Lompoc City Council member Gilda Aiello (formerly Cordova) decided not to run for reelection this year after facing “a few unfair attacks on me brought on by a group of individuals who wanted to have me removed” during her last few years as a council member.
“It really was with a heavy heart,” Aiello told the Sun. “In the future, anything I do will always be with the good intention to genuinely serve the community and the needs of the community.”
As of Aug. 13, former Lompoc Planning Commissioner Steve Bridge will be running unopposed for her seat in the 1st District this November. Lompoc residents wishing to run had until Aug. 14 to file—which was after the Sun went to press.
“It just got to a point where I feel like it’s my time,” Bridge said. “I’ve done all I could do at the Planning Commission, and I feel like it’s a good time for me to help the city.”
He said that he would like to help establish a transition center for people experiencing homelessness to go for resources during the day; he wants to run the city as a business and make sure the budgets are balanced; he supports development of the private space education center at Ken Adam Park; and he supports continued business development at the city.
“It’s always a matter of priorities and where you put the funding,” he said. “I’ll focus on economic development because I believe rising tides bring all the ships up.”
In her six years, Aiello served on the council that helped get Lompoc’s budget balanced after being in a years-long deficit. She helped purchase public safety equipment like new cameras and a radio replacement for police and emergency services; helped improve infrastructure at city parks; worked with the city’s community liaison officer to address homelessness; and helped reinstate patrols of vehicle encampments near the riverbed, she said.
“I was always trying to make sure we were being fiscally responsive and not just addressing unimportant things,” Aiello said.
In a July 30 video Aiello posted to her public campaign page on Facebook, she said that a few residents created a website and claimed that she lived outside the district, accused her of tax fraud, and accused her of using her position on City Council to leverage the property she owned.
In a March 7 post, she shared a statement from the Santa Barbara County Tax Assessor’s office showing that she did not receive such exemption and proving she was a resident in her district.
“When that wasn’t enough, they accused me of misappropriating funds for the nonprofit I served as president all while accusing me of having ill will of the land deal that was being negotiated by the city with a for-profit entity,” she said in the video.
In May, a Santa Barbara County grand jury report found that the city of Lompoc didn’t have a system of checks and balances in place to monitor how the city’s contracted tourism business improvement district, Explore Lompoc, spends money earned from city hotels that pay a fee equal to 3 percent of its nightly revenue to the city. Aiello serves on the nonprofit’s board.
The grand jury report accused the city of a “consistent lack of oversight” and accused Explore Lompoc of underreporting more than $500,000 in funds between 2020 and 2022.
In response to the grand jury report’s allegation that the nonprofit underreported funds in its annual reporting to the city, Lompoc Management Services Director Christie Donnelly said during the city’s May 21 meeting that the city’s contract with Explore Lompoc doesn’t require annual financial statements or cumulative totals of excess funds in regular annual reports.
“Yet as we sit today, one of my biggest opponents and accusers is running to be your representative for District 1,” Aiello said in the Facebook video. “His platform: Integrity, transparency, and change. Yet he offered none of those things to me.”
Bridge told the Sun that Aielo has “a misunderstanding of who was posting those things."
“I think she’s given a lot of time and energy of her own to the city, and I have respect for that,” he said. “If someone runs against me, I plan on running a clean campaign, and I’m assuming everyone is going to try to do their best.”
