhawk’s election questionnaire, sent out to all supervisorial candidates.

Lieff runs the Santa Barbara Watchdog blog and has written “Art Advisor” columns for the Montecito Journal.

She said she was frustrated by the “lack of alarm” over pension liabilities and government “trying to take the middle class down piece by piece,” and felt intimidated and harassed during her campaign.

“Apparently, Santa Barbara is satisfied with its current leadership, and that’s just fine,” she wrote in an email. “But it no longer interests me. It has become tedious and boring dragging horses to water that they will not drink.”

In a phone interview this week, she said she just put her house on the market and moved to Montana, where she bought a 30-acre ranch, and hopes never to set foot in California again.

“The leadership is so poor and sociopathic that I want no part of it,” she said. “I’m putting my money elsewhere.”

She loves Montana, saying people there “see what’s going on.”

“I talk to people in Santa Barbara and people think I’m an alarmist; I talk to people here — I don’t have to do this work here, people are already doing it,” she said.

Even though she has decided to drop out, her name will still appear against incumbent Salud Carbajal on the ballot. It was finalized weeks ago and will be mailed out to absentee voters next Monday, according to the County Elections Office.

Carbajal, who was first elected to the Board of Supervisors in 2004, is backed by hundreds of thousands of dollars in his re-election bid. He has reported raising $66,880 since January and has $304,100 in cash, according to pre-election campaign finance reports filed with the Elections Office.

Lieff has not filed any fundraising forms with the county.

— Noozhawk staff writer Giana Magnoli can be reached at gmagnoli@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.