Politics
State lawmakers targeted a Santa Barbara development. Then came the fallout
Outraged Santa Barbara residents jumped into action when a developer unveiled plans last year for a towering apartment complex within sight of the historic Old Mission.
They complained to city officials, wrote letters and formed a nonprofit to try and block the project. Still, the developer’s plans went forward.
Then something unusual happened.
Four hundred miles away in Sacramento, state lawmakers quietly tucked language into an obscure budget bill requiring an environmental impact study of the proposed development — which housing advocates allege was an attempt to block the project.
The legislation, Senate Bill 158, signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom, didn’t mention the Santa Barbara project by name. But the provision was so detailed and specific it couldn’t apply to any other development in the state.
The fallout was swift: The developer sued the state and a Santa Barbara lawmaker, the powerful new president of the state Senate, is under scrutiny over her role in the bill.
The current property located at the proposed location for the eight-story apartment tower.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
The saga highlights the governor’s and state Legislature’s growing influence in local housing decisions, and the battle between cities and Sacramento to address California’s critical housing shortage.
In the face of California’s high cost of housing and rent, state leaders are increasingly passing new housing mandates that require cities and counties to accelerate the construction of new housing and ease the barriers impeding developers.
In this case, the law targeting the Santa Barbara development does the opposite by making it harder to build.
‘A horrendous nightmare’
The fight started last year after developers Craig and Stephanie Smith laid out ambitious plans for an eight-story housing project with at least 250 apartments at 505 East Los Olivos St.
The five-acre site is near the Old Mission Santa Barbara, which draws hundreds of thousands of tourists each year.
In Santa Barbara, a slow-growth haven where many apartment buildings are two stories, the Los Olivos project was perceived as a skyscraper. The mayor, Randy Rowse, called the proposal “a horrendous nightmare,” according to local media site Noozhawk.
But the developer had an advantage. California law requires cities and counties to develop plans for growth every eight years to address California’s increasing population. Jurisdictions are required to pinpoint areas where housing or density could be added.
If cities and counties fail to develop plans by each eight-year deadline, a provision kicks in called “builder’s remedy.”
It allows developers to bypass local zoning restrictions and build bigger, denser projects as long as low or moderate-income units are included.
Santa Barbara was still working with the state on its housing plan when the deadline passed in February 2023. The plan was complete by December of that year, but didn’t become official until the state certified it in February 2024.
Opponents of the proposed Santa Barbara development, clockwise from bottom left: Cheri Rae, Brian Miller, Evan Minogue, Tom Meaney, Fred Sweeney and Steve Forsell.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
A month prior, in January, the developers submitted their plans. And since they included 54 low-income units, the city couldn’t outright deny the project.
“The developers were playing chess while the city was playing checkers,” said Evan Minogue, a Santa Barbara resident opposed to the development.
He said older generations in California resisted change, leaving the state to come in with “heavy-handed, one-size-fits-all policies to force cities to do something about housing.”
Santa Barbara, a wealthy city that attracts celebrities, bohemian artist-types and environmental activists, has a long history of fighting to keep its small-town feel.
In 1975, the City Council adopted a plan to limit development, along with water consumption and traffic, and keep a cap on the city’s population at 85,000. In the late ‘90s, actor Michael Douglas — an alum of UC Santa Barbara — donated money to preserve the city’s largest stretch of coastal land.
Hemmed in by the Santa Ynez Mountains, the city is dominated by low-slung buildings and single-family homes. The median home value is $1.8 million, according to Zillow. A city report last year detailed the need for 8,000 more units, primarily for low-income households, over the coming years.
Stephanie and Craig Smith, the developers of the project at 505 East Los Olivos Street.
(Ashley Gutierrez)
Assemblymember Gregg Hart, whose district includes Santa Barbara, supports the language in the budget bill requiring the environmental review. He doesn’t want to see the proposed development tower over the Old Mission and blames the builder’s remedy law for its introduction.
“It’s a brilliant illustration of how broken the ‘builder’s remedy’ system is,” said Hart. “Proposing projects like this undermines support for building density in Santa Barbara.”
Similar pushback has been seen in Santa Monica, Huntington Beach and other small cities as developers scramble to use the builder’s remedy law. A notable example recently played out in La Cañada Flintridge, where developers pushed through a mixed-use project with 80 units on a 1.29-acre lot despite fierce opposition from the city.
