Heather Moreno wins 5th District Supervisor race 

Atascadero Mayor Heather Moreno will shed her current title for a greater one: the next 5th District Supervisor in January 2025.

According to election results certified on March 27, Moreno clinched 56.4 percent of final votes while her opponent, Atascadero City Councilmember Susan Funk, grabbed 43.6 percent of the total.

Moreno will replace current 5th District Supervisor Debbie Arnold who chose not to run for a fourth term.

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• File Photo By Jayson Mellom
• LONG-AWAITED VICTORY With 56.4 percent of counted votes in her cache, Atascadero Heather Moreno soared above her opponent with a nearly 13-percentage point lead.

"I'm honored by the trust and confidence the voters have placed in me," Moreno told New Times on March 27.

She added she'll spend the next nine months building relationships with county staff, researching county issues, and meeting with groups like the mental health advisory committee and housing advocate Generation Build.

Moreno is mayor until the second Tuesday in December. In her final months as Atascadero's top city official, she said she's pleased to see the general plan update close to completion after being involved with it since the beginning.

"We're toward the latter part of the general plan update, which is a big undertaking," she said. "I'm glad to continue as mayor throughout this process."

The final results showed that 17,820 of 33,224 registered voters in District 5—the region that spans Atascadero, the California Valley, Garden Farms, Pozo, Santa Margarita, and parts of Templeton, SLO, and Cal Poly—cast ballots for the supervisor race. That's an almost 54 percent voter turnout.

County-Clerk Recorder Elaina Cano said in a March 27 press release that her office counted 92,526 ballots across all the primary races. It put SLO County's voter participation in the primaries at 52.3 percent—higher than the statewide average of below 34 percent, and more than the turnout in both the neighboring counties of Monterey and Santa Barbara. Cano added in the press release that 94 percent of voters chose the vote-by-mail method and the rest opted to submit their ballots on the March 5 election day.

Funk told New Times that she called Moreno on March 21 to concede the race. In a campaign email released the following day, Funk acknowledged that though the results at that point didn't include many provisional ballots from Cal Poly, there weren't enough ballots to bridge the 13-percentage point gap between her and Moreno at the time.

"The beauty and pain of democracy is that you don't get to win every election you run in," Funk told New Times on March 26. "It's the ongoing mark of how we shape our community together."

She will continue her term as an Atascadero City Councilmember, which runs through 2026. She said she hasn't made a decision about what comes next or whether she'll run for mayor. In February, fellow City Councilmember Charles Bourbeau announced his intention to run for Atascadero Mayor in the November election.

Funk said she is busy preparing for the general plan update and will work with Bourbeau, Moreno, and the rest of the City Council on the process.

"I did share my appreciation to the mayor and she to me about keeping our county campaigns out of our work on City Council," she said. "We need to build a stronger tax base in Atascadero and a stronger jobs base." Δ