Voters in Orange will choose from two familiar faces this November when they elect their mayor.
Up for a two-year term as mayor are challenger and District 1 Councilmember Arianna Barrios, who runs Communications Lab, a public relations and community outreach firm, and incumbent Dan Slater, who has worked as a residential real estate broker at Orange Realty, Inc.
The mayor of Orange may serve a maximum of three consecutive two-year terms. Slater, who served on the council for eight years from 1994 to 2004 before returning to the council in 2022 as mayor, is asking for a third term. He ran unopposed in 2024.
Barrios ran for and won the newly formed District 1 seat in 2020, when the city transitioned from at-large to district elections. Barrios is the first Latina elected to the city council and has served the city through the Orange Chamber of Commerce, the YWCA of Central Orange County and the Orange Educational Foundation.
Barrios and Slater responded to an Orange County Register questionnaire for the news organization’s voter guide and weighed in on key topics.
In her bid for the mayoral seat, Barrios said she’s “developed a comprehensive plan to fundamentally transform operations at City Hall to ensure that our local government works for everyone, not just the feared or the favored.”
Barrios proposed structural changes to City Hall’s inner workings, such as having things such as “charters, term limits, or pension formulas – go through publicly deliberated commissions with real notice and input, not floor amendments finalized in a single meeting.”
The overhaul includes adding “a public dashboard” to the city website, making public discretionary spending and the city budget, “instead of a static document few residents read.”
Slater, who was president of the Old Towne Preservation Association and led the Orange Chamber of Commerce, said he was running to “represent all the citizens of Orange.”
“Everyone deserves to be heard and served by their government,” Slater said. “I’m a consensus builder and I work very hard to make sure that all of the council members are heard.”
Orange coffers have long struggled with an eight-figure budget deficit that is cutting into the city’s reserve funding. The shortfall, city staffers have said, is driven by rising costs and an underlying structural deficit driven by debt, totaling $17.9 million for bonds to meet pension obligations and lease revenue bonds.
For the past few years, the city has pursued aggressive spending cuts and mulled over ideas for increasing revenue, including adopting a charter, a one-cent sales tax and a 4% tax increase on hotel stays, which will all appear on the Nov. 3 ballot.
Both candidates agree on the severity of the fiscal situation.
“Orange’s $30 million structural deficit didn’t appear overnight; it’s the result of years of decisions — like adding police officers without new funding or spending $250,000 on the city pool — both made without a consistent framework for fiscal discipline or accountability,” Barrios said, adding “this erodes public trust.”
Barrios is suggesting the city fix its internal budgeting practices and have potential council decisions go through fiscal analysis and public input before being voted upon.
“We’ve cut the budget $37.5 million and have reduced employees by 10%. We’re at the point where we’re now cutting into the ‘muscle,’” Slater said. “Police officers are 15 below our preferred level. We are living within our means, and we have maintained a balanced budget.”
To remedy the issue, Slater said the city should stay “laser focused” on economic development. He named Axis Product Development — a space parts manufacturing company — which recently expanded its operations into the city and could eventually “bring over $2 million in sales tax revenue to Orange annually.”
Cities are facing state pressure for more housing, especially at lower price points. The candidates proposed different avenues for meeting those quotas.
To meet that demand, Slater said the city could be more “business friendly” to housing developers. “We can ‘get ahead’ of state mandates and meet our housing requirements using the market — as it should be.”
In his two terms, Slater said, “We have done many things to remove hurdles for development,” and the city now has “17 housing projects in the pipeline.”
The city has pursued several infill developments, such as the demolition of a long-vacant JCPenney building at The Village at Orange shopping mall to make way for a condo community.
“Many of our projects are ‘in-fill’ and redevelopment of tired commercial spaces,” Slater said. “But I’m working to allow housing in more areas (we have a huge industrial area) where there is less likelihood of compromising the quality of life for existing neighborhoods and residents.”
“Finally, I do not support project labor agreements,” he added. “They often kill projects because they make them too costly to build.”
To meet state housing mandates while preserving Orange’s small-town character, Barrios said the city can “concentrate new density near transit corridors when possible, and underused commercial strips (like parts of Chapman/Tustin/Katella) rather than spreading it into established single-family tracts.”
She suggested “gentle density tools” such as ADU’s and JADU’s and duplex-to-four-plex conversions and said the city “needs more density bonuses tied to affordable units and partnerships with nonprofit developers to help hit lower-price-point goals rather than relying solely on market-rate construction.”
Read more of the voter guide, including candidates up and down the ballot at ocregister.com/voter-guide.
Voters can return their ballots to drop boxes around the city or by mail — they must be postmarked by Nov. 3 and received within seven days. Voters may cast their ballots in-person starting Oct. 25, when the first vote centers open.