Four people are running to replace Councilwoman Meagan Harmon as the District 6 representative on the Santa Barbara City Council.

Jason Carlton, Gabe Escobedo, Anabella Lehne and Alexander Stoeber are all on the ballot for the Nov. 3 election.

Harmon, who has served on the council since 2018, has reached her term limit. Her leadership and sense of reason during meetings earned her praise from both sides of the political spectrum, leaving big shoes for her replacement to fill.

District 6 includes most of the main downtown core, the Oak Park neighborhood and parts of the lower Westside.

Candidate Background

Carlton, who owns an electrician company, was born in Oakland but spent most of his childhood in Davis. He would regularly visit his aunt and uncle in Santa Barbara.

He has lived in the city for 25 years with his wife and son, worked as an electrician for more than 30 years and has owned his own business for almost 20 years.

This marks his second run for the City Council; he previously ran and lost in 2021. He’s running for the council again because he said he has seen firsthand how challenging it is to run a small business in the city.

“The hostile way the city treats small businesses is a problem,” Carlton said.

Escobedo said he is ready to bring his Santa Barbara Unified School District board experience to the council, hoping to make a bigger impact for children and families. 

“There’s not enough collaboration between our neighboring cities and the county and the school districts, and it’s something that I want to kind of bring together,” Escobedo said. “I can bring that perspective to City Council, and yes, for the broader community, but also for our kids and our families.”

After 3½ years on the school board, the Ontario native is proud of improvements made in early literacy and the development of workforce housing for teachers. 

One thing he wishes was handled differently is the treatment of Black students and families in the district, specifically around communication and creating more of a sense of belonging.

While Escobedo said he is proud of the progress that has been made to combat anti-Blackness, the recent Blackface incident involving San Marcos High School students highlights that more needs to be done.

“These systems weren’t built in just a year or two or three; they’re not going to be dismantled and changed in a year or two or three,” Escobedo said. “This is truly never-ending work — deep, deep work that all of us as part of the system have to do within ourselves in addition to the spaces that we are supervising.”

Lehne is a loan-signing agent born and raised in Santa Barbara. Her parents were born in Mexico and eventually immigrated to Santa Barbara. Her mother was a seamstress, while her father worked at the Copper Coffee Pot Cafe. 

Lehne’s own life hasn’t always been easy. She’s a survivor of sexual assault and a former teen mom, having her first daughter at 17 years old.

She said she’s always been interested in public service, teaching children how to empower themselves and adults on how to protect children from assault. She previously worked for social services at Cottage Hospital, before working as a loan-signing agent.

She said she is running for the City Council to help people and represent those born and raised in the city.

“People that are from here have a certain love for the character that we have and we’re welcoming,” Lehne said. “We want people to be able to afford Santa Barbara.”

From experiencing homelessness growing up, to selling real estate and now running for the council, Stoeber hasn’t always had an easy journey. 

Growing up in Texas, Stoeber said he spent most of his youth sleeping in tents with his mom and sister or crashing on a friend’s couch. When his mom went to prison, she encouraged him to focus on school, which led him to attending UC Santa Barbara.

At UCSB, he studied political science and was the vice president, social chair and recruitment chairman for the Sigma Pi fraternity. 

After graduating, he worked at AT&T as a salesman and then as a manager before working for a few tech startup companies and, in 2019, starting his own real estate company.

Now, he’s running for the council because he’s seen people struggling to afford Santa Barbara.

“They’re talking about how expensive everything is and how they feel like they’re not getting their money’s worth for Santa Barbara,” Stoeber said. “They want a higher quality of life, and I want to create a future here so that more people can have the opportunities that I did.”

State Street

While Lehne said she does miss having vehicles up and down State Street, she promises not to put what she wants ahead of what the majority of people want. 

“If everyone here wants it closed, then let’s have it closed,” Lehne said. “I’m here as a representative.”

She does want to see more investment in infrastructure, clear communication about the price of redevelopment, and a trolley on State Street. 

After the implementation of the State Street Master Plan, Stoeber said he wants to see one lane open for delivery vehicles, emergency vehicles and, hopefully, a trolley as well.

“I think it would be a good step in the right direction for public transportation, and then we could talk about cars being on State Street,” Stoeber said. “But I definitely think we need to protect micro-mobility with bikes and scooters, and people who want to be out on State Street and biking up and down.”

He also wants to see more parades and events such as silent discos and other activities that bring people downtown.

Escobedo said he strongly supports the State Street Master Plan but believes it needs to be paired with a business revitalization plan, making it easier for small businesses to open in the empty storefronts. 

He wants to see a streamlined permitting process and maybe even forgiveness for business licenses and permitting fees.

“The longer that they have to go through the permitting process, that makes it that much more difficult for them to actually open up their business and be successful,” Escobedo said. “We want them to survive, so that long term we can collect those sales tax.”

Escobedo is also in favor of a vacancy tax so property owners don’t keep storefronts vacant. 

