Edhat Staff
Alejandra Gutierrez (courtesy photo)
By edhat staff
The final results are in for Santa Barbara City Council seats and Alejandra Gutierrez secured a win over incumbent Jason Dominguez.
The final tally was released on Thursday confirming Gutierrez secured her District 1 seat with just 8 votes over Dominguez. Gutierrez received 963 votes with Dominguez receiving 955, Cruzito Cruz received 100 votes.
Mike Jordan won by a sizeable lead for the District 2 seat out of four other candidates with 36.92% for 1,509 votes. Brian Campbell came in second with 27.6% for 1,128 votes.
The City of Santa Barbara contracted with the Los Angeles County Elections office to provide the tally and canvas of returned ballots. The ballot tally took place in Norwalk at the Los Angeles County offices which caused the delay in results.
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In the “old days” people working the polls hand counted the votes after closing the polls; for state wide and national elections. The results were known the next day. For an election this small I don’t understand why that couldn’t have happened instead of the crazy way this was handled. Good grief, took way too long to get the results.
Tremendously disappointing but not surprising, given the huge push made by the Democratic Party against fellow Democrat Dominguez because he is too independent. (It will be interesting to see how they like Jordan who also is independent and a very recent Democrat but more politic than Dominguez.) Hopefully, A. Gutierrez will turn out to be less of Murillo clone than (relative?) O. Gutierrez. Both Murillo and O. Gutierrez walked the eastside against Dominguez. That plus the embarrassingly low voter turnout made the difference. Clearly, what the residents of the Eastside said was, “who cares? Not I!”
Jason reached out to eastsiders and, despite what Alejandra and friends claimed, was very responsive to residents’ needs. It will be interesting to see if Alejandra does similarly — will she be keeping her fulltime school job, btw? The district is geographically very large, from State Street to Salinas, from Canon Perdido to Cabrillo Boulevard, with many differing interests and concerns that have nothing to do with Franklin School.
Thanks, Jason, for all you’ve done, from streetlights to trash removal to in depth study of the issues — I felt that you sabotaged your campaign for re-election by running for Assembly at the same time . It was a great pity for your eastside constituents AND the city as a whole – and each councilmember is a representative of the CITY as a whole, not just the 963 voters.
Sorry he didn’t win, but I hope he smokes the mayor in the Assembly race. Her career needs to just end right now. Word on the street is the Dems know she could not win in a one-on-one race for her re-election campaign for mayor. That’s why they’re trying to fob her off on the Assembly.
Time to choose the GOP candidates. We have seen what too many years of Democrats running things have done to our town, county and state.
Even with local counting it would have taken extra time, as votes were valid if they were postmarked by election day.
We need to go back to one election day only, and vote by mail that must arrive by election day. Worked well in the past. This new system stretches out the campaign period beyond human endurance, greatly increasing campaign costs as well as ultimate campaign disinterest. The current system is an experiment that has failed everyone. Go back to the old way of doing things. Voter participation did not increase and this last district race was a debacle of voter disengagement.
Mayoral Puppet #2. Santa Barbara lost a wonderful Councilmember and got a fraud who’s strings will be pulled by Cathy Murillo.
As a lifelong Santa Barbara Democrat I am sad to see Dominguez go. The City Council needed his contrary voice to balance out the incompetence and sheer laziness in much of City governance. Any decisionmaking group dominated by one viewpoint is vulnerable to making poor decisions. Now Cathy and the local Democratic Party machine can ignore serious issues and cut ribbons to their hearts’ content.
Dominguez should have asked for the recount….. Good luck with Gutierrez…… I don’t really have anything nice to say about her, so I’m gonna keep quiet.
Best part is now we can all vote for Jason Dominguez, not just the very small numbers of city council district one voters, which is too easy to rig against him..
Dominguez did not represent my neighborhood in the Eastside when an illegal business took up residence. Violating the Zoning Ordinance and confirmed by the City Attorney, the City Council then refused to investigate what has happened in the Dominguez Dumping Ground. He bailed completely for us. Trust no one.
Because this is the last odd year election in Santa Barbara and the cost of operating the SB County Elections office just to send out 10,000 ballots and count the 5,000 ballots returned was much more than the price it costs Los Angeles County.
