At our May 18, 2015 meeting, the Visalia City Council selected the final map for district elections. Five districts will be implemented in the November 2016 and 2018 elections. These particular district boundaries will be used until 2022, when new boundaries will be selected and approved by that city council based upon the 2020 census.
Leading up to this decision, numerous community forums were held. Truth be told, however, at most only 20 to 30 people total from the community participated. So I thought I'd devote this article to informing the other 130,000 people in Visalia, and bring you up to speed.
The Visalia city charter required citywide elections for city council. However, in 2001, the California legislature enacted the California Voting Rights Act (CVRA), which contains a presumption in favor of district elections. The city council cannot unilaterally change the city charter. Accordingly, we placed on the November 2012 ballot, at the recommendation of a local blue ribbon task force, the issue of whether Visalia should convert to district elections. The majority of citizens voted against district elections. This precipitated a lawsuit against the city based on the CVRA. Aware that a number of such lawsuits had been brought throughout the state, which no city had won, and costing taxpayers huge sums of money in lawyer fees, a majority of the council voted to quickly settle the case. The suit was settled within a matter of weeks after being filed, with the settlement providing that Visalia would go to district elections and that council elections would move from odd years to even years beginning in 2016. This simple settlement was then reduced to a court order, thus modifying our local charter.
The council then began the process of drawing up district boundaries. The council, as part of this process, adopted criteria to be used in creating and assessing proposed boundary plans, which included the legal requirements of equal population, complying with the Federal Voting Rights Act, and that race cannot be the "predominate" factor. Other criteria included communities of interest, keeping the districts compact and contiguous, avoiding pairing incumbents if possible, and accounting for planned future population growth. The council hired a professional consulting firm, National Demographic Corporation (NDC). Public participation kits were made available. A total of 12 maps were submitted by interested community members, and three by NDC. Through the public forums, and the council's own meetings and evaluations, these maps were whittled down to a final four, with the final map being selected at the May 18 council meeting.
Towards the end of the process, as special interest groups were trying to get their map version accepted, claims of "gerrymandering" of boundaries were asserted. Coincidentally, however, the current council members' residences are in different parts of the city, with the closest two homes being 1½ miles apart. Tulare recently went through drawing new district election boundaries. In their case, since three of the council members lived within blocks of each other, existing council members were paired in the same district. That was not the case in Visalia, and logic dictated that there was no need to artificially pair any of the incumbents just to create an open district in the next election. As a practical matter, at least one council member has already declared his intention not to run again and thus there should be at least one open district up for grabs. That will be the new north side district 4 which will have the highest Latino population of the districts at 57%, up for election in 2018.
The Rest of the Story - Remember that at the same time Visalia was being sued to impose district elections, other CA cities and towns, including Palmdale, were also being sued. Visalia was required to pay approximately $80,000.00 in legal fees in swatting away this lawsuit as quickly as possible, understanding the inevitability of district elections under the CVRA and the potential cost of trying to prove a point otherwise. Palmdale 's city officials made the opposite decision, electing to defend and litigate. They asserted that their residents had voted for at large elections and the city had a right to determine how it wanted to conduct its own balloting. Based on the CVRA, the Los Angeles County Superior Court disagreed and the city lost a series of appeals. In a May 2015 article in the Los Angeles Times, it was reported that Palmdale finally gave up the fight, and had to pay $4.5 million plus interest to lawyers for the three minority plaintiffs. Palmdale's mayor produced a list of 25 such cases across California which have cost taxpayers more than $13.8 million in defending and legal fees! By comparison and hindsight, it's clear that our city council made the right decision to put this matter to rest, to avoid incurring huge legal fees paid by taxpayer money. After four years, it's time to move on.
See you at the polls!
Warren Gubler
Visalia Vice Mayor
