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At the end of the ’90s, Esperanza Colio Warren was on the streets of El Centro, a small city in California’s Imperial Valley, when she spotted a flyer. ¿Quieres aprender inglés? Tenemos clases de inglés en la High School. The classes were free, and because she liked that word—free—she said to herself, “Let’s give it a try.”
She had been living in the U.S. for three years, married and building a new life just 12 miles from the city where she was born: Mexicali, the capital of the state of Baja California, Mexico. Still, she had not quite adjusted. It’s not easy, she said, to go from a bustling city of more than half a million people—filled with restaurants, theaters, and more cousins than you can count—to one 20 times smaller, built in the sprawl of the American suburban style, where she didn’t speak the language. So she enrolled in the high school classes, and they became the first rung of the ladder she would climb to the top of San Benito County government.
On June 16, Warren was appointed San Benito County’s new County Administrative Officer, nearly a year after her predecessor, Ray Espinosa, was placed on medical leave. She steps into the role at a critical point when the county is facing steep budget constraints as a result of revenues not keeping pace with spending over the past five years. She will also oversee the expansion of the county’s only library and will have to deal with a split County Board of Supervisors and the possible recall of two supervisors. She said she’ll also be preparing for the ripple effects of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which calls for nearly $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid.
“The bill is going to impact some of the departments that provide services to the public,” she told BenitoLink. “We’re going to start those conversations about how the community is going to be impacted. We have to inform the board about it.”
After nearly 30 years in the U.S., Warren is fully bilingual. She speaks softly, but with the quiet conviction of someone shaped by more than three decades in public service. And she traces it all back to the days when, despite holding an accounting degree from a Mexican university, she returned to high school just to learn English.
“I went back to high school,” she said, “but that’s okay—because doing it in a different country gives you a sense of the community. I took some history classes, and that’s how you start learning about the new country. That’s the beauty and the advantage of going back to that level.”
From there, she enrolled in community college, driven not by a degree but by a desire to master English. After taking nearly seven classes a semester, a counselor pointed out that she had already accumulated enough credits to transfer. She earned a bachelor’s and then a master’s in public administration from San Diego State University.
After five years in San Diego, Warren returned to El Centro, where she began a decades-long career in public service. She began as an intern with El Centro’s Waste Management Task Force and was then hired by Imperial Valley County, where she worked for 18 years as community and economic development manager and deputy county executive officer.
When the pandemic hit, Imperial County had the highest rate of COVID cases in California. Its location on the U.S.-Mexico border played a key role in the spread. Thousands of farmworkers were deemed essential and continued to work through the lockdowns, as they were crucial to California’s food supply chain. Many of them crossed the border daily from Mexicali into Imperial County.
“Every day, about 30,000 to 50,000 people cross the border from Mexicali,” Warren said. “About 5,000 of them are farmworkers.”
Those workers, many of them green card holders, were allowed to cross into the U.S. to work the fields, spreading the disease. “The problem was that they would get into buses and cars together, without face masks or any protection,” she recalls. “And they were passing COVID to each other.”
Warren, who had previously worked as an accountant for the Mexicali government, connected the two sides of the border. Her bilingualism allowed her to moderate meetings between Mexican and California officials, helping coordinate strategies to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
When the pandemic began to ease in 2022, Warren returned to the border region. She was hired as the city manager of Calexico, the California city that sits just across from Mexicali. She held the position for two years, until last year, when a political shift reshaped the local government.
A recall effort removed two local council members, Gilberto Manzanarez and Raul Ureña, who had supported Warren’s work. The newly elected council did not.
“I didn’t want to work anymore for them and they didn’t want to work with me,” she said. “It’s politics. But we as administrators and CEOs have to understand that we take a risk every time that we go to a city or a county.”
Though she was in Calexico for just two years, Warren began confronting a problem she now faces in San Benito County: the financial hangover from the pandemic. As COVID relief funds dry up, cities and counties across the country find themselves scrambling to balance budgets once funded by federal aid.
Through the American Rescue Plan Act, the federal government distributed $350 billion to state and local governments, and San Benito County received $12.2 million. Like many jurisdictions, it used those funds to support day-to-day operations. But now, with those dollars gone, the county is facing cuts.
From Calexico, Warren also brings expertise on how to tread the line between public service and politics.
“Well, there are protocols you need to follow,” she said. “Elected officials are chosen by the public to represent them. They make and approve the policies. My job is to coordinate the departments to accomplish the goals of the board.”
She firmly believes that her job is to adhere to facts.
“Whether they want to vote one way or the other, that’s not up to me,” she said. “They make that decision. They are the policymakers. My job is to provide the facts and give a recommendation. But my recommendation is not necessarily what their constituents want. No, that’s not my job. They’ll listen to my recommendations and they’ll do whatever is better for their constituents. I have to [have] respect, and I think that’s the biggest word: respect, both for their job and for mine.”
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