Ojai: Sit on it, Potsie!

‘Happy Days’ Star Anson Williams Lost a Mayoral Race to a Yoga Instructor.

Wrap-Pro: Recounts! ”Popping“ Ballots! Lawsuits! Inside the bonkers politics of a tiny mountain town where nothing is as mellow as it seems

OJAI, Ca — It looked, for one brief shining moment, as if Potsie had pulled it off.

On election night last November, Anson Williams was up by about 100 votes, what in these parts counts as a commanding lead. There were still plenty of results left to tally in the hotly contested campaign for mayor of Ojai, California — where all of 3,604 ballots were cast in 2022 — but the 73-year-old former TV star was far enough ahead of his opponent, 59-year-old incumbent mayor and yoga instructor Betsy Stix, that a few days later Stix released a statement congratulating Williams on his victory.

Happy Days, it seemed, were here again. 

But then this is Ojai, where local politics are as volatile as the recent weather. And as Williams and his supporters were about to discover, there’s a lot more going on in this quirky little spa town than hot stone massages and hikes around the Topatopa Mountains.

Indeed, beneath its mellow surface, Ojai turns out to be a teeming cauldron of petty political intrigue, wacky electoral dysfunction, bitter ideological turf wars, shady self-dealing and shadowy consultants manipulating the levers of power at the highest levels of City Hall.

Think “Peyton Place,” as directed by Barry Levinson. Or maybe Mel Brooks.

“I went to where they were actually counting the votes and it was hysterical,” said Williams, chuckling as he recalled election day. “They have these machines that slice open the envelopes and drop the ballots into a plastic box. And while I’m watching, I’m seeing ballots popping out of the box onto the floor. I’m like, ‘There’s one popping out. There’s two popping out.’ Then some person comes in, scoops them up, and puts them all back into the box. I mean, we put people on the moon 50 some years ago, and we’ve got ballots popping all over the floor.” more