Four candidates are vying to take over the District 4 seat on the Santa Barbara City Council, including a planning commissioner, a former council member, a local businessman and a member of the Neighborhood Advisory Council.

Running to replace Kristen Sneddon, who is running for mayor, are Devon Wardlow, Monte Wilson, Genevieve Taft-Vasquez and Jason Dominguez.

District 4 includes the Riviera, the upper Eastside, Eucalyptus Hill and the Foothill neighborhoods. 

Genevieve Taft-Vasquez

Taft-Vasquez is a born and raised Santa Barbara resident looking to make the city safer for the next generation. 

After moving away for college and to start her career, Taft-Vasquez and her husband moved back to Santa Barbara with their three kids seven years ago.

She serves on the Neighborhood Advisory Council, and her career has focused on ethical sourcing and sustainability initiatives for major companies such as Coca-Cola.

With all of the changes facing the city, Taft-Vasquez said she wants to be a part of the decision-making that will impact the next generation.

“I certainly believe that there are some decisions that are going to really shape the way that the community looks in the foreseeable future,” Taft-Vasquez said.

As a resident and homeowner, she wanted to see a candidate who wasn’t focused on a political career. 

“I am not going anywhere,” Taft-Vasquez said. “I jumped in late to this race, and I did that in part because I didn’t think that other candidates were reflective of what I wanted to see within the district.”

When it comes to State Street, Taft-Vasquez said she wants a walkable core that’s well lit and landscaped, along with programming such as live music and other events.

However, the biggest thing she thinks businesses need is more housing downtown.

“The businesses can’t survive without housing,” Taft-Vasquez said. “Housing down there makes sense both from the business perspective, but also from the environmental perspective, because housing is a climate choice, and if you have people who don’t need to drive as much, who can work there, who can shop locally, I think that will be really beneficial in a lot of ways.”

She said she also hopes that with Yardi moving downtown, it can attract other companies to set up their offices along Chapala Street.

“I think it’s beneficial for businesses to be close to each other for creative thinking and innovation,” Taft-Vasquez said. “But obviously, it’s also really good for our downtown to just have people on a daily basis who are going to lunch, who are staying after work.”

When it comes to rent stabilization, Taft-Vasquez said there should be strong protections to make sure tenants have livable homes, and that landlords should be held accountable if they aren’t providing that. 

However, she said the rent-stabilization ordinance is overly complicated, and she worries about the cost and that it will push local landlords to sell their properties to larger companies.

If she were on council, she would have wanted to see small-scale property owners exempted from the ordinance, and a sunset clause on the ordinance or mechanism to see whether it’s working in a few years.

She also supports Section 8 housing being exempted from the ordinance, an issue that’s been highly debated among the current council members. 

Jason Dominguez

Dominguez may be a familiar name to voters as he represented District 1 from 2016 to 2019 before he lost his re-election bid to Alejandra Gutierrez by just a handful of votes. 

He has since become a father and a homeowner in District 4 and is ready to go back to work at City Hall.

“I’ve got a 6-year-old daughter. At that age, I can start to see where she’s going to fit in with our society and our culture, and what can I do to make Santa Barbara remain a great place for her when she’s an adult,” Dominguez said.

His career has included working as a criminal prosecutor and legal aid attorney, a UN International Criminal Tribunal legal officer and a law professor at the Santa Barbara & Ventura Colleges of Law.

During his time on the council, Dominguez wasn’t afraid to go head to head with then- Mayor Cathy Murillo. He views the current division on the council as “unfortunate” and a product of having to navigate the COVID-19 years as well as the party system.

“I could see maybe they’re just frustrated after so many years on council and having to deal with pretty tough issues,” Dominguez said. “I think that’s part of it. I’m very independent. I didn’t come up through either party system, and I think the party system is wreaking havoc on the City Council.”

As former chair of the city Finance Committee, Dominguez said he wouldn’t have dipped into the reserves.

There are a few cost-saving measures he wants to implement, such as stopping paying for out-of-town consultants; stopping giving years-long severance payouts if someone leaves the city employment; and having every city department reduce its budget by 10%.

To increase revenue, he wants to have more housing developments downtown.

“When you bring in residents, you raise the tax revenue, both the property tax and sales tax, because those people will spend more money in the city,” Dominguez said. “But it’s also more vibrant downtown, and that attracts more tourists, and more locals will go downtown and spend more time and money down there.”

While he likes the promenade on the lower blocks, Dominguez thinks State Street should open as a one way from De la Guerra Street to the Arlington Theatre to see if that helps the upper blocks.

He also wants to see more programming such as concerts and parades.

As for rent stabilization, Dominguez isn’t confident of its success. 

With capped rent prices, he thinks people will stay in multi-bedroom units by themselves when they could afford a market-rate unit. 

“Now they’re in this apartment paying half the rent as the person living in the apartment across the street, which isn’t rent stabilized,” Dominguez said. “It’s just not fair, and now you’ve got a lot fewer units available to working-class folks. It literally does take units and capacity off the market.”

Instead of focusing on rental stabilization, Dominguez said he wants to see higher salaries and encourage local companies to pay employees more.

Devon Wardlow

With five years of experience on the city Planning Commission, Wardlow is running for a seat on the council to help the city improve policy-making and bridge the divisiveness on the current council.

