"Who else is going to do this job?"
Arianna Barrios wants to be the next mayor of Orange. She comes with a resume—and receipts.
So I met Arianna Barrios last week at L’Orange Cafe in Orange, and much like the downtown of her mini-metropolis, the veteran City Council member and mayoral candidate has a comfortable mojo about her.
She curses, though not excessively. Speaks with her hands to emphasize points. Laughs easily, spins a good yarn, refrains for spewing excessive shit talk about opponents. In many ways, she feels like the species of political figure we need to rediscover in these bitter times: Namely, she’s (gasp!) agreeable.
Barrios is running for mayor against Dan Slater, the incumbent and a man she once supported. And while she insists it’s nothing personal (“I like Dan”), that’s not entirely true. To Barrios, Orange is personal. Unlike most of us, who visit, grab a drink, shop for antiques, then drive off, this is her home. Which, via Barrios’ eyes, is on the verge of serious trouble. For Orange, Barrios is plagued the parallel problems of a looming economic tsunami and a mayor who knows not what to do about it. “That,” she says, “is why I’m running.”
One can visit Barrios’ website here, and donate to her campaign here.
Ladies and gents—Arianna Barrios …
JEFF PEARLMAN: “So, you’re running for mayor …”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “I am.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “And is that fine and dandy with your people?”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “I would say my husband would prefer I would’ve been done, because that was our plan. I was going to be done, this was going to be the end, and instead I will now be running against an incumbent mayor …”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “So why do it?”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “Because I think the city as a whole has gotten way far off track. You probably haven’t been following all this, but the city has been in fiscal instability and free fall for years. This year we’re going to be on our second go for a sales tax measure, and I’m really worried. I had to think honestly about, if the sales tax passes, do I trust the current council configuration to do the right thing with the money? And if we don’t get the money, do I trust them to handle what that’s going to look like on the flip side?
“And it’s arrogance on my part. I own that. But I don’t think there are enough people right now saying, ‘Cliff, cliff, cliff!’ What are we going to do about that? How are we going to handle that?” There is no plan B. And how do you go into such a situation and not have a plan B?" It just boggles my mind.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Wait, so when you say we’re about to fall off a cliff, break it down. Why is Orange about to fall off a cliff?”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “So over the years, we have flipped upside down from what we used to be in terms of our tax revenue. So it used to be like most cities, in that you would see a a financial situation that was guided and really run by sales tax. And that has changed. Now it’s guided by property tax. So when you do that, property tax here is very limited in terms of its growth. So you either have to go ‘Build, build, build, build!’ to increase that base, or you have to balance it out and find new ways of economic development. And Orange, unfortunately, for decades has been very, very slow or very, very bad at doing economic development. In addition, when you look at how our finances were handled or reported from just six years ago when I first came into the council … and I will tell you this, when I first got on the council, I thought I was stupid.
“I would come home and tell my husband, ‘I just must be the dumbest person on the planet. I don’t understand these budgets. They don’t make any sense.’ Now mind you, I had been on the community college board where we were dealing with budgets three times the size of the city. And I didn’t have any problem with that. But this, I couldn’t understand. And about six months to a year after being on the council, my very first go, I realized it wasn’t me. And my other colleague, Ana Gutierrez—we would just sit and just go, ‘It’s not us. Something’s really wrong.’ Well, things were being papered over. It was robbing Peter to pay Paul. It was basically a shell game to look like everything was fine. And it wasn’t fine. The structural deficits were huge and they were growing every year. We had gone out and gotten a brand new, fancy, beautiful firehouse, but all that was done under bonds.
“We had covered over all of our pension obligations, the ones that were unfunded, by doing more bonds. And it was just perpetuating that previous councils were not willing to really look at the situation in the face and say, ‘How do we change? We need a different trajectory.’ Growing numbers of employees, growing numbers of pensions, because you still have tons of pensions, you still have that.