Still, the controversial law doesn’t exempt developments from review under the California Environmental Quality Act, known as CEQA, the state’s landmark policy requiring a study of the project’s effects on traffic, air quality and more.
The developers behind the Los Olivos Street project sought to avoid the environmental review, however, because of a new state law that allows many urban infill projects to avoid such requirements. Assembly Bill 130, based on legislation introduced by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland), was signed into law by Newsom in June.
When the Los Olivos developers asked city officials about using AB 130 for their project, a Santa Barbara community developer director told them in July 2025 that the CEQA review was necessary. AB 130 doesn’t apply if the project is planned near a creek and wetland habitat, or other environmentally sensitive area, the director wrote.
Months later, the state Legislature passed its budget bill requiring the review.
Santa Barbara residents who oppose the project said they didn’t ask for the bill.
But if the review finds that traffic from the development would overwhelm fire evacuation routes, for instance, they may have an easier time fighting the project.
“We don’t want to come off as NIMBYs,” resident Fred Sweeney, who opposes the project, said, referring to the phrase “not in my backyard.” Sweeney, an architect, and others started the nonprofit Smart Action for Growth and Equity to highlight the Los Olivos project and a second one planned by the same developer.
Standing near the project site on a recent day, Sweeney pointed as cars lined up along the main road. It wasn’t yet rush hour, but traffic was already building.
A ‘really strange’ bill
Buried deep in Senate Bill 158, the bill passed by state lawmakers targeting the Los Olivos project, is a mention of the state law around infill urban housing developments. Senate Bill 158 clarified that certain developments should not be exempt from this law.
Developments in “a city with more than 85,000 but fewer than 95,000 people, and within a county of between 440,00 and 455,000 people,” and which are also near a historical landmark, regulatory floodway and watershed, are not exempt, the bill stated.
According to the 2020 census, Santa Barbara has a population of 88,768. Santa Barbara County has a population of 448,229. And the project sits near both a creek and the Santa Barbara Mission.
The controversial development fit the bill.
Monique Limón is president pro tem of the California state Senate.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
A representative for Senate President Pro Tem Monique Limón told CalMatters that the senator was involved in crafting that exemption language.
During a tour of an avocado farm in Ventura last month, Limón declined to comment on her role. She cited the lawsuit and directed questions to Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office.
Limón, who was born and raised in Santa Barbara, confirmed that she did talk to Sweeney — who started the nonprofit to fight the development — about opposition to the development.
The Los Olivos project had “a lot of community involvement and participation,” she said. “In terms of feedback, what I understand, reading the articles, there are over 400 people that have weighed in on it … it’s a very public project.”
Limón also defended her housing record.
“Every piece of legislation I author or review, I do so based on the needs of our state but also with the lens of the community I represent — whether that is housing, education, environmental protections or any other issues that come across my desk,” Limón said.
The developers filed a lawsuit against the city and state in October, claiming that SB 158 targets one specific project: theirs. As such, it would be illegal under federal law, which bans “special legislation” that targets a single person or property.
The home currently located at the proposed development site.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
The suit claims that Limón promoted and ushered the bill through the state Senate, argues that it should be overturned and questions the required environmental review, which would likely add years to its timeline and millions to its budget.
Stephanie Smith, one of the developers, told The Times that the bill was born of the “protests of wealthy homeowners, many of whom cosplay as housing advocates until the proposed housing is in their neighborhood.”
“As a former homeless student who worked full time and lived in my car, I know what it means to struggle to afford housing. Living without security or dignity gave me a foundational belief that housing is a nonnegotiable basic human right,” Smith said.
Public policy advocates and experts expressed concern about state lawmakers using their power to meddle with local housing projects, especially when carving out exemptions from laws they’ve imposed on everyone else in the state.
“It’s hard to ignore when legislation is drafted in a narrowly tailored way — especially when such language appears late in the process with little public input,” said Sean McMorris of good government group California Common Cause. “Bills developed in this manner risk fostering public cynicism about the legislative process and the motivations behind narrowly focused policymaking.”
UC Davis School of Law professor Chris Elmendorf, who specializes in housing policy, called the bill’s specific language “really strange” and questioned whether it would survive a legal challenge.
He expects to see more pleadings for exemptions from state housing laws.
