As Santa Maria prepares to enter its first November using a district election formula, city officials and council members are attempting to show signs of unity.
“The district boundaries are important for elections but not for the way we are going to govern the city,” Santa Maria’s City Manager Jason Stilwell said at an event on April 18. The small crowd assembled that day in the Santa Maria Inn by the city’s Chamber of Commerce and the Committee to Improve North [Santa Barbara] County consisted of council members, business owners, and community leaders.
All came to hear from Stilwell about just what would and wouldn’t change with the five new districts that will now define how Santa Marians elect its council. Some in attendance expressed concern about how committee appointments would be made (they’ll be made at large, or by selecting candidates from across the whole city), or what would happen if a district failed to put forward a candidate in an election (in that case the elected council would appoint one from anywhere in the city).
“I think the easiest way to explain it to the crowd is that the only thing that changes is how we get elected, everything else stays the same as far as appointments and representing the city,” Councilmember Etta Waterfield said that day.
Santa Maria has a five-member City Council—four council members and one mayor. Under the new election rules, those four council members will now be elected by, and represent, four districts, divided by population, while the mayor will still be elected at-large by the entire city.
The council seats for District 3 and District 4, which represent the southwest and southeast portions of Santa Maria, respectively, will be decided on Election Day this November. Both Councilmember Jack Boysen, who resides in District 3, and Waterfield, who resides in District 4, are running for re-election.
Stilwell said keeping certain areas of the city like neighborhoods and housing tracts intact was key when the boundaries for the districts were drawn.
“It makes sense if you are going to have an election,” he added, “you want to have an area that is a historic neighborhood that is cohesive—one area of land—and so you’ll know who your elected official is.”
The city pushed forward with district elections on Feb. 21 of last year, when local businessman, and former City Council candidate Hector Sanchez, along with his attorney, threatened to take legal action following Sanchez’s unsuccessful bid for council in 2016. The council eventually voted 3-2 to make the change.
It was a move that Stilwell said on April 18 was absolutely necessary.
“The cost of defending one of these [lawsuits] will be in the millions of dollars,” he added. “It becomes a battle of experts: You have to have high-paid experts to be able to say what the demographics are, what the impact to the community is” and that even if the city had attempted to defend itself from the complaint it probably would “have ended up where [it] was going to end up anyway.”
Stilwell mentioned Palmdale in Los Angeles County. In 2016, the city settled a $4.5 million lawsuit that claimed its citywide voting system of electing four councilmembers was unfavourably stacked against minorities.
“They [the lawsuits] are difficult to defend,” he said. “Palmdale went hard and ended up where we were going to end up anyway.”
There are two laws that are pushing communities in California to have district elections: the federal Voting Rights Act and 2002’s California Voting Rights Act. The federal law stipulates race cannot be a predominant factor, that boundaries cannot be set based on it, and that “communities of interest,” along with other certain cohesive neighborhoods should not be divided. Furthermore, the districts are supposed to avoid impacting incumbents and be contiguous.
The California iteration of the voting rights act, while less strict, requires that cities must demonstrate that they do not have racially polarized voting and that people have equal voting opportunities.
In the 1990s, Santa Maria successfully defended a federal Voting Rights Act lawsuit, but it cost about $1 million to defend. To date, no city has been successful fighting a California Voting Rights Act lawsuit.
“It’s better to work with the community to make the transition,” Stilwell said.
This article appears in Apr 26 – May 3, 2018.