Government is expensive.
Debbie Arnold said she learned that in her 12 years sitting on the San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors—funding is finite.
“It always has to come out of somebody’s pocket or at the expense of some other service,” Arnold said. “Any time you put five people in a room and ask them how they want to spend money, they’re going to have five different opinions.”
As one of the five people deciding how to spend the county’s money for more than a decade, Arnold didn’t always agree with her colleagues on where to allocate the funds. But she said she always tried to be fiscally responsible with taxpayer dollars and allocate it toward priorities she felt were important.
“I was a big proponent of trying to prioritize, every budget cycle, maintaining our roads,” she said. “I had to get the words ‘road maintenance’ actually listed as a budget priority.”
She managed to get that done in 2017 with a 3-2 vote along partisan lines when conservative supervisors made up the majority. At the time, Arnold said that the county’s infrastructure was deteriorating and she believed constituents wanted it maintained.
Since 2000, Arnold has worked on North County issues, first as a legislative aide for then 5th District Supervisor Mike Ryan, then for Assemblymember Sam Blakeslee before running for supervisor and losing in 2007. She ran again in 2012 and won.
After serving three terms, in 2024, she decided against running for a fourth. Atascadero Mayor Heather Moreno ran for the 5th District seat with the Republican Party’s endorsement and beat out fellow City Councilmember and Democratic Party favorite Susan Funk for the job.
In Arnold’s time on the board, supervisors often disagreed along partisan lines, and when the board majority shifted, so did its priorities. In 2022, South County Supervisor Lynn Compton lost to then Arroyo Grande City Councilmember Jimmy Paulding, a liberal, shifting the 3-2 majority in the other direction and putting Arnold in the minority alongside fellow North County Supervisor John Peschong.
When the majority swung from conservative to liberal, a lot of things changed, Arnold said. Many of the overarching decisions that defined the conservative era of the Board of Supervisors were reversed. This included discarding the Patten redistricting map, repealing a Paso Robles Groundwater Basin planting ordinance, rejoining the Integrated Waste Management Authority, and removing road maintenance as a priority, among many other policies on the Democratic target list.
“It took me five years to get roads as a priority,” Arnold said at the time. “I’m so sad and sorry we’re doing this.”
As Arnold looked toward her impending retirement at the end of 2024, she said she’s not happy that a lot of the policies she worked on were reversed, “but that’s just the majority.”
However, it doesn’t always take a majority to impact county policy. In August, she was the lone vote against pursuing eminent domain against private property owners in order to build out the remaining 4.5 miles of the Bob Jones Trail. That solitary vote was enough to stop the decades-long effort that now has to thread another path between the Octagon Barn in San Luis Obispo and Ontario Road.
“I’ve tried to be a property rights proponent and also protect our agriculture and open space—kind of the character of our county,” Arnold said. “I tried to stay true to the character of the county and on the land use planning, the land use authority side, and always do what I thought was best for the constituents here in this county. That’s who I felt I worked for.”
Now, she’s ready for a full-time life in rural North County.
“I’m looking forward to retiring. It kind of hit me like a ton of bricks that I’m about to turn 70 years old,” she said in December. “I always felt like charging every hill.”
The hills she will be charging now involve catching up on her to-do list at the family ranch near Pozo, raising cattle and hay, tending to the Arnolds’ vineyard (The Vintage Cowboy), and enjoying time with her grandkids.
Arnold’s successor was sworn in as the new 5th District Supervisor on Jan. 7. Moreno brings experience to her new role, Arnold said. Moreno spent more than a decade serving on Atascadero’s City Council.
“I’m really happy that Heather … was ready and willing to step up and run for this seat,” Arnold said.
New face
With an understanding that there are multiple sides in every conversation and a finite amount of resources to accomplish county goals, Moreno said she plans to listen and help the county maintain a short list of priorities.
“We can’t do everything, we can’t meet every need, we just can’t,” Moreno said. “We can’t just keep adding and adding, that’s how you get into that situation where you have budget deficits and have to start cutting things, … rather than just maintaining the size of government as it should be.”
That’s the approach she took in Atascadero after getting elected as mayor in 2018. She started serving on the City Council in 2012, when she was appointed to fill Tom O’Malley’s council seat after he became the city’s mayor. The city’s biggest accomplishments during her tenure?
“Being able to prioritize and fully fund our public safety efforts, to be able to pay our employees a competitive wage—particularly law enforcement, but really across the board,” she said. “Infrastructure projects, the roads, … the downtown.”
