Dale Francisco was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1953. His family moved to Southern California that same year. His father, a Marine aviator, was stationed at El Toro Marine Corps Air Station near Santa Ana, where he was a flight instructor and a squadron leader.
Dale grew up in Garden Grove and Irvine, and graduated early from Mission Viejo High School in 1971. After high school he pursued a variety of trades, including construction, cabinet-making, and plumbing; he also worked on a dairy farm, in an offset printing shop, and in an automated chemical factory. He traveled extensively in Europe, and lived on the East Coast for five years.
In 1979 he returned to California to pursue a college education, first at Santa Barbara City College, and then at UCSB, where he earned a B.S. in Computer Science and a B.A. in English with a minor in History.
After college he took a full-time position as a software engineer with a Goleta network equipment firm. Over the ensuing years he worked for three different networking companies, finally including Cisco Systems. In 1996 he began work as a senior software engineer with Cisco’s operating systems group at their headquarters in San Jose, and two years later became manager of his engineering team. At the completion of a major project in 2001, he decided to leave Cisco. He gladly returned to Santa Barbara in Spring 2002.
Since then he has worked independently and pursued a variety of interests, including history, music, and local politics. He first became involved with city politics over the controversial topic of “traffic calming.” For two years he was secretary of a neighborhood-based, non-profit organization called Santa Barbara SAFE Streets that has strongly questioned the policies and programs of the city’s transportation planning department. In 2007, frustrated with the direction the city was headed, he ran successfully for a seat on the Santa Barbara City Council. In the 2009 mayoral race he came in second behind Helene Schneider, but ran a strong race and was joined on Council by two new members (Frank Hotchkiss and Michael Self) who share many of his views, thus changing the dynamics of city government away from the ideological approach of previous years to a more pragmatic direction focused on public safety, sound city finances, and infrastructure.
