As many of you know I am the Santa Barbara County chairman for McCain for President. I am also his only delegate to the convention for this county. I had been working for months to get Sen. McCain to visit our community and believe his trip here provided our community, state and country an excellent forum on our nation’s energy policies. However, I don’t want to talk about presidential campaigns, or offshore oil, or blue states vs. red states. I want to talk about the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History.

When the McCain advance team asked me to recommend venues, I immediately recommend the Ty Warner Sea Center for a small event and the main campus’ Fleishmann Auditorium for a larger event. The museum has always been one of my family’s favorite locations. My children, who are no longer children and in their 20s, have grown up enjoying this incredible facility. But enough bragging of how wonderful this museum is. What I want to talk about is how professional and helpful the staff and the Board of Directors were in making the event happen. It was never an issue of partisanship but an opportunity they welcomed to host another Town Hall Forum. And from the beginning of the planning process to the last riser in the back of the auditorium being taken down, they were all there doing everything conceivable to make this an event our community could be proud of.

And I think for all who attended or took interest in it, there could not have been a more successful event. That success goes to the folks running, operating and serving on the board of the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. I can’t thank you enough and I just wanted our community to know.

Mike Stoker
Buellton