If you’re looking to buy an election, maybe it’s time to move to Cambria.
The coastal elites who live there think that money is what it takes to win, and they are unanimous in that!
Before you agree with me under false pretenses and start talking smack about the Cambria Community Services District and its board members, let me explain. The unincorporated town on SLO County’s North Coast brought back a tradition this summer that’s been on a decades-long sabbatical: the race to become Cambria’s official unofficial mayor.
As part of the town’s Honorary Mayor’s Race, candidates make outrageous campaign promises and fundraise for votes. I know, it sounds an awful lot like a SLO County Board of Supervisors race—except instead of opponents sending out brutal attack ad mailers, they enter pie-eating contests and dance with each other at community events.
Four people are running for the spot and raising money for the Cambria Chamber of Commerce and each candidate’s local nonprofit of choice at the same time. One candidate has promised to keep as much fog out of Cambria as possible.
Chamber President Renee Linn encouraged residents to “vote early, vote often.”
“It’s literally an election you can buy,” she said with a laugh. “It has no official merit … but it’s brought people together. It’s raised money for nonprofits. And it’s reminded us that politics—even fake politics—can still make people laugh.”
Hear! Hear!
But back to the weekly gristmill of Shreddable shenanigans.
Cal Poly had students slated to live in on-campus housing that won’t be ready in time for the fall semester. So, it’s doing what any good university worth its pedigree would do: shoving them into existing housing with other students who weren’t expecting to have a roommate.
A four-bedroom apartment with four students assigned to it will “temporarily” become a three-bedroom apartment with six students living in it and a “study room.”
What can the university do? Construction delays are construction delays.
What is Cal Poly going to do for the students who are being shuffled around like a game of musical desks?
Well, initially, the university thought it might just give impacted students a $100 to $300 credit per month of “temporary housing,” leaving students on the hook to pay the full cost of the housing they were expecting to live in.
That way, Cal Poly could still be the corporation it always dreamed of being—no discounts, no way, not here.
But students were not happy about that plan: “We will have to pay extra (single room price) for a smaller shared room,” one student wrote on Reddit after receiving an email about it from the university.
The email was a notice that two additional students would be assigned to the student’s apartment and “beds will be bunked in two of the rooms.”
“Welcome back to campus!”
Hah!
Two weeks later, the university changed its tune after pushback from the affected students and their families footing the bill. Now, the impacted students will all be getting a 50 percent discount on their housing bills.
That’s what I call action in action!
Cal Poly students have also pushed and pushed for the university to uninstall its flock of Flock Safety cameras on campus to no avail, questioning what the data collected by the license plate readers will be used for and who exactly will have access to it. Nothing to see here, the university has said. The data gets deleted in 30 days, and the school has also said it will not share information with federal agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
That’s what they all say! San Francisco—you know, the sanctuary city—used those same lines to assuage local fears about collaboration with ICE. Turns out, the San Francisco Police Department allowed out-of-state cops to run 1.6 million searches using the city’s license-plate reader database, including some that were related to ICE!
Sounds very loop-holey, amirite?
ICE is, of course, a concern. But there are other concerning incidents of Flock abuse: A Texas cop used 83,000 cameras to track down a woman who had an abortion. Two South Carolina police officers were recently fired for using the technology inappropriately—what they did hasn’t been released yet. The Los Angeles Police Department just terminated its contract with Flock over concerns about how the data their cameras collect is stored. The Milwaukee Police Department just announced that an internal affairs detective was using Flock to stalk his ex-girlfriend.
The list of misdeeds across the country seems to be endless.
Those collective concerns landed in Oceano in early July. The Oceano Community Services District told the SLO County Sheriff’s Office that there’s no flocking way it’s going to allow a Flock Safety license plate reader on one of the district’s buildings.
“I extremely value privacy, and I think many members in our community think the same way I do,” board member Allene Villa said at the July 8 meeting. “I think it’ll have the effect of scaring some potential customers from coming in and paying their bills.”
So now, the Sheriff’s Office has a long road ahead of them of trying to get approval from Caltrans to put up a camera along the highway that runs through town. SLO County already has 30 set up in unincorporated areas.
What’s one more? ∆
The Shredder doesn’t have a license plate. Send one to shredder@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in July 16-23, 2026.
