It’s Official: Capps Challenges Williams
Santa Barbara County’s 1st District Supervisor Race Starts Off with Roses
It was perhaps the most excruciatingly beautiful political throwdown in Santa Barbara history: Santa Barbara school boardmember Laura Capps announced Tuesday she was running for the 1st District supervisorial seat against incumbent Das Williams at a press conference orchestrated at the Rose Garden by the Santa Barbara Mission — under sunny August sky-blue skies — where Capps disclosed she once rolled down the hill as a young girl.
Surrounded by an army of friends, family, and enthusiastic, sign-wielding well-wishers, Capps — the daughter of husband-and-wife former congressmembers Walter and Lois Capps — vowed repeatedly to listen to her constituents, and not just special interests, and conduct herself with integrity. She spoke frequently of the “bond of trust” that must exist between elected officials and their community and of being a “caretaker” for the community. Reverend Anne Howard, who spoke before Capps, hit similar themes but more pointedly. There could be “no under the table contributions and no backroom deals.”
When asked if she was suggesting Williams didn’t listen or that he lacked integrity, Capps declined to comment, saying, “I’ve made my statement.” Capps never mentioned Williams once, nor did she so much as allude to the debate generated by the cannabis industry that’s consumed much of the supervisors’ bandwidth in recent months. Capps had been enlisted to run against Williams — who has aroused the wrath of anti-cannabis activists in Carpinteria who are upset by the persistent odor emissions of cannabis greenhouses — by philanthropist and publisher Sara Miller McCune. The cannabis issue created a wedge into which Capps — a White House staffer in the Clinton administration and a seasoned political professional in her own right — could insert herself.
