Santa Rosa starts hearings on district elections

Santa Rosa will begin its speedy shift to district elections tonight in the first of several public hearings on the controversial change.

Under the threat of lawsuit seeking to create a purportedly fairer electoral system, the City Council voted in late August to change how its seven members are elected.

Now it’s coming to grips with the enormity of the challenge of radically changing city elections in three months, the deadline to limit the city’s legal liability under the California Voting Rights Act.

The city has 10 public meetings planned between now and the end of November, making the shift to district elections a virtually all-consuming issue for City Hall over the next two months.

“This is not the ideal way to go about this, but it definitely focuses the attention and the effort on the issue,” Mayor Chris Coursey said. “It’s right in front of us. We need to deal with it. And that’s what we’re going to do.”

Like all cities in Sonoma County, Santa Rosa City Council members have always been elected in an at-large system, where all council members are elected in citywide votes.

For most of its history, there were five council members, but since 1994 - the last time a major change to the city’s governing structure was made - there have been seven. They’re elected to four-year terms, with three or four up for election every two years.

Now the city is facing pressure to shift to a district-based electoral system, where residents from a defined geographic area only vote for candidates who live in their neighborhood.

Malibu attorney Kevin Shenkman, who represents a Texas-based voting rights group, triggered the change when he sent letters to the city and the Santa Rosa school district in July alleging their election systems had led to “racially polarized voting,” as defined by the California Voting Rights Act.

The letter claimed the city’s at-large election system does not give Latino voters a fair voice in city governance, citing elections where Latinos’ voting preferences were not reflected in the final results. Ernesto Olivares is the only Latino to ever serve on the council, despite Latinos making up nearly 30 percent of the population, according to the 2010 census.

The California Voting Rights Act allows lawsuits on behalf of disenfranchised voters, but caps liability for cities if they act swiftly to fix the problem.

“It’s such a short timeframe,” City Attorney Sue Gallagher said. “The statute only gives us 90 days to enjoy the safe harbor.”

The city has already hired a demographer, National Demographics Corp., to study if the city has racially polarized voting, and to draft maps of seven potential council districts, Gallagher said.

The first two public hearings before the council - scheduled for today and Oct. 10 - will provide opportunities for public input. On Oct. 24, the city will publish draft maps of the districts, leading to a third hearing Nov. 1 to get more input. Then on Nov. 14, the council will hold a fourth meeting to tentatively approve the districts, with them becoming final Nov. 21, just a few days before the Nov. 27 deadline.

The council will only address the narrow issue of how the seven districts should be drawn, not whether there should be seven or whether the mayor should be separately elected, Gallagher said.

Other changes would have to be made by the voters through the regular charter review process and resulting ballot measures, Gallagher explained.

A few factors must be considered in drawing the districts, including striving for equal populations. Numerous others can be considered, including other jurisdiction boundaries, such as school districts, boundaries that are “compact and contiguous,” the inclusion of “communities of interest,” and distribution of public facilities and commercial interests “to the extent feasible,” according to Gallagher’s staff report.

Coursey thinks it also makes sense for as many districts as possible to contain a piece of downtown, he said. He also predicted that residents of Roseland, which is on track to be annexed as early as Nov. 1, will have someone from the area on the City Council by 2018.

Coursey hopes that having so many public hearings will improve not only the quality of the process but the public’s trust in it, especially since it involves politicians drawing districts that will affect them.

“We need to make sure we have the city’s interests in mind and not our own interests,” he said.

You can reach Staff Writer Kevin McCallum at 707-521-5207.