During a special closed-door hearing, the Santa Barbara City Council voted on Tuesday to terminate long-time City Attorney Ariel Calonne, who’d been placed on paid administrative leave this past July after what had been described as an exceptionally heated exchange with another attorney who worked in his office.
Calonne, who’d previously served as City Attorney for the City of Ventura, was hired by the City of Santa Barbara in 2014. In the intervening eight years, he enjoyed a reputation for both intelligence and intensity, taking on, for example, slumlord Dario Pini in an especially protracted legal war over the habitability of Pini’s units. In this action, Calonne sought to use the court system to hold the feet of Pini’s lenders to the fire, as well as Pini himself.
But in his zeal, Calonne also dispatched teams of city inspectors backed by city police wearing body armor to the apartment complexes, alarming in the process many of the predominantly Spanish-speaking tenants. At the time, Donald Trump had just been elected president, and many tenants worried this might be an immigration raid.