“Local groups that don’t want the project are going to the legislature to get the relief that, in a previous era, they would have gotten from their city council,” Elmendorf said.
UC Santa Barbara student Enri Lala is the founder and president of a student housing group. He said the bill goes against a recent pro-housing movement in the area.
“It’s certainly out of the ordinary,” said Lala. “This is not the kind of move that we want to see repeated in the future.”
Politics
Omar’s disclosures erased millions, leaving her with potential negative net worth. She won’t explain why.
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Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., refused to address her revised financial disclosures that could imply she has a negative net worth after the progressive lawmaker dramatically reducing the reported value of assets tied to her husband’s business ventures.
“Can you tell us if your husband still has the consulting business and the wine business?” Fox News Digital asked Omar.
The congresswoman stayed silent as she was repeatedly questioned, after previously telling Fox News Digital that the original filing — showing Omar’s reported assets reducing by as much as $29.9 million — was inaccurate and “incomplete” information.
ILHAN OMAR’S OFFICE SAYS SHE’S ‘NOT A MILLIONAIRE’ AFTER $30M FILING REVISED DOWN TO UNDER $100K: REPORT
US Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, speaks during a press conference with family members of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh as members of Congress call for US investigations into Israel’s actions and reintroduce the Justice for Shireen Act, outside the US Capitol in Washington, DC, May 18, 2023. The Al Jazeera journalist, who was a dual US citizen, was killed on May 11, 2022. The Israeli army later admitted one of its soldiers likely shot the reporter. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
The controversy surrounding Omar’s finances began when a 2024 financial report estimated that Omar and her husband possessed between $6 million and $30 million in assets, all while the Minnesota fraud scandal within the Somali community was beginning to come to fruition.
A more recent 2025 financial disclosure report shows Omar’s revised value of shared assets between her and husband to sit at a maximum of $125,000 — a multi-million-dollar drop from the year prior. The lower estimate of their assets, $20,000, compared to the low and high debt estimates, $30,000 and $100,000, would imply the Minnesota Democrat could have a negative net worth.
Both her and her husband have separate debts, each ranging somewhere between $15,000 and $50,000 — from her own student loans and her husband’s credit card debt, according to the disclosures.
WATCH: OMAR SILENT WHEN CONFRONTED ON ALLEGED TIES TO MASSIVE MINNESOTA FRAUD SCANDAL
RICHFIELD, MN – AUGUST 08: Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) (C) campaigns with her husband Tim Mynett (R) at the Richfield Farmers Market on August 8, 2020 in Richfield, Minnesota. Omar is hoping to retain her seat as the representative for Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District in next week’s primary election. (Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
The biggest change in the documents involved Omar’s husband, Tim Mynett. His reported ownership interests in both his winery and venture capital advisory firm, which were previously valued in the millions of dollars, are listed with no value now.
In Omar’s 2024 financial disclosure records, Mynett’s share in his winery was valued between $1 million and $5 million, and his share at the venture capital advisory firm was valued between $5 million and $25 million. Now, his equity interests are both listed at $0.
Omar’s office previously told Fox News Digital that Mynett has partners in both businesses and said the earlier disclosure mistakenly reflected the businesses’ total equity rather than his ownership interest. The office also said the original filing listed assets without accounting for liabilities.
VANCE REFERS TIM WALZ, MINNESOTA ATTORNEY GENERAL TO DOJ FOR CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION OVER STATE’S ALLEGED FRAUD
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., has publicly voiced his interest in the Ethics Committee opening an investigation into Omar’s personal finances after the 2025 financial reports came out showing the possibility of a $29 million drop in her net worth.
Vice President JD Vance also has previously said the U.S. Department of Justice will be opening a probe into her alleged fraud as part of the administration’s anti-fraud taskforce that he spearheads, though no formal investigations have been shared with the public at this time.
Omar has been reluctant to answer Fox News Digital’s questions about her financial fallout and potential probes to be opened against her.
The Minnesota lawmaker similarly dodged answering any of Fox News Digital’s questions just last month about the revised disclosures.
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“There’s also the possibility that it might rain on this sunny day,” Omar replied without responding directly to the content of the question.
Fox News Digital’s Robert Schmad contributed to this report.
