Name: Babatunde Folayemi
Age: 63
Occupation: City Councilman
Background: Small business owner; community volunteer with the Housing Authority, the Human Service Commission, Pro-Youth Coalition and several other nonprofits.

LD: What do you consider to be your biggest accomplishments on the City Council?

BF: There are a number of things that I’m happy about. … The inclusionary (housing) ordinance, … the living wage ordinance, the forward movement of the Granada Theatre. … I’m happy about the fact that we started the street sweeping on Eastside … and the Westside. Those were really two important things that the people have been calling for awhile now. …The position on the Patriot Act actually, that we took a stand as a community.

LD: What issues are your priorities?

BF: Equity, and some people may think that’s vague, but it isn’t. It’s the essence all of my decision-making is based on. The fact that Santa Barbara is not a monolithic community. It’s a very diverse community, and yet all segments of the community not only don’t have representation but don’t have an equitable part of the pie. My priority is trying to make sure that that happens. … Especially now as we plan the next 10 to15 years of Santa Barbara’s future. If that plan doesn’t include that large segment of the community, then what kind of a city is it going to be?

… Santa Barbara’s relationship to its neighbors … the problems that Santa Barbara is facing are regional problems. … Un-addressed they will become Goleta and Carpinteria’s problems tomorrow.

It’s like the RV situation … in the beginning, Goleta and the county took the position that well, “that’s Santa Barbara’s problem because most of them were here.” But once the ordinances were passed and they started moving into Goleta and the county, then they realized “oh wow, that’s what happens, if you make a law that only affects this place, people will go out here.” As we plan the future, that coordinated vision has to happen because the solutions lie within that coordination.

When I was working with the gangs, it was one thing to address the gangs here in Santa Barbara, if we didn’t also address to the north and south then all that would do is actually make them more vulnerable. … The 101 is like an artery, it connects all of these communities, you have to find a solution that benefits everyone who feeds into that artery … You hear that all the time, we need to take a regional approach, well the reason you hear it is because it’s true. Now what we need to do is take it out of the state of being a mantra and put it into actual practice.

LD: What do you appreciate most about Santa Barbara?

BF: I’ve lived in communities all over the world, literally, and the unique thing about Santa Barbara is its combination of its size and diversity.

It’s diverse enough, in all ways, I don’t mean just diverse in terms of race or ethnicity or anything like that, I mean it’s diverse in terms of its economic strata, it runs the gamut and there’s enough here that Santa Barbara can really accomplish anything it wants to accomplish and it puts its mind to. I’ve seen Santa Barbara rally around nonprofits that were financially in trouble, and in a matter of a couple of days, raise a half a million dollars to save a nonprofit. … They have a heart that’s very compassionate and they’re very involved in every aspect of their city’s development and group.

LD: What would you most like to see change?

BF: It may sound simple, but again it’s not, what I would like to see is institutional and government bodies that are representative of the community they represent. Meaning, our school system in some instances at some schools is 82 percent to 90 percent Latino and yet we have no Latinos on the school board. Our city is a very diverse population, and yet there’s very little diversity on the council. Our principals and our teaching staff needs to be much more diverse because it’s important for young people in school to see teachers that look like them. … And that’s not a little thing, that’s a major thing because that’s what creates hope and imagination and creativity, that’s what unleashes it in a young generation.

LD: How would you describe your political views?

BF: Progressive and socially focused. Socially progressive, if you’ve got to put a label on it.

LD: What about your views on spending?

BF: I think it revolves around the priority being people. For example, I would be more inclined to spend money that ensured a certain security or stability for people or a group of people than I would to put designer tile on lower State Street or than I would be inclined to create another luxury condo or time-share. My emphasis would always go toward putting the people at the heart of our spending. … It’s about priorities. Spending is always about priorities. Sometimes expenditures now on the front end are more like investments on the long end.

LD: How would you attack the problem of the jobs/housing balance in our town?

BF: I see them holistically and I see them as related – jobs, housing, transportation, all of those they’re related and they have to be addressed in a holistic, related, fashion. For example, in terms of housing, I was at a forum out at Valle Verde senior complex and it hit me, why couldn’t we have similar types of housing developments for teachers, or for police, or for firemen or for nurses. Cooperatives if you will, where people could pay into owning these homes.

One of the things that’s important is a situation like that then would have to also have to transportation component that would allow people to get from that community to their work areas.

In terms of jobs, I really think we need to begin to retrain some of our workforce and to begin to encourage some other types of industry to come to this area. The high tech industry, for example, is particularly suited for that kind of thing, communications, industries that are clean environmentally and pay well. That calls for us to begin to develop a workforce that’s capable of fitting into that kind of a market. I think we need to begin to look at that. Because if we continue to just be a service driven economy, then we’ll never close that gap between what workers earn and the cost of living here. It’s just going to get wider.

LD: What about neighborhood compatibility?

BF: One of the reasons that Santa Barbara is so desirable to live in is because it is a planned community. Things don’t just happen haphazardly … You have the historic preservation side, you have a number of watchdog groups that make sure that the various kind of the unique little communities that exist here and unique types of architecture aren’t just bulldozed down and cookie box houses put in. I think that has to overlay all our decisions for future planning.

And the neighborhoods themselves should have input in that.

LD: What are your feelings about growth in the community?

BF: The cat’s out of the box now, you can’t put it back in. … Growth is inevitable but how we deal with this growth, the only way we can deal with it equitably