Debbie Arnold retires after 12 years as SLO County Supervisor. ‘It really is an honor’
Debbie Arnold cast her last vote as a San Luis Obispo County Supervisor on Tuesday, saying a bittersweet goodbye to the county role she has held for over a decade.
Arnold will officially retire and leave her long-time supervisorial role after the incoming District 5 supervisor — former mayor of Atascadero Heather Moreno — is sworn in to her seat in the new year, but Tuesday’s SLO County Board of Supervisors meeting was Arnold’s last.
Emotions ran high as Arnold’s constituents and fellow supervisors alike thanked her for her service during public comment.
“You embody truly what our founders, I think, envisioned — and that was the system where the citizens are elected to represent us, and they come together and they argue and they debate about important issues,” District Attorney Dan Dow said. “You have done that with honor, with integrity, with grace.”
Dow then presented Arnold with a certificate of appreciation, while her fellow board members thanked her with a San Luis Obispo County Line sign. Others brought flowers.
“Thank you for your service, thank you for your commitment, thank you for being accessible, thank you for never losing your grounding and thank you for your friendship,” SLO County resident Diane Greenaway said. “May your example fall like good seed onto good soil and produce and inspire a harvest a hundredfold of public servants like you.”
Before she left office for good, The Tribune sat down with Arnold to reflect on her life and career as a public servant.
From Mustang to mom: Arnold’s life in SLO County before becoming a supervisor
Arnold has served as the District 5 supervisor since 2012, but she had a thriving life in SLO County long before her tenure on board.
Arnold first moved to the county to attend Cal Poly, where she studied animal sciences, met and later married her husband, Steve, she said.
The couple still lives on a ranch in Santa Margarita, following generations of her husband’s family who farmed there before them. They raised two children, their daughter Michelle Pascoe and son Joey Arnold, who recently won a seat on the Atascadero school board.
Arnold also ran a preschool in Atascadero — Small Wonders — for 17 years while raising a family.
She sold the business after her children left for college and moved into politics, somewhat by chance, she said.
For over a decade, Arnold worked as a legislative assistant to county supervisor Mike Ryan and then as a county representative for state legislator Sam Blakeslee.
Then, Arnold decided to try her own hand at office. Though she lost during her first campaign in 2007, Arnold was successful four years later in 2012.
In total, Arnold served three terms, totaling 12 years, on the SLO County Board of Supervisors.
Arnold said she was blessed with a diverse and “totally unplanned,” career.
“I felt like life came to me,” she said.
Arnold’s proudest work on the Board of Supervisors
Arnold said over the course of her career on the SLO County Board of Supervisors, she was proudest of her work fighting for water rights and fair use of the Paso Robles Groundwater Basin — even though it didn’t stick.
“That kind of got to be my passion,” Arnold said.
In December 2022, the Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance that would have allowed farmers in the Paso Basin Land Use Management Area to use more water than previously allowed, a vote championed by Arnold. But the controversial ordinance — which was opposed by many agricultural organizations and farmers themselves — was overturned by the board in February before it could take effect.
The ordinance would have increased the amount of water farmers could use from the basin to irrigate their crops, but it came with strings attached. Farmers would’ve been required to fulfill a laundry list of environmental mitigation measures that many found prohibitive and burdensome.
Additionally, the supervisors who opposed the ordinance cited that the groundwater basin was already “critically overdrafted.”
From Arnold’s perspective, the old rules did — and continue to — disadvantage small farmers.
“The way it ended is such an unfair distribution of the water,” Arnold said of the failed ordinance. “The way it’s now, some people have unlimited use of water — and typically, that’s your big, most recent irrigators that have come in and set themselves up — and most people, including folks that have been generational, smaller farms here, don’t have the right to irrigate on their property anymore.”
Though the ordinance was ultimately overturned, Arnold said she was proud of her work to understand the issue and educated property owners on their water rights.
Arnold also said she was “really disappointed” with the outcome of the most recent redistricting process, which took place in 2021.
The map that was originally selected as the new supervisorial district map — which became known as the Patten map after its creator Richard Patten — was later discarded as the result of a lawsuit that argued it was gerrymandered to favor Republican voters.
A Tribune analysis from the time found that the map favored the conservative vote by packing Democrats into Districts 2 and 5 — making it easier for Republican candidates to win Districts 1, 3 and 4 and maintain a conservative majority on the board.
However, Arnold argued that it was not the Patten map that was gerrymandered, but the previous and now again current map.
While the current county map puts Cal Poly in District 5, the Patten map put the university and its more liberal voters into another district, Arnold said.
