Sonoma County supervisor accuses board of ‘bogus’ closed-session meeting as redistricting dispute escalates

Days before the final scheduled public hearing on a map that will shape Sonoma County politics for a decade, discord over redistricting has risen to a new level amid a feud between some supervisors, accusations of gerrymandering and sharp questions from Santa Rosa leaders about the latest proposal to divide the city’s downtown.

For weeks now, the county’s redistricting has been a politically tense process. It was strained from the start due to the delayed federal delivery of 2020 census data, which left less time for public input. And some proposals pitted the interests of far removed parts of the county, including the coast, against urban areas like Rohnert Park that sought a unified district.

An emotional hourslong meeting Monday unleashed many of those tensions while sparking fresh controversy, with nine women of color from the county’s redistricting commission Saturday sending a scathing letter to the board that suggested supervisors will “commodify equity” if they carry forward with their latest map.

Drawn at Monday’s meeting, the supervisors’ map reversed course on plans to put all of Rohnert Park and the west county in one district, rejecting in doing so the map crafted by the county’s 19-member Advisory Redistricting Commission.

“My district has been carved up like a Christmas ham,” said Santa Rosa Councilwoman Victoria Fleming, who represents neighborhoods surrounding the Santa Rosa Junior College and the city’s northeastern hillsides, including Hidden Valley and Fountaingrove. Big shares of her 25,000 constituents would fall into four different supervisor districts under the new map, she said.

The new map favored by four supervisors splits downtown Santa Rosa in two and keeps Rohnert Park divided in two districts ‒ despite the early wishes of city leaders. It is up for public comment and board discussion at an 8:45 a.m. hearing Tuesday. The board could hold its final vote on the map that day, or post a map with changes and take up a final vote Dec. 14, the day before a state deadline.

Some Santa Rosa city leaders called both the latest proposal and the process flawed, singling out Monday’s meeting as particularly problematic. Supervisors that day generated their latest proposal off of a consultant’s draft released by the county less than two hours before their meeting began.

The supervisors in a single day had replaced a map the public had seen for a month with “a map that’s been out there for less than half a day,” Chris Coursey, the lone voice of dissent on the board, said in the meeting.

In an interview, Coursey, who represents the 3rd District that today takes in central Santa Rosa and most of Rohnert Park, ramped up his criticism, accusing the board of convening last month in a closed-session meeting to discuss redistricting under what he called a “bogus” pretense.

Coursey was referring to a Nov. 19 executive session, where the agenda included the late addition of a discussion on “anticipated litigation.” Under California law, government bodies are allowed to confer with their attorneys behind closed doors to discuss legal threats.

Coursey, however, said Sonoma County Counsel Robert Pittman never presented evidence of a legitimate threat of litigation. Instead, Coursey said, the meeting centered on an accusation behind closed doors from Supervisor Lynda Hopkins that he had improperly influenced the redistricting commission to harm her political career and aid his by adding Rohnert Park to her largely rural west county district.

“The threat of litigation was a pretext for a political attack on me in that meeting,” Coursey said in a Thursday interview.

Hopkins, the current board chair, rejected that characterization, telling The Press Democrat there was a legitimate threat of litigation that Pittman had vetted. Hopkins said she had to defer to Pittman on whether the specifics of the legal threat could be disclosed, but said she had “received word from multiple avenues of litigation” over redistricting.

“I can’t speak to the contents of closed session, but I have never personally attacked or accused Chris Coursey of political malfeasance,” she said.

Pittman also declined to describe the threat, saying the law did not allow him to do so without the consent of the majority of the board.

Supervisor David Rabbitt, in an interview, said there “was a legitimate threat of litigation.”

Supervisor Susan Gorin did not respond to multiple requests for comment and Supervisor James Gore sent a text message Saturday saying he needed to speak with Pittman before answering questions from The Press Democrat about the meeting.

Coursey was adamant that he saw no evidence of a threatened litigation put forward at the closed-door meeting.

“There wasn’t really anything that was presented,” he said. “At the beginning of the session, the county counsel gave us a definition of gerrymandering. There was no reference to any litigation regarding gerrymandering.”

Hopkins acknowledged that the county’s process was beset by a new level of tension and said accusations of gerrymandering have been made by her constituents. Gerrymandering is generally defined as manipulating electoral boundaries to favor one party or class in elections.

“There is a tremendous amount of suspicion and distrust over quite frankly all of the maps that we have presented,” Hopkins said. “I have had west county residents accuse me of gerrymandering. This is the kind of language that folks have used.”

Generally, Pittman said, county attorneys need to consider there to be a real possibility of litigation to justify a closed session, but that does not require an explicit threat of a lawsuit.

“You want enough evidence to suggest that it’s legitimate,” Pittman said. The threat would need to come from an entity that is capable of suing, like an advocacy group or a lawyer, he said. His office sets a high bar for such sessions, Pittman said, adding that the decisions were not taken “lightly.”

Public tension alone would not justify a closed session, said David Snyder, the executive director of the First Amendment Coalition, a group that advocates for transparency.

“There has to be some fairly well defined potential for a lawsuit on a fairly well defined topic,” Snyder said. “Generalized complaints about a political process by themselves would not justify going into closed session.”