JEFF PEARLMAN: “I’m going to ask you a dumb question. Why is it wrong? Why was it misguided to use bonds to fund a new firehouse?”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “It might not have been had we been otherwise fiscally healthy, but we weren’t fiscally healthy. And for example, and I credit Council Member Dumitru with this, is that when they asked us to do the bonds for the pensions, they really hid this fact that they were asking us to also change what the mandatory minimum would be for our catastrophic reserves. And so those were changed and whittled down. And that’s problematic. I mean, that should have been really clear. It should have been really upfront. And instead it was just kind of like, ‘No, we’re not going to talk about that.’
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Even the people on the city council who you probably vehemently disagree with, they are human beings who live here in the city and probably want the best for the city. So why do you feel like they would behave so recklessly?”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “I’m not sure that reckless is the right word. I just see the same pattern starting over again as when I first got on the council. And I had such high hopes when I first got on that we would be moving away from those old patterns. But I see them happening again. So I see this consolidation of power and ideas that were just, they’re old ideas. I’ll give you an example. So when we were passing the budget for this year, knowing that we were going to go off for a sales tax again, and knowing that that may or may not pass, nobody was asking the question about, again, what is the plan B? We’re passing this budget. We’re once again deficit spending to do it. We’re taking money out of our reserves to do it. So what is the plan B? If we don’t get this tax money, we know that in three to four years we will be insolvent.
“We should be passing two budgets, actually. One if the sales tax passes and one if it doesn’t. And what you can point to right now is Long Beach. Long Beach is, their deficit I think is somewhere around $14 million. They’re cutting people left and right. They’re cutting people, they’re cutting services, they’re cutting public safety. I mean, it’s terrifying, but it’s what has to be done. And people should know that. We should be utterly transparent with people about what it would mean.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “You feel like Long Beach is the potential ghost of Orange future?”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “Yeah, I honestly do. And it terrifies me. And the first question my husband asks is, ‘Why in the hell would you want to do this job if you don’t think the sales tax is going to pass?’ I’m like, ‘Because who else is going to do this job?’ Someone has to stand up and say, ‘All right, I have a plan. It won’t be pretty and it won’t be easy, but someone has to step up and say it. It’s what’s right to do. We have to be honest with people. We have to tell them what they’re going to go through.’
“I look at it as like … I’m a huge student of history. I used to work at the Nixon Library—a place I love. And what my 1960s parents told me about Nixon was not the same as being there and saying, ‘Oh, I didn’t know he also did Medicare and helped on busing and I did the EPA.’ I didn’t know any of that. So it was just a great experience and it just taught me that you never know. You never know the whole story until you dig into it out and find the whole story. So I look at it very much like when you look at a Roosevelt and how he was just really honest with people. So I’m being honest—it’s going to hurt. It’s not going to be pleasant, but we’re going to get through it together. And here’s the trajectory and how we come out the other side.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Wait, so who are you saying that to? Like you’re saying, ‘We’re going to do this together, blah, blah, blah, blah.’ Who are you saying that to?”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “Whoever will listen.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Are people listening?”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “They’re starting to. So, I mean, I came late to this. I wasn’t sure I was going to run. I was really just like, ‘Oh, do I do this? Do I not do this?’ And the current mayor, Dan Slater, I’ve known him most of my life. There was nobody who was a bigger, stronger supporter when he first said he was going to run. I mean, I think I was one of the first people he came to and asked for support and help when he ran in 2022. And when I gave my support and help, I was all in, 100 percent. I worked my ass off to make sure that everything that could be done was done to help him get elected.
JEFF PEARLMAN: “And now you’re running against him. What changed?”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “Four years later, there are some broken promises, which really disappointed me. I see a realignment to kind of the old establishment, the old boys network in town. And I was like, that’s not what I fought for. And you couple all that with what’s happening nationally. And it bothers me. It bothered me so much that I just was ripping my hair out, that there wasn’t this understanding that people are in trouble. There are people in trouble. I mean, I have gone with residents to immigration court. I have seen ICE raids in our city. You can’t ignore that. You just can’t. I mean, I guess you can ignore it. Some people do. But the lack of humanity and sympathy for that, coupled with everything else that we’re going through locally, hyper-locally, it all kind of mirrored each other. And I think at the end of the day, whether I win or lose, it doesn’t matter to me.
