Valencia leads Aguilera in tight race for Santa Barbara County District 5 supervisor
SANTA MARIA, Calif. (KEYT) - The race to win the seat for District 5 supervisor in Santa Barbara County is a tight contest as many expected.
As of the most recent update posted early Wednesday morning by the Santa Barbara County Elections Office at 1:48 a.m., Ricardo Valencia holds a slight lead over Maribel Aguilera by 276 votes.
The update shows Valencia has 3,567 votes (51.72%), while Aguilera has 3,291 votes (47.72%).
"I'm feeling really grateful to the people of Santa Maria, Guadalupe and Tanglewood for their belief in our campaign," said Valencia on Wednesday afternoon. "I'm feeling really grateful for the trust that the community has shown in us so far and I'm excited to see this lead grow."
Even though Aguilera is currently in second place, she pointed out Wednesday morning the Santa Barbara County Elections Office has quite of bit of counting to complete until a final outcome is determined.
"There's still a lot of votes to be counted," said Aguilera. "So still optimistic and still have some positive feelings going in. We are optimistic. We are very proud of our campaign. We are super excited, and this is democracy at its best, and it's just exciting to be part of the process."
While nearly 7,500 ballots have been counted in the District 5 race, it's currently unknown just how many votes remain to be processed and tabulated.
According to the County's Election Summary Report, there are 32,048 registered voters in District 5.
Santa Barbara County Chief Deputy Registrar of Voters Martin Cobos told News Channel 3-12 on Wednesday, "We won't have any update on the number of uncounted ballots until around 3 pm tomorrow.We are unpacking ballots dropped off at the polls as well as ballots from USPS that are postmarked by Nov. 3. We won't guess, speculate, or have anything on uncounted ballots until tomorrow."
With potentially thousands of votes still left to be counted, both Valencia and Aguilera understand it could be a long period of time until the winner is announced.
"I want to let the voters know that I appreciate their patience in waiting the couple of weeks that it's going to take for the official results to be counted," said Valencia. "I'm confident that here at our county, the results will be done with ethics and with their due diligence, and every vote we want to counted. I can't wait to see what those final results are, and hopefully at the end of the day, celebrate our win, but we can't count victory until it's official in a couple of weeks from now."
"We've got to be really patient and just go through the process and we'll see," said Aguilera. "The voters will decide at the end of the day it's really up to them. When I ran for City Council it was similar. We won't know likely for a few days, maybe even longer. It could be two weeks if it continues to be really close where you have less than 300, maybe even less than 500. We will just have to wait. We will start to see the trend, but I really think because it's an open seat, there's no incumbent, it's going to be close."
The two candidates are each vying to win the seat that represents the highly-populated region of Northern Santa Barbara County, including Santa Maria, the county's biggest city, as well as Guadalupe and the unincorporated community of Tanglewood.
The seat has been held by Steve Lavagnino, who was first elected in 2010, and is currently the longest running supervisor on the board.
Lavagnino decided to retire from the seat, leaving the office up for grabs for someone new to fill the position.
Valencia and Aguilera have been running for nearly one year and said Tuesday night they both proud of how they have campaigned for the position throughout the past several months.
"We worked really hard for the community for 11 months," said Aguilera on Election Night at her watch party. "We started back in January. I have to thank my husband and my daughter. It was really a family affair to be on the campaign trail for 11 months, and we worked really hard. We got our message out there. We put up signs. We knocked on doors. We spoke with the voters and we really listened more than anything as to what was important and what they think are the biggest issues of the Fifth District. We worked hard. There wasn't a day that we didn't work on the campaign. We haven't had a weekend off in months and so there's nothing that I can say that we could have done because we worked hard every day and I'm super proud of the campaign. I'm super proud of all the work we did."
"What makes this campaign so special is that we have a team of high school students, community college students, folks from all ages, all backgrounds, with the commitment to invest in affordable housing, affordable childcare, living wages for workers, challenging the ICE activity," said Valencia on Election Night at his watch party. "H aving people who are seeing the inequalities that are taking place in our country, but want better for working families, t. hat's what makes this campaign so inspirational to so many people. Why so many people that have been voted in the past are starting to vote and people that want to stay engaged in the civic process, where we don't want to just stop at election night. We want to keep working for working families throughout the year."
In the June Primary Election, three candidates ran to earn a spot in the November General Election.
Aguilera, a Santa Maria-based based attorney and current Santa Maria City Councilmember, Valencia, a Santa Maria High School teacher Santa Maria-Bonita School Board member and Cory Bantilan, who has served as Lavagnino's Chief of Staff the past 15 years.
After nearly 9,000 votes were cast, Valencia came out in first place with 3,432 votes, Aguilera finished in second with 2,553 votes, while Bantilan was third with 1,975 votes.
After finishing in the two top positions in the primary, both Valencia and Aguilera advanced to the General Election.
Valencia, who was raised in both Guadalupe and Santa Maria, is running on a campaign centered around affordability, particularly housing, youth/community wellbeing, economic development/jobs and environmental protection.
Aguilera, was raised in Santa Maria and is centering her campaign on affordable housing, public safety, youth investment and infrastructure.
The winner of the election will be sworn into office on Tuesday, Jan. 12, 2027.