The confidential meeting came 10 days before four board members — with Coursey the lone holdout — threw their weight behind a new map that abandoned many of the lines recommended by the county’s redistricting commission.

The appointed panelists, drawn from the ranks of civic leaders and community advocates, had been charged with rebalancing population among the county’s five supervisorial districts while also keeping communities of interest such as neighborhoods and school districts together. The commission also was asked to address equity, in the hopes of improving representation for historically marginalized communities such as southwest Santa Rosa.

The redistricting commission had put forward a single map that kept most of Santa Rosa, including Roseland and Moorland — predominantly Latino neighborhoods in southwest Santa Rosa — together within the 3rd District represented by Coursey. The map then tied Rohnert Park to west county in a sprawling 5th District — Hopkins’ district. That proposal had been strongly criticized by Rohnert Park and west county representatives alike in recent weeks.

But Monday’s meeting featured the inclusion of three new maps 90 minutes before it began, upsetting commission members. The maps were formed based on suggestions board members submitted individually in the weeks following the commission completing its work, Hopkins said.

The late arrival, which denied the public a chance to contact supervisors before the meeting, was the fault of slow work by the county’s hired consultants for redistricting, Hopkins said.

Some commission members expressed outrage over the turnabout.

“Unfortunately, you have decided to diminish the work of the commission for your own political motivations,” Advisory Redistricting Commissioner Ana Lugo told the board at the meeting.

In a letter emailed to the supervisors Saturday night, Lugo and eight of her commission colleagues, all women of color, accused the supervisors of ignoring the work of the group they selected to conduct a more inclusive redistricting process than previous ones. Drawing a new map at the Nov. 29 meeting may have violated the Brown Act, the letter read. The choice certainly “violated the meticulous, inclusive, and transparent process that the commission followed,” the women wrote.

To read the letter, click here:

Redistricting Letter.pdf

“We listened to communities, read reports, learned the Federal and State Guidelines, and did our own outreach, so that we had the capacity to dutifully and responsibly represent Sonoma County,” they wrote. “With all due respect, we do not believe that the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors did the same.”

The supervisors’ new map leaves Rohnert Park divided as it is today, with the majority of it within Coursey’s 3rd District. Supervisors also split up northern Santa Rosa, separating the city’s downtown areas of Railroad Square and Old Courthouse Square and splitting neighborhoods around Santa Rosa Junior College. The chunks of downtown previously in the 3rd District moved to Hopkins’ 5th District.

“You have to get past ‘this is strange,’ and get into ‘does this make sense?’” Hopkins said, “does it empower representation or does it disempower representation.”

The west county and Rohnert Park were underrepresented on the commission, Hopkins said.

“There wasn’t engagement from these communities regarding moving Rohnert Park into west county,” she said. “As soon as that became public knowledge a massive amount of negative feedback poured in.”

The commission was “an advisory committee,” Rabbitt said, but not the last word. “A map that was adopted and published a month ago is not the only map that can be considered,” he said.

Rabbitt was surprised when the commission only put forward one map, he said, and did not think the inclusion of Rohnert Park in the 5th District made sense.

Coursey, however, argued supervisors should support the decision of a commission they created for the purpose of community input and redressing long-standing disparities.

“It’s based on equity and inclusion and empowerment at a time when we need it the most,” he said. Coursey, too, questioned the language used in the notice of the Nov. 29 meeting and said what was done was far deeper than modifications of the commission’s map.

“We had two lawyers in the room that were telling us that (modifications) is exactly what we were doing but … that’s not what it looked like to me,” Coursey said.

Fleming, the Santa Rosa councilwoman, noted the city of 180,000, the largest by far in the county, was always likely to be divided into different supervisorial districts. But, she said, “there doesn’t seem to be any strong logic,” behind the lines drawn by supervisors at Monday’s meeting.

“This map completely disenfranchises my district,” she said, divvying up the say of 25,000 residents on county matters between four different supervisors. But “the populations (of each portion) are so negligible that it would be easy for one supervisor to overlook that constituency,” Fleming said.

Not every Santa Rosa council member opposes the map, however. Councilman Eddie Alvarez, the first elected official to directly represent Roseland, said he was pleased not only to see his district and Moorland added to the 3rd District but also to see them linked to northern parts of Rohnert Park that have socioeconomic and cultural similarities.

“The promise of that is a louder voice,” for areas with majority Latino populations, Alvarez said.

“I’m not worried about downtown Santa Rosa,” he said. “It’s strong enough, it’s organized enough to make a play when it needs to make a play. I’m worried about those that don’t have the ability to defend themselves.”

But Santa Rosa Mayor Chris Rogers said his concern was with the process as much as the result. “To chop up the city without asking us what are our communities of interest really deprives us of a voice,” he said. “Redistricting is about the constituents not about the existing representatives.”

Rogers called for the supervisors to explain what transpired in the closed session. “The public deserves to know,” he said.

The supervisors would have to vote to disclose the threat of litigation and discuss the closed session, Pittman said.

You can reach Staff Writer Andrew Graham at 707-526-8667 or andrew.graham@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @AndrewGraham88