Bill Cirone, a retired superintendent of schools for Santa Barbara County, on Friday announced his support of Laura Capps, who is challenging Das Williams to represent the First District on the county Board of Supervisors.
Cirone was the marquee name, but he was just one of about a dozen educators and advocates who joined Capps at Sunflower Park in Santa Barbara, across the street from Franklin Elementary School on the Eastside.
Santa Barbara School Board member Kate Ford, Santa Barbara City College instructor and City Councilwoman Kristen Sneddon, City College Trustee Marsha Croninger, Adelante Charter School Executive Director David Bautista, former school board member Ed Heron, Carpinteria Unified School Board member Rogelio Delgado, and former Goleta Unified School District Board of Trustees member and former county Supervisor Janet Wolf were among the people who attended the event.
The group sat around a picnic table and talked about why they supported Capps. They also sought to cast Williams as concerned more about special interest groups than the needs of residents.
Cirone praised Capps as “honest, trustworthy and courageous.”
“Laura has the qualities I know we can agree we all want in our elected officials,” Cirone said. “We need leaders with Laura’s integrity and values to stand up for what is right, even if it means taking on powerful special interests.”
He then blasted Capps’ opponent, incumbent Williams.
“Williams is, and always has been, the No. 1 champion of the cannabis industry, promoting and supporting policies that many feel are harmful to the children and their families who live in his district and throughout the county,” Cirone said. “Das receives large campaign contributions from the cannabis industry.”
Cirone alleged that when Williams had been asked on the campaign trail about his support and promotion of allowing cultivation near schools, “Das’ flip and glib response was, ‘I would rather have our schools smell like pot than lay off teachers.’”
Cirone said such logic is a stretch: “We all know that there is no direct funding between education and the cannabis industry, and if there was a real concern sitting at the policy table or the Board of Supervisors, he would be advocating for a good portion of the money to go to schools. That hasn’t happened.”
Williams fired back in a statement to Noozhawk on Friday evening.
“It’s an outlandish perversion of my position and work on this issue, and it’s sad that the Capps campaign has resorted to false attacks as the cornerstone of her campaign,” Williams said. “First, I live in Carpinteria and I want the best for my daughter, who is going into the school district this fall, and all our neighbors and community’s children.”
Williams said that when he has walked door to door in Carpinteria, he has heard from folks that cannabis odor is an issue — and that he, too, is concerned.
“My office has been the leader in working to curb it, and we are making progress,” Williams said. “It is also clear to me that most voters I have spoken to are worried about the finances of the Carpinteria Unified School District and believe we need more funding for our schools. I agree with them. They are worried about enough instructional assistants, library resources and teachers. The fact is, Carpinteria Unified gets a significant amount of its funding from property revenue tax in the agricultural part of town. Without business there, property tax — and therefore school funding — will suffer.”
He also said that when he served on the Assembly Education Committee, the state nearly doubled the resources for each student.
Capps, who was appointed to her seat on the school board, is looking to unseat Williams, who has held some form of elected office since 2003, when he won a seat on the Santa Barbara City Council. Since then, Williams was elected twice to the City Council, three times to the California Assembly and once to the Board of Supervisors.
Williams has been endorsed by the Democratic Party of Santa Barbara County, but Capps has aligned herself with a growing faction of Democrats who don’t fall in step with party directives and have won office without the formal party’s endorsement in recent years.
While it’s typically difficult to oust an incumbent, particularly from within the same party affiliation, Capps was asked to run in response to the controversy over cannabis.
Williams accepted about $60,000 in donations from members of the CARP Growers, officially the Cannabis Association for Responsible Producers, while the county was writing its regulations for cannabis cultivation.
Wolf said Capps has “integrity and ethics, and that is what we need on the Board of Supervisors.”
“I am just so proud to support Laura, and I know you are going to be a great supervisor, Laura,” Wolf said.
School board member Ford said it was a “tremendous honor” to be sitting next to Cirone, who served as superintendent for 34 years. Ford said Capps always puts community and children first.
“She’s beholden to no one, and she’s not selfish or egotistical about anything related to the needs of our community,” Ford said.
Adelante’s Bautista said he is endorsing Capps because of her views on the environment, her efforts to end poverty and improve literacy, and her overall big-picture views.
“We have a crisis,” Capps said. “We are at the second-highest poverty rate … in the entire state, and our state has the highest poverty rate in the country. As supervisor, I am hoping we have a task force on poverty that will bring all of these pieces together. We can’t be the second-highest poverty rate. We can’t. And I don’t hear much discussion of it.”
— Noozhawk staff writer Joshua Molina can be reached at jmolina@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.
