Jim Mosby and Jenelle Osborne are again fighting to become Lompoc’s next mayor. This time around, the two veteran local politicians will be joined by newcomer Lydia Perez.
Incumbent Osborne has served on the City Council since 2016, becoming mayor in 2018.
Mosby, a former City Council member, was first appointed to the council in 2014 and elected in 2016. He ran for mayor against Osborne in 2018 and again in 2022, but lost both times. He lost his 4th District seat to current Councilmember Jeremy Ball in 2020.
Perez works for People’s Self-Help Housing—a nonprofit that develops low-income housing and provides housing assistance to its clients.
All candidates said they promise positive change to the city—specifically, increasing housing development, recruiting more businesses to Lompoc, and identifying new revenue sources for the city’s general fund or finding more ways to save money.
Osborne’s challengers believe it’s time for new leadership because the city hasn’t seen change. The incumbent claims that the city has finally seen some progress under her leadership after years of financial hardship, and she wants to continue moving the city forward.
On Election Day, Lompoc residents are voting for mayor and whether to convert Ken Adam Park to private property, and 1st District residents are voting for a new council member.
Originally slated to run in the 1st District against former Planning Commissioner Steve Bridge, Perez ultimately decided to run for mayor because she felt she “could be more effective.”
“Not that my vote has more power, but being able to go to the county and state level to form such partnerships,” Perez said. “We need someone who can relate to our demographic and not be afraid to speak up. We need someone who is really going to show up and represent them at the city level.”
Perez is the only Latino running in any Lompoc race this cycle. With 1st District Councilmember Gilda Aiello (formerly Cordova) stepping down this term, Perez would be the only Latina on the dais if elected.
“A lot of our Hispanic demographic is underrepresented. There’s no interpretation at a city level,” she said. “The Hispanic population is not coming out and not being included, and it’s time for change and time to be inclusive.”
The city needs to focus more on partnerships at the state and federal level and take advantage of grant opportunities—like the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development or Community Development Block Grants—for housing development, she said. She wants to take advantage of the city’s vacant lots and promote mixed-use development to bring in businesses, jobs, and housing.
With more than 300 jobs projected to be created at Vandenberg Space Force Base in the next seven years, she added, Lompoc needs to support youth entering the local workforce by establishing more science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) programs and vocational training.
“The biggest concern is they are not prepared for the job market, they don’t have the interview skills, or they don’t want to go to college,” Perez said. “It’s everybody’s responsibility to make sure the knowledge, information, and resources are out there. The school board doesn’t work directly with the city right now. … I think we could accomplish so much more together than we are right now.”
To retain public safety employees, Perez promised to revisit the budget to better support and prioritize first responders who are coping with low wages.
“We have this revolving door of new [employees] and then they’re gone to a different station because they are getting paid more,” Perez said. “We need to focus on their pay and focus on [keeping] the people we hire. If you think about it, we can’t afford the increases, but we are wasting so much money on hiring, training, recruitment.”
Osborne agrees that the public safety employees need higher wages, and she wants to diversify the city’s businesses—including in manufacturing and tech jobs with space exploration—and streamline the planning process to help generate more sales tax for the general fund.
“We recognize that our community is ag-based, and that’s important to us, but we also have the military here; then you have the school district, the hospital district, and the city is a business employer,” she said.
In order to attract more businesses and retain employees, the city needs a more diverse housing supply, Osborne said. More than 30 percent of Lompoc’s housing is Section 8—which is property tax not coming into the city’s general tax fund or its school district, she said. She wants to partner with developers who want to develop market-rate housing on small city lots, create development incentives, and start a program to help residents with down payments or cover realtor fees.
Osborne said that she has established relationships with state, federal, and Vandenberg officials to get grant funding—including federal appropriations to help complete the new dispatch center and provide new radio equipment and body cameras for the Police Department.
“We’ve pivoted and utilized the funds we have been able to generate with cannabis revenue and improved sales tax revenue and a healthier hotel tax,” she said. “Beyond what people think of as traditional public safety, we’ve been able to use appropriations, Proposition 68 funds, to improve our parks, put in streetlights, and paving [roads] when we can.”
Perez and Osborne both oppose the proposal to convert Ken Adam Park into a space-themed education center. However, Mosby believes it would be a huge benefit to the local economy and would create needed STEM and space education programming.
“The park land was given to the city of Lompoc to do this,” Mosby said. “It wasn’t acquired for the city of Lompoc to sit on it and let it rot.”
Mosby said he supports annexation and expansion to develop more housing—despite recent denials from the Santa Barbara County Local Agency Formation Commission to develop onto ag land.
“Why are we denied? Santa Maria is allowed to grow, Santa Barbara can grow, but Lompoc is not allowed to grow,” he said. “We have to take matters into our own hands.”
If elected, he wants to go through the budget “with a fine-tooth comb” because he believes the City Council is “spending money like drunken pilots,” he said. The council approved “unsustainable” raises for city staff, Mosby said, and passed out COVID hero bonuses “like trick-or-treat candy.” He added that utility rates jumped 30 percent, and the city’s tax revenue dropped this fiscal year.
“When I was on council before, to revitalize the economy we brought back nearly 2,000 jobs to the economy. We had a big boom going on. This council has chased a lot of that away,” Mosby said. “What I saw, what was happening in the town, projects were walking away, crimes were bad, drug issues, urban campers, and the public—especially when it gets dark—people were afraid to get out of their cars and leave their house.”
Osborne and the county grand jury say otherwise.
By 2021, the Lompoc Police Department lost a third of its officers, and equipment failures hindered immediate responses, causing “an unrelenting upward trend in violent crime,” due to budget cut decisions made by Mosby and former Mayor John Lin, according to a Santa Barbara County grand jury report.
“It’s easy to see his impact, the mishandling of departments, positions lost, and how we struggled,” Osborne said. “When he lost his seat on council and [we] got a council that was more balanced, diverse, we have had more respectful conversations.”
Osborne added that utility cost increases were necessary because of the gas price spike and infrastructure mandates.
“It’s not profit, it’s rate recovery, cost of providing services, and repair and emergencies,” she said. “[Taking] the time to invest and increase revenue and use it appropriately, you can really lift up the entire community and see benefits.”
Mosby said he “tightened the belt” on the budget, and helped pass the needed sales tax to get the city through some tough times.
“I don’t see what we’ve done negatively,” he said. “However it works out, we need to remember we are one small community. Remember everybody out there, not just City Hall.”
Reach Staff Writer Taylor O’Connor at [email protected].