“The grade is kind of a geological boundary between people in the North County and the South County,” Arnold said. “All my years being around the local politics, you’d hear people all the time saying, the Cal Poly students shouldn’t be voting in North County. That’s two such separate communities.”
Arnold said she always thought it was “a bit of a gerrymander” to “scoop up 8,000 students” and have them vote in Atascadero.
Despite the settlement of the lawsuit against the Patten map and the return to our current district lines, Arnold called the Patten map “very legal” and said it followed the Fair Maps Act — a California law aimed at increasing public participation in reducing partisan influence over redistricting — which she was “really happy to see” pass in 2019.
As for SLO County’s new independent redistricting committee that will decide the next boundary lines in 2030 and will be made up of appointed citizens rather than elected officials, Arnold found it to be “farther away from the people.”
“I think government needs to stay close to the people,” Arnold said. “I’ve come to think that when you start giving important jobs like that to unelected folks, or you’re creating committees, it all sounds good, but the reality is, you’re taking it further away from the people.”
‘Four-to-one Debbie’
In many votes throughout her career on board, including a few recently, Arnold ended up the sole dissenter as her colleagues otherwise unanimously vowed their support — so much so that when she first became a supervisor, people would jokingly call her “four-to-one-Debbie,” she said.
But Arnold sees her role on board as representing the citizens of the county, not the staff of its government.
“It’s a lot of work to go against the grain,” she said.
Often, what is good for the county isn’t what is good for the people, Arnold said. While it’s easy to see every idea as a good idea, she said she felt her role was to question the county’s actions and read between the lines.
For Arnold, it was a matter of moral character — and a point of personal pride.
“I always wanted, since I got elected, to never regret a vote and not be ashamed that my name was on that vote the wrong way,” Arnold said.
Another recent vote Arnold went against alone pertained to the Bob Jones Trail.
Arnold, a champion of property rights, had a history of voting against the use of eminent domain when it came to building the bike path from San Luis Obispo to the sea, but she also rejected a recent vote to redesign the path to avoid the properties that would’ve required forceful seizure of land.
The vote passed even without Arnold’s support, but for her, the price of the project — which she saw as a luxury instead of a necessity — had simply gotten too high, she said.
“I was kind of thinking that eventually, with everything that they’re trying to ask for, it’d be like $40 million,” she said. “I can’t even get them to put $15 million on some of our rural roads that are down to the dirt.”
While she said she sees the benefit of the trail, her ultimate impression was that the county should be putting its funding toward what she described as more urgent and foundational transportation needs, like fixing the pot holes in roads.
“I‘ve always thought that road maintenance should be a priority,” Arnold said.
Even though the county’s $18 million Active Transportation Program funding was granted by the state specifically for the construction of the trail and the county does not have the discretion to reallocate those funds to another avenue of the budget, Arnold said she still sees that money as taxpayers dollars.
Local community groups are now fundraising to pay for the construction of the new $36 million trail design.
Another vote in which Arnold recently went 4-1 was the declaration of the certification of SLO County’s 2024 election results — which Arnold called a “protest vote” knowing that it would ultimately pass.
“It was a vote that, I hope people go, ‘Why did she vote no?’” she said. “I want people to stop and think about that.”
Arnold said she has been concerned with the integrity of elections since the changes that occurred in 2020. She cited the length of receiving election results, the centralization of vote counting, sending out mail-in ballots without voter identification and the use of machines to tabulate vote rather than hand counting ballots.
“All those things, all the loosening of the process, I think it has made it more difficult to get an accurate count,” she said.
Though Arnold said it was purely a protest vote, she did not say whether she would have changed her vote were other supervisors also to have rejected the results of the election.
Arnold’s parting words of wisdom
In her retirement, Arnold said she is looking forward to “slowing down the hamster wheel,” as she put it — spending time at home with her husband, seeing her four grandchildren, cooking and discovering new hobbies.
But as parting wisdom, she encouraged anyone with an interest in running for public office to do so, even if they feel unqualified.
”We really need regular old people that are representatives of normal, regular citizens,” Arnold said. “People think that (if) they’re not some kind of superstar expert in some area, they wouldn’t make a good elected official, but these are governments designed to be true representatives.”
The Republican Party of SLO County will honor Arnold with a retirement party on Wednesday night at the Pavilion at Atascadero Lake, the group shared on Facebook. The catered event will start at 6 p.m. While free, a $50 donation for tickets is suggested.
After 12 years of service, Arnold said, “it really is an honor.”
This story was originally published December 18, 2024 at 5:00 AM.
