The Santa Maria City Council voted to set Main and Broadway as major boundaries for the city’s redistricting process after hearing public comment and discussion at the council’s Sept. 7 meeting.
Mayor Alice Patino said the boundaries would allow all council members to continue contributing to Santa Maria’s growing downtown.
“We are divided in four districts, but we want to govern Santa Maria as a whole. The motion is that each one of us has a piece of downtown because that’s important to us and our constituents,” she said.
The district map is currently divided into northwest, northeast, southwest, and southeast quadrants with similar boundaries, and many residents believe this model still works for the community to preserve communities of interest along with council’s downtown contributions.
Daniel Phillips from the National Demographics Corporation encouraged residents to provide input on redrawing district boundaries through a Santa Maria redistricting website where they can see maps and filters for specific demographics. The Sept. 7 meeting was the second of two pre-draft meetings. The city will release draft maps in February 2022, with the final district map in April.
“We would like to ask what neighborhoods are meaningful to people and what their boundaries are in order to preserve them in the redistricting process rather than breaking them apart,” he said at the meeting.
One of the concerns with the city’s current district map is that the four districts are uneven population-wise. Phillips said the first thing Santa Maria needs to do is consider how to redistribute the population so that each of the four districts contains about 26,500 people. Phillips said he’d like to see the council take demographic information into account as it moves through the redistricting process.
“We’re hoping that the council can vote on recognizing an official list—not necessarily exhaustive, but a starting point—as we get into the drawing process for what neighborhoods and communities of interest should be considered,” he said.
Rebeca Garcia, a policy advocate for Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE), submitted written public comment discussing Broadway and Main’s importance for communities of interest.
“With over half of eligible voters in the city being Latino, a fair map will have two out of four districts with majority Latino voters. These natural districts lie in the northwest and southwest quadrants,” she wrote.
This article appears in Sep 16-23, 2021.
