The Carpinteria City Council has voted to establish district-based elections for council members, and adopted a map that will start being used for the November 2022 elections.
The council approved the district elections resolution on a 4-1 vote last week, with Vice Mayor Al Clark dissenting due to the district selection process, and approved a five-district map.
Once the resolution goes into effect for the fall city elections, Carpinteria community members will vote for one representative per district.
This decision, which included Ordinances 752 and 753, has been a topic of discussion for the past five years. The change was a response to complaints alleging that Carpinteria’s at-large voting model violated the California Voting Rights Act.
The complaints came in 2017 from Jatzibe Sandoval and Frank Gonzalez, who alleged that Carpinteria’s “racially polarized voting” setup at the time violated the CVRA, and especially hurt Latino voters. The two asked that the city switch to district-based elections to protect local minorities in Carpinteria.
Carpinteria made a conditional settlement agreement and declared its intention to switch to district elections by November 2022.
Other cities throughout the county have been making the switch from at-large to district-based elections as well.
Carpinteria community members appear to largely support district elections. The map used to divide these districts, however, has been a topic of debate all the way to adoption.
At the March 28 meeting, council members voted 3-2 to choose the A2 draft map, pictured above.
Mayor Wade Nomura, who made the motion to pick this map, said the process has been controversial but in picking the map the city will have to “live with the best one you can.”
Gregg Carty and Roy Lee also voted for the A2 adopted map while Natalia Alarcon and Clark voted no, saying they preferred the other map in consideration for its cleaner boundaries and keeping more communities of interest together.
For some citizens, the barriers between a few districts, which cut through neighborhoods, puzzled them. Some said it looked unnecessarily gerrymandered, like a “jigsaw puzzle.” Others didn’t support where the divisions between districts existed.
“I always believed that the initial premise (of the district elections) was to protect and cover communities of interest,” said Fred Shaw, a former council member, during the public comment panel at a March meeting discussing the map. “I would just encourage the council to not separate streets within neighborhoods. (It’s possible that) you and your neighbor could vote on the same issue, but with different representation.”
Despite these points of concern, Carpinteria’s city council agreed that moving to district-based elections will benefit the community. Though some incumbent members may need to run against each other with the new districts, they are keen on the positive effects of the switch going forward.
At the March 28 meeting, Alarcon said district elections were forced on the city, “but now minorities have the opportunity to run and possibly win.”
“I really hope that moving forward we look at it as a positive thing in our community,” she said.
Nomura agreed.
“We look right now at the complexion of our council, it’s very diverse, extremely diverse, I’d like to thank everybody for that, especially the voters for what you’ve done to make it that way,” he said.
The City Council also voted to number the districts and have District 1, District 3 and District 5 up for election this year, and District 2 and District 4 seats will be up for election in 2024.
City Manager Dave Durflinger said the new District 1 has no representative on the City Council, based on current members’ residential addresses.
There will be a hybrid council with some by-district elected members and some at-large members for the next few years as district elections are phased in, he noted.
Noozhawk managing editor Giana Magnoli contributed reporting to this story.
— Lauren Luna is a Noozhawk contributing writer. Contact her at news@noozhawk.com.
