Santa Maria could be looking at a future where City Council members are chosen based on the city’s classic dividing lines: Main Street and Broadway.
The city’s voters starting electing candidates from the districts they lived in during the 2018 election, and now Santa Maria’s adopting new district boundaries based on the 2020 census—a data collection that occurs every 10 years to analyze population growth and the demographic changes.
As they stand now, the city’s four districts aren’t equal—with an 18 percent population deviation between districts, Daniel Phillips from the National Demographics Corporation told council members at their March 3 meeting. Federal law requires Santa Maria to redistrict in order to maintain balance between its districts with a deviation of less than 10 percent.
“The idea is we’re sticking very close to the districts as they currently are with the realization that the districts perform well with the exception of equal population. We made minimal changes to get the population deviation to an acceptable level,” Phillips explained as he presented three options to the council.
A community favorite was the quadrant plan: A map that used Main and Broadway to divide the city into distinct quadrants, a change compared to the current layout—which zigzags across the city’s major roads. In the quadrant plan, District 1 would be completely north of Main and west of Broadway, District 2 would be north of Main and east of Broadway, District 3 would be south of Main and west of Broadway, and District 4 would be south of Main and east of Broadway.
“This is pretty clean, you have a total population deviation of 6.2 percent—under the 10 percent threshold. Three districts are a majority Latino voting age population, but the percentage in different districts fluctuate. There’s no difference in terms of contiguity or neighborhood integrity, and the boundaries are much more easily identifiable, since they are more straight and serve to keep the district more compact,” Phillips said.
Although the City Council has yet to make any decisions, Councilmember Mike Cordero voiced his support for the quadrant map.
“The quadrant plan is much cleaner and simpler to understand, and it puts the right value on the communities of interest within the city limits,” Cordero said.
Its easy-to-understand boundaries had residents like Rebeca Garcia supporting the quadrant map.
“I noticed that one of the considerations under the second category is that when voters are in a new district, it can be confusing. I like the quadrant plan because even when voters are moved, it’s really easy to understand where you are going to be. I can see off Broadway and Main what district I would be in based on that, and it makes it accessible,” Garcia said during the meeting.
Giovanni Medina—another Santa Maria resident—added to Garcia’s comment.
“As someone who is experiencing the redistricting process for the first time and is trying to understand it, I support the quadrant map. It’s something I thought was super easy and necessary for our community of voters. It will encourage people to vote; there’s a lack of accessibility here with no Spanish translation, and a good first step is making our map accessible,” Giovanni said.
The City Council is scheduled to have a second meeting on March 15 to take additional community and council input and adopt a plan. The city is scheduled to adopt a final map on April 5.
This article appears in Mar 10-17, 2022.