This is just my opinion but losing Jason on the City Council is a huge loss for the City of Santa Barbara as a whole not just our district. Some say he was too argumentative on council but I saw that as to questioning why the city council was allowing our tax dollars to be spent on wasteful things. We the taxpayers and property owners are paying for all their wasteful spending.
For those who do not like the current mayor and her minions another one was just elected who took money from the mayor for her campaign (this can be looked up on the city website for campaign donations) and will possibly be beholding to the mayor to vote the way she wants her too.
Jason was the only candidate that ever came to my neighborhood and asked me what problems were going on in the neighborhood and what my concerns were. I told him I had a long list which he wrote down and even before he was elected he personally took care of some of those problems and continued to help me after he was elected. We have a much better neighborhood due to his concern for his district and it’s residents. Jason Dominguez thank you for your service to Santa Barbara. As a District 1 resident, you will be missed on City Council.
I’ll miss Jason he liked to stir the pot and question everything that came passed him he took care of this area as best he could that is my opinion anyway, I don’t care what Alan thinks…Lol inside joke.
P.S. Congratulations Alejandra…
Plus I heard the SB Co elections office was in the middle of upgrading their software and couldn’t do the job even if they could agree on a price with the City. In recent years the County cost for this has been escalating rapidly.
Uneducated and Unqualified winners chosen by county democratic clubs not residents. Got to love the machine. Santa Barbara is going down the tubes do to that.
The reality is, people are procreating like they just discovered it. With more people we will have more density. SB will not be immune to this. We do not have enough land to build single family homes for everyone that wants them. That means we will be building taller, similar to Europe. Inevitable.
Facto, wasn’t saying she would use her magic on the other schools. There are plenty of other city programs that could use some magic. Maybe we should wait until she actually does something in an official capacity before we descend on her like a ton of bricks.
Give her a chance she might do some great things quit being so Negative…
Murillo, Rouse, Hotchkiss, Schneider, Hart, White, Francisco and Lodge got us the Marc. Murillo was the newbee. The Planning Department is tight with Developers. Loopholes got us the Marc and Murillo, O. Gutierrez, Friedman, Hart an Rowse punted changes that were needed to provide affordable housing. You don’t know what you are talking about. Dominguez ran on changing the AUD. Dominguez, White, Schneider and others wanted change. But Murillo and Hart and the like held out for Developers to rape the city.
I wonder if all the folks who criticized Dominguez for running for Assembly will do the same with Murillo?
We will. We don’t want her running for anything that’s why.
Too late, you already slammed her. But that was your intent, right? Franklin School is doing some amazing things and maybe she can extend some of that magic to the rest of the city?
Based what information? Or are you just a hater in general?
It is not the city councils job or purview to run Santa Barbara schools. That is the elected school board’ job. She picked the wrong seat to run for – or someone else picked it for her obviously.
Jason couldn’t even win reelection as an incumbent, much less beat Cathy for assembly.
Very very nice to see locals, born and raised in Santa Barbara run for office and run against rich move-ins, outside developers and their representative incumbents. Some how the new folks come in wanting to change everything, especially making it easier for developers, to rise building heights to three stories and build a shopping center and parking garage around a no parking available Balboa Building (such as bay area developer Robert Klausner who did just that). More recently the City Council, using affordable housing ADU’s as an excuse, approved developer Greg Reitz to tear down vacant Grace Lutheran church with an empty parking lot and build the 89 unit Marc with its tiny apartments. Recently Reitz sold his unaffordable project to a hedge fund investment company for $56 million. The current Council is to blame for this and many other densification changes to Santa Barbara that resulted in increased traffic, crime and population to a formerly beautiful and livable downtown. Hopefully Ms. Gutierrez will have concerns for our current population over those who wish to exploit the beauty and livability of Santa Barbara.
Ms Gutierrez is all in 100% for more “affordable” housing everywhere in this city – stack and pack ’em. Totally on board with the Upper State density increases, Oak Park density increases, expanding downtown density increases but only is holding back on more density in her own Eastside District. With her vote joining the Murillo majority, this town will never be the same. Nice legacy for a local to leave behind.