Politics
Column: Trump decries ‘communism’ while his government takes ownership of companies
As a student years ago, I dove deep into the history of the Red-hunting McCarthy era and became familiar with the actor who emerged second only to Wisconsin Sen. Joe McCarthy as the villain of that insidious time: his shameless, conniving young lawyer, Roy Cohn. Never would I have imagined that a future president would count Cohn as a mentor and role model.
Then came Donald Trump.
Now, in Cohn-inflected McCarthyesque style, President Trump is channeling his tutor yet again, baselessly labeling his political enemies — all Democrats — as communists as he looks ahead to the fall’s midterm elections. Once more Trump shows that his catchphrase “Make America great again” means regressing, this time to Trump’s formative 1950s and the McCarthy era that sadly helped define it.
In recent speeches, including on the Fourth of July, Trump’s utterances of “communist” or “communism” reached double digits each time. (As that implies, the president didn’t set aside his divisive rhetoric even for the nation’s 250th birthday.)
“Our warriors did not fight communism on battlefields across the world only to have that menace rear its ugly head right back here in America,” Trump said late on the Fourth on the National Mall.
Trump couples his commie-baiting with a dash of his trademark xenophobia. “There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including by newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success,” he said at Mount Rushmore a day earlier. (He’s got it backward, of course: Immigrants come here for the American way of life and promise of success.)
Here’s the irony: Trump’s actions in his second term make him look more like the commie. He’s projecting again.
Now that Trump is exploiting a few victories lately by left-wing democratic socialists in Democratic primaries to paint the entire party as communists, it’s time to review the record — his record.
A hallmark of communism is government ownership of companies and control of the economy, at the expense of private property and free markets. In just over a year, Trump has used billions of taxpayers’ dollars to buy shares for the government in a growing list of private companies — U.S. Steel, Intel, Westinghouse and more — citing national security. The companies don’t always welcome their new stakeholder; at a minimum, they rightly fear it for the demands the government could make about prices and production.
“It’s what Putin did,” the estranged Republicans at the Lincoln Project posted online Monday. “Trump is the closest we’ve ever come to communism.”
“What began as a populist revolt against so-called elites has become a program of state ownership, price fixing and top-down industrial control,” free-market economist Veronique de Rugy wrote in The Times last October of Trump’s actions. “The power to ‘partner’ with business is the power to control it.”
Comrade Trump’s first big government grab, and a model for those to come, was in June last year, when he wrested a permanent “golden share” in U.S. Steel in return for approving its sale to Japan’s Nippon Steel. The company’s charter was revised to give the U.S. president extraordinary veto power over nearly a dozen corporate activities, including closing or relocating plants, supply-chain decisions, even pricing.
“We have a golden share, which I control,” Trump told reporters at the time, in words I never thought I’d hear from a president of the party once associated with free markets.
Just last week, Trump boasted to CNBC how he’d extracted a 10% stake in beleaguered chip giant Intel last August, after first demanding that its chief executive resign. “Intel came in. They had a problem. I said, ‘I can solve your problem, but I want 10% of the company.’ … Somebody said that’s not very American. I said, ‘No, I think it is very American, actually.’ And I’ve done that with other deals.”
And so he has.
The Pentagon is now the largest stockholder in struggling MP Materials, a large rare-earth mine in California, and guarantees a 10-year price floor for its output that stunned competitors. The administration has since taken shares in other rare-earth companies. The Commerce Department took an option for an 8% stake in Westinghouse, to spur construction of nuclear reactors, and has the right to 20% if the government decides the company should go public. The government takes a 15% cut of Nvidia’s and Advanced Micro Devices’ AI chip sales to China.
As much as anything he does, Trump’s direct intervention in private enterprise invites the question “What if Biden/Harris/Obama did that?” The answer, of course: Trump and Republicans would cry “Communist!”
Trump’s actions are the sort Americans generally have only seen during economic emergencies or major wars, and then rarely. I covered the frenzied and ultimately successful response to the near-collapse of the global financial system and the U.S. auto, insurance and housing industries. Behind the scenes in the Obama White House (and George W. Bush’s at the outset) was constant, angst-filled debate about any actions smacking of government takeovers and a determination that interventions be temporary, unlike Trump’s schemes. (For all the still-lingering unpopularity of the banking bailout, the Treasury — the taxpayers — got all the money back and then some, and exited the business.)
