What are the main things you wanted voters to know about you and your campaign as we move towards the election?

“I’m a mom of an 8-year-old here in Santa Barbara, I was born and raised here. This is my home, and I love this community, but we have a lot of work to do to make it a better community for all of us.

That means addressing climate change, and that means addressing the fact that we have the second-highest poverty rate in the entire state and our state has the highest poverty rate in the entire nation.

We also have extreme weather events in this county, with floods and fires, and we need our county to be as innovative and proactive as they possibly can be.

Lastly, we need to clean up government and make sure that there isn’t as much money in it as there is now, so I’m running on a platform of campaign finance reform to put limits in so that special interests have less influence and really so that the government serves the people it was intended to serve.”

What inspired you to run for supervisor?

“Really, it was the Thomas Fire and the mudslides, and realizing that this district, which represents Carpinteria, Summerland, Montecito, Riviera, East Side, and Mission Canyon, is experiencing these extreme weather events, and the county’s job is to keep us safe.

It runs our sheriff department, our fire department, our mental health, our public health, and more, and so that is what propelled me to want to be part of innovative solutions to make sure that we are doing right by the people we serve.”

Can you describe for our readers what the responsibilities are for the supervisor position?

“So there are 5 county supervisors for a county of 500,000 people, and the main job is one, to keep us safe, and two, to protect and enhance our quality of life.

That means good schools, it means the air that we breathe, it means oil development and keeping it off of our shores, it means turning towards alternative energy.

It’s very much the fundamentals, which is, I believe, the most important thing.

Even given what’s happening in the national government, realizing there can be dysfunction nationally, but what really matters, having served in the Senate, having worked in the White House, having worked in DC for almost 20 years, what matters most is local government.

And that’s what people need to know. They should pay attention to who is going to serve the people, not special interest, not corporations like cannabis corporations, but actually the people of this wonderful county.”