The field of Santa Barbara mayoral candidates grew to seven Tuesday as City Councilman Dale Francisco announced he’s running for the position.
Curiosity brought many people and media to Casa de la Guerra for the announcement — as the news release was perhaps purposefully vague — and cheering broke out among his supporters when he said he was running for mayor.
“I prayed for that,” Santa Barbara resident Kathy Mora said. “It was that, or the state stealing our property taxes — that was the other option (for the announcement).”
Francisco began by talking about what the City Council has been doing wrong. He criticized the council’s past behavior, including “treating the reserve fund like a credit card,” which, combined with low bed-tax revenues, most likely will lead to millions of dollars in additional budget cuts, he said.
The biggest problems, Francisco said, are budgetary issues and using City Council seats as a way to advance personal political agendas.
He called out members of the council for “spending money we didn’t have on salary increases for city employees,” and said that during negotiations, the council shouldn’t act like union representatives. Public employee unions often contribute a lot of money to local campaigns, but his won’t be one of them.
“I said two years ago, and I say again today, I’ll never accept a dollar from our unions or from our developers. Indeed, from anyone whose livelihood is directly dependent on decisions that the City Council makes.”
The other big problem, as he sees it, is when people use City Council seats to advance their personal political agendas or careers. “People on council see their position of public trust as nothing more than a stepping stone to more lucrative county or state political positions,” he said to loud applause.
Lad Handelman, who has lived in Santa Barbara for 25 years, agreed that the city doesn’t need council seats to serve as stepping stones.
“There are two obvious reasons (to support Francisco),” he said. “He has financial skills we need desperately, and he doesn’t accept money from self interest groups — he’ll vote for the whole community.”
So-called wrong priorities are the “roof of our problems with gangs, graffiti, homelessness, hecklers and the rest,” Francisco said. The crowd broke into laughter when council candidate Bob Hansen could be heard protesting loudly from the sidewalk area outside the plaza.
Francisco said he wants politics to go back to “common sense priorities,” including all of the mundane tasks city government is responsible for, he said.
He arrived at the decision to run reluctantly, he said, but wants to set a new tone for the city, even if he gets only one vote.
He strongly supports Measure B, the measure to limit building heights, and other measures that preserve “what is good about the city.”
Many of his supporters were there Tuesday and were grateful for his candidacy, although they didn’t know what was coming when they showed up for the announcement.
Assad Mora called Francisco “the only reasonable voice on the City Council today,” and both he and Kathy Mora have lived in the area for 17 years.
They keep up with local politics, but having a job can make it difficult since most meetings are held during the workday. “It attracts people who don’t have working people’s interests at heart,” Kathy Mora said.
Francisco was elected to the council in 2007 for a four-year term. If he is elected mayor, the fourth-place council candidate in the race would serve the remaining two years of his term.
He will be running against fellow councilmembers Iya Falcone and Helene Schneider as well as Bob Hansen, Isaac Garrett, Steve Cushman and Justin Michael.
With Francisco’s announcement, five of the seven members of the council — excluding Mayor Marty Blum and Councilman Roger Horton — are now campaigning for various political positions.
— Noozhawk staff writer Giana Magnoli can be reached at gmagnoli@noozhawk.com.