A cheap fake

We’re coming down to the wire in the 2026 elections. For residents of Encinitas District 4, the City Council race deserves particular attention.

The contest pits appointed incumbent Marco San Antonio against challenger Brad Lefkowits, an Encinitas newcomer. The choice is between a demonstrated record of public service and a boatload of rhetorical claims. It’s the difference between the genuine article and a cheap fake.

San Antonio has a record to run on. He grew up in Village Park, attended local schools, and has been involved in the family business on Coast Highway since childhood. He and his wife are raising their two children in Olivenhain. His public service includes ten years as a reserve firefighter with the Orange County Fire Authority and elected service on the Olivenhain water board. Appointed to the City Council in January 2025, he also completed the city’s Community Emergency Response Team training earlier this year.

On the council, San Antonio has been part of the majority working to control expenses, improve infrastructure, reduce homelessness, and strengthen public safety. District 4 residents have particular reason to appreciate the staffing upgrade at the Olivenhain fire station, enacted on his motion.

Lefkowits is another story. He arrived in Encinitas with his family in 2020. Since then, his involvement in local affairs has been variously ineffectual and downright objectionable. Equally troublesome is his tendency to inflate his personal record, obscuring a conspicuous lack of accomplishment.

Start with his application for appointment to the council seat now occupied by San Antonio. Under education, Lefkowits listed “University of California Santa Barbara/Philosophy/1998-2002.” UCSB has no record of awarding him a degree. On the contrary, he dropped out in his senior year. A college degree is hardly a prerequisite for public service, but advertising four years of university attendance without mentioning the absence of a degree creates a misleading impression.

After UCSB, Lefkowits embarked on what he describes as a 17-year career in the San Diego indie music scene, claiming experience in “strategic planning, financial management, and leading diverse teams under high-pressure conditions.” His council application lists “Professional Musician/Recording Studio and Record Label Owner — 2002-2019.”

The reality appears considerably less impressive. The small recording studio (SDRL) he was involved with apparently operated only from 2007 to 2016. In a 2009 Tape Op interview, the studio’s recording engineer described Lefkowits arriving to learn recording, helping paint the floors, and working as a scheduler and assistant.

Lefkowits himself acknowledged in a San Diego Reader profile that the music business wasn’t a livelihood and had “never been much of a plan.” For several of those 17 years, he supported himself with a day job at a screen-printing shop producing band merchandise. Honest work, certainly, but hardly the “extensive experience in team management and creative entrepreneurship” suggested by his application.

His next career was in landscape design. His council application lists “MiraCosta College — Landscape Architecture — 2017-2020,” while his business website says he “Studied Landscape Architecture at MiraCosta College.” Neither identifies a degree or certificate. It’s reported that he did a professional internship with his mom.

California regulates the designation “landscape architect,” requiring education, experience and state licensure. Lefkowits is not a licensed landscape architect. Instead, he calls himself a “landscape designer,” an unregulated designation that anyone can adopt.

His campaign website describes him as an “award-winning landscape designer,” neglecting to mention that he nominated his own backyard for one of the two awards cited, not a professional accolade but recognition for being a water-conscious resident. That may qualify as an award, but it raises a question about the professional significance implied by the description. His Form 700 financial disclosure offers little help in establishing the extent of his business activity.

What about public service?

Lefkowits prominently features his membership on the city’s Urban Forest Advisory Committee (UFAC), which he joined in 2023 and chaired for two years. But his leadership coincided with a remarkably unproductive period. The committee made minimal progress on its work plan and fell woefully short of its tree-planting objectives. Although the goal was to add 100 trees annually, the city’s tree count actually declined by an average of 128 trees per year.

That’s hardly a record to boast about, and Lefkowits understandably doesn’t mention it.

More troubling than his thin resume is his judgment.

Lefkowits trumpets his role as a founder of Parents of EUSD (PoE), a self-described grassroots organization unaffiliated with the school district. From my perspective, the group’s conduct has sometimes resembled organized intimidation of other parents and students. “Bullies” may be a more restrained description.

PoE sided with the Encinitas Union School District in the notorious Boo Bash transgender controversy and the “My Shadow Is Pink” debacle.

In the latter case, EUSD refused to allow parents to withdraw their children from classroom instruction, which they objected to on religious grounds. The district’s intransigence, encouraged by PoE and Lefkowits, led to a federal lawsuit brought by two local families. The families prevailed in district court; EUSD ultimately abandoned its Ninth Circuit appeal, reaching a sizable settlement in favor of the families that brought suit. Add the district’s legal expenses, and the episode became a costly adventure for taxpayers.

The district court in that case observed that the “children experienced severe bullying and harassment … from other students, their parents, and community members” and that after the lawsuit was filed one family was “a target of significant hostility and backlash from the school community.” Members of PoE, of which Lefkowits was a founder, contributed to that behavior. This is an episode of his public engagement that he understandably omits from his campaign resume.

More recently, Lefkowits has attacked the City Council for failing to prevent Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from making arrests in Encinitas.

There’s a rather obvious problem with that criticism: ICE is a federal law enforcement agency, operating under the Department of Homeland Security. The Encinitas City Council has no authority to direct or restrain its operations.

Mayor Bruce Ehlers and the local sheriff’s captain have instead opened communications with appropriate ICE officials. The council also directed city staff to establish a “Know Your Rights” webpage, providing residents with information and resources.

Yet Lefkowits posted an Instagram video just last week criticizing the city for failing to take actions beyond its authority. Ironically, that video appeared the same day the Ninth Circuit struck down California’s “No Vigilantes Act” (a law that would require non-uniformed law enforcement officers, including federal immigration agents, to visibly display clear identification), holding that the law improperly “attempts to directly regulate the United States in its performance of governmental functions. No set of circumstances exist under which the Act would be valid.”

Apparently, the limits of municipal authority are another subject Lefkowits has yet to master.

There’s more to his history of embellishment, but the available evidence of accomplishment is remarkably sparse. Interestingly, his LinkedIn profile, available as recently as early September, has since disappeared. An odd development for a small-business owner presumably interested in attracting customers.

I’ll grant Lefkowits one thing: he’s a smooth talker, occasionally to the point of glibness. But his vocabulary is long on aspirations and values and short on measurable results. His record reveals a recurring pattern of ambitious claims, modest accomplishments, and a failure to see things through.

Serving on the City Council involves a great deal of unglamorous work. It requires patience, diligence, sound judgment, and the willingness to attend to tedious details. Lefkowits has demonstrated little of that discipline. Instead, his public conduct suggests an aggressive, provocative temperament ill-suited to the responsibilities of local government.

For District 4 voters, the choice should be clear.

Marco San Antonio is a grown-up doing the hard work of building a business, raising a family, and serving his community. Brad Lefkowits offers polished rhetoric and a resume that looks less impressive the closer you examine it.

Perhaps he sees his performance skills and willingness to reshape the facts as qualifications for a career in Democratic Party politics. His chief supporter, Catherine Blakespear, born into a wealthy family, made a similar transition after failing to prosper in the private sector.

Encinitas deserves something better than political performance art. It deserves demonstrated accomplishment.

Marco San Antonio has delivered it. Brad Lefkowits hasn’t.

Garvin Walsh, retired from a career on Wall Street, is a Cardiff-by-the-Sea resident. He is an elected member of the San Diego County Republican Central Committee. Read more From the Cheap Seats.

*The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of the newspaper, its editors or staff.