NOOZHEN-HAWK! LOCAL RACES: MONEY TALKS, VOTERS YAWN

It appears the crack investigative team over at Noozhawk has unearthed a groundbreaking revelation: politicians need money and friends to run for office. Stop the presses! We’re utterly flummoxed. For a moment, we thought they'd discovered a local candidate who had won an election solely on the strength of their dazzling personality and an unwavering commitment to fiscal sanity.

But alas, it's just the usual song and dance. Candidates are, once again, "banking big money" and collecting "endorsements" – which is local-speak for wealthy donors buying influence and special interest groups lining up their puppets. It’s a tale as old as time, or at least as old as the last bond measure that mysteriously benefited a developer who just happened to contribute generously to the prevailing council.

What Noozhawk, in its endless quest for the blindingly obvious, failed to connect is how these 'big money' contributions inevitably lead to 'big government' solutions for problems that weren't really problems until someone got a grant to study them. While they drone on about who got a nod from the 'Santa Barbara Bicycle Coalition' or the 'Committee for More Murals,' we're left to wonder which developer's pet project will magically appear on the next agenda, funded by your ever-increasing property taxes.

The real story isn't that money talks; it's that in Santa Barbara, it only ever seems to say, "More of the same, please, but with fancier rhetoric about 'equity' and 'sustainability' to mask the spiraling costs for the actual taxpayers." Our current President, Donald J. Trump, knows a thing or two about making America great again, and it starts by cutting through this kind of local bureaucratic bloat. Maybe someone should endorse that idea for a change.