The Kern County Board of Supervisors Remains Tone-Deaf and Out-of-Step

By Gonzalo Santos, Published on 10/28/25 as an OpEd in The Bakersfield Californian.

Last Tuesday, October 21, a large number of Kern County citizens from every walk of life – young and old, of all ethnic backgrounds, U.S.-born and immigrant, veterans and lawyers, educators and community advocates, and faith leaders – turned out to the county’s Board of Supervisors (BOS) meeting to call on the supervisors to rescind their September 23 resolution opposing Proposition 50, passed on a partisan basis (4-1) with little consideration given to community input or the polarizing effect the resolution would have. 

The citizens’ statements can be heard at the Official Kern County YouTube site, here, or in a more compact, clean version here.

The thing that stands out to me was the speakers’ sincere attempt to persuade the supervisors, not to reverse their stand on Prop. 50, but to simply stay out of it – adopt the proper neutrality the non-partisan nature of their board requires to allow their constituents to vote their conscience free of any undue interference. 

Several speakers addressed the reasons why, in their opinion, Prop. 50 was necessary: to protect and preserve the fairness and integrity of our now-endangered federal electoral processes, in the face of the unprecedented mid-decade gerrymandering efforts in Texas, under orders by President Trump. 

Others pointed to the terrible impact a rigged mid-term congressional election would have on our democracy, especially on the communities under attack by the Trump administration – including the working-class and Latino majorities of Kern County’s population.

 Finally, an earnest young woman stressed how her generation wanted so desperately to believe in their elected leaders, their representative democratic institutions.

It all fell on deaf ears. At the closure of the two-hour-long session, the four Republican supervisors made brief statements that made clear they wouldn’t even entertain a motion to reconsider their stand and moved on to other matters. 

You can hear them in the video and judge for yourself the degree of unresponsiveness and misalignment to their constituents these elected officials displayed, long accustomed to holding a tight grip on the county’s governance, ignoring the expressed will of the actual majority of their constituents, serving mostly at the behest of the powerful interests that control our local economy and, sadly, cling to our still apartheid-like social and political life. 

This latest robust and admirable community exercise in free speech and petitioning the BOS for redress of grievances vividly demonstrated, above all, that the fabled Kern Republican political machine continues entrenched in power at the county level, though woefully out of touch, unresponsive, and profoundly misaligned with the community. At the local level welcome change is happening in the governing bodies in Bakersfield and the surrounding towns, but not yet at the county level.

Two predictions are in order: just as when the BOS took a similar partisan, anti-Latino, anti-immigrant stand opposing the 2016 Truth Act (meant to protect due process rights for our persecuted immigrant communities), only to pass 59–16 in the State Assembly and 23-9 in the Senate thanks to the robust political participation of Latinos and other communities of color, this November’s Proposition 50 – meant to protect our democracy from Maga Republican raw power grabs – will pass in a landslide, and there's absolutely nothing Trump, the state Republican Party, or our county’s Republican-controlled BOS can do about it. 

The other prediction is that this woeful, unrepresentative state of affairs in Kern governance is unsustainable. The county’s Republican Political machine is living on borrowed time. For one thing, we are no longer in Pete Wilson’s era of rampant anti-Latino xenophobia in California; quite the contrary, Latinos and other communities are now politically engaged and constitute the largest panethnic group in the state (40%); for another, Latinos in Kern County are already a majority of the population (57%).

The mostly-white BOS’s longstanding silent acquiescence and even complicity in perpetuating the marginalization, exploitation, and criminalization of our Latino, immigrant, and other communities of color will lead to their eventual replacement by more representative, attuned, and committed champions of all our diverse communities. It won’t happen automatically, it’s been a long uphill battle, and it will require fresh and courageous new leaders to emerge willing to challenge the status quo, as it has already begun to happen in city councils and state and congressional districts from around our area.

It's just a matter of time, for what the BOS is producing more than anything else with its resolutions on the wrong side of history and the opposite side of their constituents’ urgent needs, is its own accelerated demise.

Vote YES on Prop. 50!