“What matters to me is that people have a choice and that people hear the truth.
JEFF PEARLMAN: “How many conversations have you had with Dan Slater about you running for mayor?”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “Not one.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Oh.”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “I went to him back in January and sat down and talked to him because I was really honest. And most people who know me know I’m painfully honest, mostly to my detriment. And I sat down and talked with him and I just told him where things were going, what things were bothering me, what I was concerned about. And not everyone’s going to have the same level of concern or passion about things. I get that. I’m not insane. But just the unrealistic element of like, ‘Oh, is that really happening?’ Yeah, it’s really happening. Do we care? Do we not care? What are we doing? And I just told him that I couldn’t support him this time around. My colleague, Ana Gutierrez, is also not supporting him this time around.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Is he pissed?”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “I think he understood at the time how important these things for me were because, just as an aside, my grandparents fought tooth and nail, not unlike I fight for things that I’m passionate about, but fought tooth and nail to end school segregation in Orange County. I didn’t even know that until I was an adult. And once I heard about it, met with historians who followed it, and I was just like, ‘Holy cow, how brave for them to do those things.’ And nowadays we’re called to that same kind of bravery. And there are people who have no other voice, who have no one else to stand for them.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Do you think in a fairly conservative, fairly white, fairly older town like Orange, it is tough for this kind of message to resonate? Most of these people have money. Am I wrong?”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “I think that’s a misnomer. So when I started first running 10 years ago, goodness, that was exactly what Orange was and had always been. Orange is a very conservative town. Orange is not that town anymore. When you look at the voter registration, Orange is now approximately a third, a third, a third. Republican, Democrat, Independent. So the Democrats are just pissed everywhere. And everybody knows this. So the city has changed dramatically from just 10 years ago, from even five years ago. So when you look at that, I mean, the No Kings events here in the city had over 3,000 people show up.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Do you view yourself as an underdog?”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I’ve been able to mostly self-fund in my past campaigns, so I’m not going to be able to do that this time. I am not going to be taking a lot of corporate money. I’ve already sworn off many options. No developers, no real estate money. I’m going to be very weary of any PACs. But yeah, it’s going to be a very grassroots, very boots on the ground, a very different kind of campaign. I’m not going to be doing 10 mail pieces. I have a very different strategy lined up for this one.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “How would you describe your strategy?”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “I describe my strategy as hold the middle and unite the left. Because that, again, in a third, a third, a third environment, if I stay the middle—which is where I sit—I believe there are things we can accomplish together.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “If you were running in, I don’t know, Trenton, New Jersey or Youngstown, Ohio, you could look around and you could be like, ‘Look! Dilapidated buildings!’ or you could be like, ‘These streets are falling apart!’ But when one comes to Orange, it’s a beautiful town with orange trees and a cool downtown and a kind of thriving business approach. Is it hard to get people to be aware that the underbelly of problems the city has when it looks so pretty?”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “Do you mean before or after we had a gunshot murder in our biggest park, Hart Park, in broad daylight where hundreds of families, children are in the park? No, it’s not hard to show them that there’s the underbelly. Is it hard when you have businesses who call me to complain because there are homeless people sleeping in their doorways and pissing on their front doors?”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Is homelessness a big problem here?”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “Homelessness overall throughout the entire county has gone down by a lot. And the numbers in Orange have gone down by a lot. Where it hasn’t gone down is Hart Park along the riverbed and in the plaza. And the current group of homeless that we now see … so, we have the people we all know that have been here for decades and they’re harmless, sad and they deserve our sympathy. But what we’re seeing over the last six months is a very rough influx. And they’re just gravitating here because they don’t think we’re going to enforce. And we need to enforce.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “What does that mean? Enforce? Like, in what way?”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “It means that we have so many resources in Orange. We have the Hub OC that offers nothing but services, referrals. We can get you a bus ticket in an hour to send you back home and reunite you with your family. We can get you into Be Well OC, which right here in Orange is the crown jewel of mental health services for the entire county. We can take you right over there. You can get rehab, you can get mental health services. You can stay in-house for. It used to be that people would be sent to jail and that’s how they get cleaned up. We actually have something where you don’t have to go to jail, but you get what you need in order to clean up. That’s what I mean when I say we can be compassionate.
