On August 19, our County Executive Officer, Mona Miyasato, will retire. A County Executive Officer is an unusual role where a single day can involve public safety, health care, housing, roads, labor relations, emergency response, a billion-dollar budget — and a jammed elevator in the Admin Building, all before lunch. The breadth and depth of required knowledge is staggering
Most residents never see that work. But they experience the results of it every day
Mona arrived in 2014 to a county where authority had scattered into largely autonomous departments, each running its own way. She looked at that and saw not separate fiefdoms, but one county waiting to work as one. “One County, One Future” wasn’t just a phrase she coined — it’s what she actually built, piece by piece, through the unglamorous, patient work of sharpening the tools of government: overhauling how Human Services supports county workers, building a new IT Department so agencies could share costs and data instead of guarding their own corners, and laying the groundwork for systems that let departments finally talk to each other.
Here’s what that really means for the people we serve. Government fails most visibly not when one department drops the ball, but when a resident just trying to get one thing done discovers it actually takes four or five agencies to get there — and nobody told them that, and nobody helped them thread the needle. The frustration is rarely about any single department. It’s about the seams between them, the gaps residents get stuck in while agencies point politely in each other’s direction
Mona understood that the county’s job is to do that stitching itself, on the public’s behalf, instead of handing residents the job of holding government together. So, she pushed our criminal justice partners to work as a system instead of separate stops on a conveyor belt. She got planning, fire, environmental health, and public works — the four agencies standing between someone and a building permit — to work from the same table instead of four different lines. And she brought the tangle of agencies working on homelessness into real coordination, because that’s a problem no single department was ever going to solve alone. That’s not a small administrative fix. That’s the difference between government that makes people feel like they’re up against a maze, and government that actually meets them where they are.
And she did every bit of that while the ground kept moving under her — sometimes quite literally, including the Thomas Fire and Debris Flow, COVID, numerous other fires, floods, and bluff collapses, and now the deepening cuts from Washington hitting health care and county services hard. We’ve had something like 40 declared emergencies since Mona arrived. Through every one of them, she kept the lights on and the business of the county moving — not just surviving, but improving. This year’s budget alone, given everything working against it, was its own kind of extraordinary. Keeping this Board and these departments together through it ranks right up there with the Thomas Fire and COVID as one of her finest hours.
Mona has earned something no policy or process can manufacture: trust. Across those years, she has worked with her Board, with 23 different departments, with community partners and residents across this entire county. Her staying power, and the high regard in which she is held, comes only from people who’ve come to deeply trust her judgment and her character. Those have made her a magnet — this county has kept and pulled in talented people who had plenty of other places they could have gone, and who chose Santa Barbara County government instead, because of who Mona is. From the Public Defender’s Office to the CEO’s suite, to Community Services and County Health, the pull is the same story, told over and over: People didn’t just take a job here. They were drawn here and chose to stay here because of her.
And through all of it — the fires, the floods, the pandemic, the impossible budgets — she never lost her sense of humor. Anyone who’s sat in a room with her knows that’s not a small thing. It’s part of why the staff adore her, why the Board of Supervisors adores her, and why this county is, because of her, a more integrated, more nimble, more caring, and honestly a more enjoyable place to work
Mona, thank you for your dedication to Santa Barbara County, for 12 years of extraordinary public service, and for everything — seen and unseen — that you’ve given this community. It has been a privilege of a lifetime to work alongside you
Joan Hartmann is 3rd District Santa Barbara County Supervisor. This piece is adapted from remarks at CenCal’s ceremony honoring Mona Miyasato