In 2014, citizens passed a half-cent sales tax specifically for road improvements. In 2020, Atascadero residents passed a 1 percent sales tax to fund public safety. In 2024, voters approved an extension of the road tax, which shows that the city and council are doing what the voters ask, Moreno said.
Revitalizing Atascadero’s downtown infrastructure is a long-term goal of the city that started well before Moreno sat on the dais, she said. It took years of foresight to revitalize Colony Square; develop The Plaza—a multi-use development of housing units and street-level storefronts; bring community events to Sunken Gardens; and entice investors to open restaurants and shops downtown.
The city is currently in the middle of changing the face of El Camino Real as it travels through downtown, aiming to make it a more walkable and pedestrian friendly area.
“I’m very aware that I stand on the leadership of those that have served before me and made decisions that weren’t immediately visible,” she said. “But once we get that going, and it snowballs, there’s more to be done.”
Future tasks, though, can’t be exponential, Moreno said.
With the help of Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, a book by Greg McKeown, Moreno introduced the concept of “essentialism” to the city because she wanted everyone “to look through the lens that we can only have so many priorities.”
“Government will grow if we don’t continually prune what we’re doing,” she said. “You have to be able to prioritize.”
And once those priorities are decided, Moreno said, the governing body needs to stick to them. She acknowledged that priorities can change. As mayor, she did her best to listen to the public and her fellow council members, take notes on what they said or asked, and figure out where consensus was.
“And making sure that we’re not going off track,” she said. “If any of my council members started to put stuff on staff’s plate, I always felt it was my job to say, ‘Hey, if that’s what we want to do, then what needs to come off of the city’s plate.'”
Current Atascadero Mayor Charles Bourbeau said Moreno’s way of thinking is probably well-timed for the county, which is facing a projected deficit of $15 million for the 2025-26 fiscal year.
“It’s really just about prioritization, because Atascadero in particular has been such a low revenue city and we have a great staff, but it’s a small staff and they can only do so much,” Bourbeau said. “One of the sayings that we have around here is the staff can do anything, but they can’t do everything.”
Bourbeau served as a City Council member for eight years before being elected mayor in the last election cycle. He said Moreno truly listened to what the public and the council had to say, breaking it down into the key points that came up—something he said he’s learning is not that easy as he steps into the role she previously held.
“I think she’s very good at listening to everybody so she’s very open to input from all sides, and I think that she’s always gracious,” Bourbeau said. “Every personality change on a governing body makes it a whole new board or a whole new council, and Heather’s very easy to work with.”
‘Strategic vision’
Moreno will help the county set its budget priorities for the 2025-26 fiscal year in February.
Last year, the board set two tiers of priorities. The first tier held homelessness and mental health and housing and economic development. The second held storm recovery and infrastructure, water resiliency, and organizational effectiveness.
Moreno said she couldn’t speak to how she might weigh in on future county decisions but she did say that as far as homelessness is concerned—listed as the county’s very first priority—the thing she’s heard over and over again is about how much money state and local governments are spending to address the issue.
“We’re spending so much money, why isn’t it getting better? Why is the problem getting worse?” she said. “People are compassionate; they want to see the problem get better.”
She wondered if there might be a way to conduct an audit and figure out what’s working and what isn’t—which dollars are the most effective.
After Moreno was sworn in on Jan. 7, 2nd District Supervisor Bruce Gibson told New Times that he was looking forward to working with Moreno.
“I’m not at all focused on the past dynamics of the board. I’m looking ahead,” he said. “We’ve got some really challenging years ahead.”
He believes that while there may be some underlying current of chaos at the federal level, which will impact the state and in turn, local government, he’s committed to the idea that local government is the most important level of government and can accomplish good things for the community it serves.
The projected future deficit is a manageable number that will take some combination of reducing expenses and increasing revenue to fix, Gibson said. In his view, Gibson said that the board needs to make a concerted effort to work with “strategic vision” when tackling the deficit and deciding on its budget priorities.
Moreno will be a very constructive participant in that effort, he said, adding that he thinks that she understands the need to have strategic vision, political will, and the follow through to get things done.
“We need to be thoughtful about deciding what we’re taking on. … And have a careful conversation about the finances needed to achieve [those projects],” Gibson said. “As we start discussing what’s ahead of us, we start engaging all the board members, we start to understand the competing issues that need to be resolved, and we come together on the issues that we can, that we collectively decide.” Δ
Reach Editor Camillia Lanham at clanham@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Jan 16-26, 2025.