“I really want to help the city work better together so that we can develop policy in a more consistent and normal timeline,” Wardlow said, “so that we’re delivering for the people of Santa Barbara on the biggest policy challenges that we’re facing.”

The Santa Barbara native has plenty of experience working in politics and dealing with big companies and big issues. 

In 2010, Wardlow worked as a field organizer for former Congresswoman Lois Capps’ re-election campaign before pursuing graduate work in the Middle East. She then worked as a White House intern during President Barack Obama’s administration. 

She later was a special assistant for private-sector engagement to U.S. Secretary of Labor Tom Perez. 

In the private sector, she worked for Facebook and Lyft before returning to Santa Barbara in 2017 and worked on retail cannabis policy.     

She now is head of public policy for Obvio, a traffic-safety company using artificial intelligence to track reckless driving behavior and enforce traffic safety laws. 

When it comes to the city’s budget, Wardlow said she wants to reduce waste by cutting consultant contracts, holding city staff positions vacant if possible, enforcing a more strict reserve policy, and having regular financial check-ins with the Finance Committee and city departments. 

She also wants to grow revenue by making the city an easier place to do business and cut fees on business licenses. 

“I know that we can be a place where people want to do business, but we need to make it better, No. 1, from a reputation perspective, but then also from an actual process,” Wardlow said. “Getting a sign for your business should not take months and months and months and headaches. We need to make it a much easier environment.”

While the community continues to go back and forth on reopening State Street, Wardlow said the city needs to focus on making the infrastructure improvements that will allow for housing developments that bring more people downtown. 

“If we brought back cars today, we’d have to pay $1 million to redo the grading of the street, and we’d have to pull out a lot of the outdoor dining,” Wardlow said. “If we all of a sudden brought back cars, didn’t do any of the improvements, I think people would be really upset, and we’re hearing from people that are upset with it today. But to me, what people are most frustrated about is the lack of progress.”

She also said the city needs to look at how much housing, and the type of housing, that could actually happen, to better understand the number and type of people who will live downtown, and their mobility needs.

Despite the city working on the rent-stabilization ordinance since December, it never went to the Planning Commission for feedback and comments, despite being told that the commission would get a chance to weigh in.

Wardlow said it should have gone to the commission because rather than debating whether the ordinance should exist, the commission could have weighed in on ordinance details and policy. 

“I think because of that demonization that happened, the policy-making process suffered as a result, and that is something that I’m frustrated with,” Wardlow said. 

While she supports a reasonable approach to rent stabilization, Wardlow is concerned about several policy elements in the ordinance.

The chief one is the rent increase cap of 60% of CPI, or 3%, which she said is too low and could lead to more landlords having to go through the petition process to raise rents higher than allowed, costing the city. 

“I want us to be successful in this, and I am nervous that by pursuing a more strict cap and the whole host of other things that are in this ordinance, that it jeopardizes the very thing we’re trying to go after,” Wardlow said.

“Now that all being said, it’s passed, and our role will be ensuring the best implementation of it that we can, and really ensuring that this is done in a way that supports and addresses the community.”

Monte Wilson

After executive roles with major companies such as Adobe and Oracle, Wilson is seeking to bring his experience to City Hall. 

“I couldn’t sit on the sidelines anymore and watch what was going on in the city,” Wilson said. “Just the way that the budget was being managed, the way that we were indecisive in moving things forward, the lack of awareness around fire safety.”

Wilson grew up in Illinois, but he and his wife, Maria Wilson, moved to Santa Barbara in 2010. Maria grew up in town, attending Santa Barbara junior high and high schools.

His career has been in high-tech companies, managing big teams and problem-solving big issues before retiring in 2022. 

Wilson is involved with several organizations, including the United Boys & Girls Clubs and the Teddy Bear Cancer Foundation. He and his wife co-founded Santa Barbara Cars & Coffee, a nonprofit organization raising funds for causes such as Unity Shoppe, Toys for Tots and the Santa Barbara Police Foundation.

Wilson said he was “appalled” to see how the city has managed the budget, particularly using up its emergency reserves. He wants to explore how the city can make more money without raising taxes. 

“If I had run my budget like that at any of the roles I was in, I would have been fired,” Wilson said. 

Inspired by Yardi moving downtown, Wilson wants to focus on bringing other companies to the city center. 

“My hope is with getting more businesses like that, high-paying jobs, they’re not dependent on the economy or weather and things like that,” Wilson said. “That will give us a base so tourism is kind of the icing on the cake versus the cake.”

If elected, he would want to dig into department budgets and look for ways to improve performances with the same or fewer resources. 

Wilson also has seen firsthand how businesses have struggled on State Street, as Maria Wilson owns The Painted Cabernet at 1229 State St.

He supports a hybrid model downtown, keeping the 500 and 600 blocks closed while opening the upper blocks and creating thriving ecosystems. 

As far as the State Street Master Plan, his main concern is how businesses will be impacted during construction, which is expected to take at least six years.

“If you tore up the entire street, people aren’t going to come down like they did before,” Wilson said. “We’ve got to build that into the plan, too.”

When it comes to the master plan and the rent-stabilization ordinance, he worries the city is building something it can’t financially support, and is ignoring the rising utility and insurance costs facing property owners.

“I’m never a big believer in heavy regulation,” Wilson said. “I think we should have focused on how do we stimulate more housing, how do we create incentives for lower rents and more moderate rents.”

District 4 voters can make their choice on Nov. 3.