“But if you’re going to carry guns and do drugs in our parks? No, I’m sorry. You got to go. You got to go. And I have no qualms about that because I don’t mess around when it comes to kids. And that’s something where we need to try something different. It’s like, can we just try something different? And that could mean a joint operation with Santa Ana Police. Because what happens is you go to the 22 Freeway, they do an enforcement that pushes them all over here. We do an enforcement, it pushes them all over there. We both need to do enforcement together and squeeze it all out like a zip. And just end it. Let’s just deal with the problem head on. And there’s no reason why we can’t do that. Absolutely none.
“So you say it all looks really cute here. There are massage parlors everywhere. When I first started asking about it, we were like at 60 and now we’re at 90. It’s like, what is happening? And if you go on that horrible app, Rubhub, it’s all there.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Wait. Did you just say Rubhub?”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “There is an app called RubHub.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Ohhhh. When you say ‘massage,’ you mean happy ending massage?”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “Ha. Yes. And there are 90 something of them. People come here to buy sexual acts.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “You also have some amazing coffee shops.”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “Two things can be true.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Do you feel like we’re going to look back 10, whatever, 15, 20 years from now at this period in history and we’re going to be like, ‘That was the beginning of the end of America’s we knew it? Or are we going to look back and think, that was a really fucked up period in America, but we somehow survived?’”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “So I talk, I’m very close to Congressman Lou Correa. He sits on the Homeland Security Committee in DC and he said something the other day. I was at an event with him and he just whispered in my ear and he’s like, ‘We need to be prepared for Election Day.’ He’s like, ‘And we need to talk about this.’ I mean, that was like, four days ago, and it’s like, ‘Oh, okay, what do you mean? What is coming?’ And I do think those aren’t existential threats. Those are real threats. And when Mr. Barranco, who was the first—that was the story of the gardener who was beaten—and it was the first national news story about what was happening with immigration. He was from here in Orange and his family all lives in Orange. And I went with his sons to his hearing out in Adelanto—the most depressing place I’ve ever been.
“The fact of the matter is the United States of America now has concentration camps all over the country. And we are holding people without due process. I mean, that is terrifying. And I really worry that my father, who loves nothing better than to come down to the plaza and sit and have a cigar and just be an old man … that someone will hassle him. Someone will ask for his papers and ask, ‘You look Mexican? Are you even American? Do you belong here?’ I mean, that we’re even asking the questions is beyond me.
JEFF PEARLMAN: “You’re here in this conservative town and you serve with conservative board members. Why do you think these people are okay with Trump?
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “I think secretly a lot of them aren’t, honestly. I think when you think about the hardcore MAGA Trump people, I don’t think they’re all that anymore. When you look at the national numbers, you’re looking at about 27 percent, 29 percent. As I’ve talked to my colleagues, I think I can see where the line is. So some of them, I think, yeah, they’re out. And others, sadly, are all in. Like, all in.
“And this is true everywhere. They like the cruelty or they think it’s somehow going to be cleansing or they’re just deluded that it will never hit them. But I talked to others of them and I think they now see it as a much more dangerous time. And I think there was a lot of change after the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. It was so graphic. It was so in your face. You couldn’t get away from it. And it was terrifying.
“But I’m angry and inspired. I believe in the fight. I just strongly believe that if you have the gall to stand up—because it takes a lot of gall to stand up and say, ‘I want to represent people’—you better be damn sure that you’re willing to represent all people. That is the rule. I turned in my paperwork the other day and for probably the 20th time of my life, I had to raise my hand and say the oath. And that oath is amazing. I still get chills about it. And I think that’s the same oath that George Washington took, that Abe Lincoln took, that Richard Nixon took. It means something. It means not backing down.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Do you think you’ll win?”
ARIANNA BARRIOS: “I’m going to do my damnedest. And like I said, if nothing else, it gives people a choice and people deserve a choice. So let’s get after it.”
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