Trump’s economic big-footing isn’t the only way in which he resembles the commies Americans know best, and whom he so admires: Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jung Un. There are also the images of himself everywhere, monuments planned, drearily long and self-adulating speeches and interference in the nation’s cultural, educational and legal spheres and — worst of all — in elections.
At Rushmore, Trump closed with a demand that Congress pass his so-called SAVE America Act to restrict voting. “We do that and we’re not going to lose an election for 100 years,” he said, speaking of course about Republicans.
One-party rule through central government election finagling? Now that’s a communist.
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Politics
Who is Valli Geiger? Meet the Maine Dem that Platner urged to run for Senate
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Maine state Rep. Valli Geiger, a Rockland Democrat, former nurse and former mayor, is drawing sudden national attention after saying now-former Democratic Senate nominee Graham Platner encouraged her to consider taking his place on the ballot in the Maine Senate race.
While Geiger has not been named the replacement nominee, her name entered the Maine Senate scramble after she told local outlet WMTW that Platner called her Monday night, praised her as a “fighter” and asked whether he could put her name forward. Platner’s campaign told the outlet he had not made an endorsement decision but confirmed he encouraged Geiger to consider running if he stepped aside.
After Geiger said Platner called her about potentially putting her name forward, Geiger posted Tuesday she would not “throw Graham under the bus,” while also saying she would not “slander or accuse” Jenny Racicot, the woman who accused Platner of rape, “of anything more than telling the truth as she experienced it.”
By Wednesday, local outlets were reporting that Geiger said Platner had encouraged her to consider running if he withdrew. Platner, who suspended his campaign Wednesday night, has denied the claim.
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT IF PLATNER DROPS OUT? HERE’S WHO COULD REPLACE HIM ON THE BALLOT AND HOW IT COULD WORK
Graham Platner Maine State Rep. Valli Geiger (Maine State Legislature/Getty Images)
“For the movement to continue, it can’t be me. For that reason, we are suspending campaign operations,” Platner said in a video posted to social media.
Geiger is a third-term Democratic state representative from Rockland, according to her legislative biography, representing a coastal House district in Maine that includes Rockland, Criehaven Township, Matinicus Isle Plantation, the Muscle Ridge Islands, North Haven and part of Owls Head. Her biography says she serves on the Labor Committee and the Energy, Utilities and Technology Committee.
Before entering the state legislature, Geiger served six years on the Rockland City Council, including one year as mayor and four years on the Rockland Comprehensive Planning Commission, three of them as chair.
Her biography says she holds a master’s degree in sustainable design and built her own passive-solar, net-zero-energy house. It also describes her as a former nurse at Pen Bay Medical Center who later worked as a health policy analyst and health administrator, including as director of the Healthreach Hospice program and clinical director for Federally Qualified Health Centers around Maine.
The Maine State Capitol May 18, 2026, in Augusta, Maine. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
PLATNER CAMPAIGN PUTTING ‘THUMB ON SCALE’ TO INFLUENCE POSSIBLE REPLACEMENT, MAINE DEM ALLEGES
Geiger’s connection to Platner predates the latest replacement speculation. Local reporting has described her as a close Platner supporter, and WMTW reported she previously stood with him and credited him with helping secure funding for rape kit tracking in Maine.
In her Facebook post responding to Racicot’s allegation, Geiger wrote that Racicot’s story “seems credible” but added that “none of us knows the truth nor will we ever.” She also described Platner as “a man becoming a better man” and said she had hoped he would lead the political movement his campaign had built and will not “throw Graham under the bus.”
In the post, Geiger also praised Platner’s “passion for economic populism” and said she had granted him “an enormous amount of grace” for his behavior during what she described as his “dark years” after multiple deployments.
Dr. Nirav D. Shah, director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, speaks during a news conference about COVID-19 at Maine Emergency Management Agency in Augusta. (Derek Davis/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images)
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The Maine state representative is not the only Democrat whose name has surfaced as Maine Democrats prepare for the possibility that Platner exits the race against Republican Sen. Susan Collins.
Several Democrats have expressed interest or are considering bids, including former gubernatorial candidate Troy Jackson, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows and former Maine CDC Director Nirav Shah.
Under Maine law, the Maine Democratic Party can replace him on the general election ballot by selecting a new nominee through its party process, with the replacement required to be chosen by July 27.
Fox News Digital’s Andrew Mark Miller and Paul Steinhauser contributed to this report.
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