Carlton has a simple philosophy when it comes to State Street: Clean it, keep it well lit and keep it safe. 

He likes the promenade in the State Street Master Plan and wants to see a hybrid model for vehicle access.

“It sounds like the owners want to open, but us local folk want it closed, but if we keep it closed long enough, we’re going to lose enough business that it won’t make a difference,” Carlton said. “It’ll be a ghost town.”

He also worries about the hefty nearly $100 million price tag and thinks the city should be more fiscally conservative right now in case of a major natural disaster.

As far as implementing the master plan, Carlton thinks the city should start construction on a block that is already heavily vacated, make the infrastructure improvements and then see how businesses are impacted.

“I would not want to do it on the 400 block or somewhere else where you could just kill the businesses altogether,” Carlton said. “I think that’s one of the things they’re not thinking about.”

Immigration

When it comes to aiding in the immigrant community during waves of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity, the candidates all had different perspectives on the city and police department’s role.

Stoeber said he’d like to see if the city can do anything to help people on their path to citizenship.

He also said the city shouldn’t be “antagonistic” with the federal government and should have a line of communication with someone in immigration enforcement.

“If they’re focused on targeting specific criminals, I think that we can use help with that,” Stoeber said. “But I don’t want them to just be going to Home Depot and rounding people up, and I don’t want them to be going to these places and targeting them based on race. Everyone should feel safe in Santa Barbara.”

Carlton’s grandparents are immigrants, and he said his grandfather’s family all died in Auschwitz, so seeing the rampant ICE activity deeply upsets and frustrates him.

He wants to have local police officers where ICE officers are to monitor and record interactions. 

“I actually don’t want them in my community,” Carlton said. “We can handle our own criminal activity without the help of ICE. We’ve been doing it for a long time. I think we do a pretty good job at it, to be quite honest.”

Escobedo wants to see funding go to organizations supporting mixed-status families. He doesn’t want the police department aiding ICE in any way, including in assisting with traffic regulation, unless it’s to protect residents. He also wants officers to watch and observe ICE activity.

“Having our police officers there to just watch and observe, I think, forces those ICE agents to regulate themselves, to moderate themselves, because they aren’t going to do something crazy in front of another law enforcement agent who also has a body cam that is filming all this stuff,” Escobedo said.

Lehne wants to see protection for programs feeding immigrant community members. She said she picks up boxes of food from La Casa de la Raza to bring to families who are too scared to leave their homes.

“A lot of people don’t realize a lot of undocumented people are still scared to go out to the supermarket,” Lehne said.

Rent Stabilization

Out of all the District 6 candidates, Escobedo is the most supportive of the rent-stabilization ordinance and sees it as an anti-displacement tool that will allow people to stay in their homes. 

If elected, he plans to focus on generating more affordable housing and ensuring implementation of the rental registry and petition process for landlords and tenants. 

“If, for some reason, it’s poorly implemented, then people are going to point to that fact and they’re going to say, ‘We don’t need it,’ and the fact of the matter is we do need it,” Escobedo said. “We just need it done well.”

Specifically, he said implementation should look like “the best customer service possible” to make it simple and timely for tenants and landlords to go through the petition process.

Stoeber said Santa Barbara’s new rent-stabilization ordinance is “trying to do everything all at once” rather than focusing on helping people in need. 

While he wants to see strong anti-displacement measures, he worries that the way the ordinance is written, people who don’t necessarily need the lower rent will be staying in stabilized units longer, making it harder for new residents entering the rental market.

He’s also concerned about half of the petition cost being passed to tenants, the uncertainty around the cost of the program, and worries that the rent cap means landlords won’t be able to keep up with their properties. 

“It’s almost encouraging them to sell to corporate landlords, and having those corporate landlords come in who don’t have a relationship with their tenants at all,” Stoeber said. “I don’t want to see a Santa Barbara downtown that’s owned just by corporations. I want our fabric to be made up of people who really care about Santa Barbara.”

While Lehne isn’t against rent stabilization, she said she is against the way the Santa Barbara ordinance was written, particularly the lack of transparency over the cost of the program.

She also doesn’t think that enough tenants realize that they will have to help pay the rental registration fee. 

“I don’t like hearing our leaders say there were unexpected costs,” Lehne said. “We should never, as taxpayers, be told that there are all these hidden fees and unexpected costs.”

Since the ordinance has passed, if elected, Lehne said she would make sure the program will deliver what was promised. 

“I don’t think everyone’s going to be happy with the result,” Lehne said.

Carlton is against the rent-stabilization ordinance, saying smaller landlords who don’t raise their rents every year will now have to do so because of the cap, and that they won’t be able to afford repairs.

He does think housing will improve as UCSB opens more students housing, but he wants to see the city develop public-private partnerships to convert more empty buildings into low income housing.

He also wants to see more empty space above storefronts converted into residential units downtown. 

Read about who has endorsed the candidates here.

District 6 voters can make their choice on Nov. 3.