Santa Rosa seeks public input as it starts redrawing electoral districts

The electoral landscape of Sonoma County's largest city is in the midst of a seismic upheaval, and time is running out for residents to have much say in how things shake out.

Santa Rosa's transition from at-large to district-based elections is happening swiftly, and the City Council has been getting an earful about how the city's first-ever electoral maps should be redrawn.

So far, few have offered input on how the new districts should be created, and those who have are largely City Hall insiders, advocates, interest groups and gadflies.

That may be because the process of drawing district boundaries to ensure fair elections is a highly complex, proscribed, and legal process for which most people can muster little time or interest.

It could also be that city officials, citing the demands of recovery from the October wildfires, have canceled previous plans for a robust public outreach effort, leaning instead on individual council members to engage with residents.

But the task of creating electoral districts is ideally a grass-roots endeavor where the residents decide how they'll elect their leaders, not one where their leaders decide who gets to elect them.

“I do not want us to be trying to protect people in their jobs,” Mayor Chris Coursey, who could find himself out of elected office this fall because of the switch. “This isn't about the seven of us who are up here now. It's about the future.”

The council has had two public meetings so far seeking input on how the districts should be drawn. Some ideas are conceptual, such as suggesting neighborhoods be kept whole as much as possible. Others have been far more detailed, with maps and supporting data and formal explanations.

The city has tried to make it as easy as possible for the public to participate. It has created a website with reams of information and tools. A number of proposed maps have already been submitted by individuals and interest groups, such as the Santa Rosa Metro Chamber of Commerce and Concerned Citizens for Santa Rosa. More submissions are welcome, officials said.

“You can actually take a cocktail napkin, draw a map, take a picture of it with your cellphone,” said Shalice Tilton, a demographer with National Demographics Corporation, the city's consultant.

The firm will take that input, combine it with guidance from the council, and return next month with a number of draft maps for the public and the council to review.

In order for maps submitted by the public to be analyzed by the demographer and posted online for the council to consider at its March 13 meeting, they need to be submitted to the city by March 1. That leaves less than two weeks for residents to submit proposed maps if they want them to be considered by the council.

That'll be followed by a winnowing process resulting in a decision tentatively scheduled for the council on April 10 and April 17. The timeline, which was delayed by the October fires, is being driven by the fact that the city was threatened last year with a lawsuit under the California Voting Rights Act, and the need to get the issue sorted out in time for potential candidates to have enough time to launch campaigns for the November election.

So far, a number of potentially thorny issues have been raised that seem likely to make the district drawing process a challenging one.

What's changing?

While the switch to district-based elections will mark a major shift in the politics of the city, plenty of things won't change because they are enshrined in the City Charter.

There will still be seven council members serving four-year terms. And there will still be a mayor picked for a two-year term by fellow council members.

But instead of citywide, at-large elections to fill the seats, there will be contests for seven separate districts in the city, each with about 25,000 residents. Just like in county supervisor races, voters will only get a say in who represents their area.

Why the switch?

In July, Malibu-based attorney Kevin Shenkman sent letters to the city and Santa Rosa City Schools claiming the citywide election system has resulted in “racially polarized voting” patterns that disenfranchised Latino voters in violation of the California Voting Rights Act of 2001.

City Attorney Sue Gallagher said the city has “substantial risk” in litigating the issue, though the details of that analysis have remained concealed.

Facing potentially millions in legal fees from protracted legal battles, the council and school district both agreed to switch to district elections to limit their legal exposure. Several council members have said that in addition to the financial reasons, switching to districts strikes them as long overdue.

How will this work?

The city's management of the switch is a touchy subject because it has the potential to affect the political careers of existing council members.

In 2018, Mayor Chis Coursey and councilmen John Sawyer and Tom Schwedhelm are up for re-election. The other four council members have two years left on their terms, and they cannot be prevented from completing that service.

So all indications are that seven districts will be created, but only three will be on the ballot this November.

Some are making the case that whatever districts Coursey, Sawyer and Schwedhelm live in should be the ones up in November, for consistency's sake.

“It's important to us that the three council members whose terms are expiring have a chance to run in 2018. That's the bottom line,” said Brian Ling, executive director of the Sonoma County Alliance, the county's largest business group.

But creating a system that protects incumbents strikes some as anathema to the whole point of creating districts in the first place, which is to give voice to members of the community who have been shut out or sidelined from the political conversation in the city.

Coursey said he'd like to see the newly annexed, heavily Latino Roseland neighborhood get a seat on the council this year. If that happened, it's unclear how the other two districts would be carved up.

Douglas Johnson, the president of the city's demography firm, said “continuity in office” is generally advisable in such situations, but not required.

“Really, the goal is so that the voters decide which council members get re-elected and which don't, as opposed to the lines,” Johnson told the council.

People including political consultant Terry Price have made the case to the council that areas with low voter turnout, such as heavily Latino areas, should be up for election in 2020, which is a presidential election year when voter turnout is higher. He argues that would create increased overall voter engagement.

Underrepresented voters

Critics of the city's existing at-large election system say the will of a growing share of Latino voters is diluted, overridden or impaired by the votes of the greater majority.

The goal of the switch is to create districts that allow Latinos, now 30 percent of the population in the city and 17 percent of the voting age population, to have a fair shot at electing candidates they support.

Two areas in the city identified with a higher concentration of Latinos were Roseland in the southwest and along the SMART rail line in the northwest. In both areas, Latinos make up more than 50 percent of the voting age population, according to city consultants.

“We want to avoid dividing those neighborhoods in a way that dilutes their voting strength,” Johnson said.

He stressed, however, that race cannot be the “predominant factor” in establishing boundaries,

Communities of interest

A host of factors can be considered in drawing districts. These include geographic and topographical features such as rivers and mountains, or man-made structures including roads and railroad tracks. School districts or other jurisdictional boundaries, public facilities including parks and fire stations, and business districts such as the downtown area can all be factored into such decisions.

So-called “communities of interest,” a formal descriptor for neighborhoods can also be weighed in the process. They can be delineated by geography, demographics, income, proximity to schools, parks or other landmarks.

“Ultimately, the definition of a neighborhood is whatever the people there say it is,” Johnson said.

Council members aired a number of ideas for what factors should be used in the district drawing process.

Julie Combs said she wanted to see historic districts kept intact and districts cross over highways when possible. Vice Mayor Chris Rogers said he'd like to see neighborhoods left intact and parks taken into consideration. Coursey said he wants the districts to make some local sense so people intuitively understand them. And Schwedhelm, a former Santa Rosa police chief, suggested the city's police beats be considered, and that the downtown get several council members representing it.

Whatever the council approves, it won't be perfect, Schwedhelm said. But that shouldn't be the goal, he said.

“At the end of this,” he said, “I want the majority of people to say yeah, that was fair.”

You can reach Staff Writer Kevin McCallum at 521-5207 or kevin.mccallum@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @srcitybeat.