CVRA ISSUES - DISTRICT OR AT-LARGE VOTING, and Malibu??
Doublespeak: Note Unification means Separation of Malibu and Santa Monica into two separate school districts
Two hearings set to evaluate multi-city voting districts for School Board
byThomas LefflerJanuary 23, 2024
There will be two hearings to talk about proposed districts for Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District (SMMUSD) Credit:Courtesy photo
While the City of Santa Monica awaits a court ruling on the future of municipal elections, a much delayed proposal to force the local school district into districted voting will get a pair of public hearings in the coming weeks.
At 6 p.m. on January 31, the Los Angeles County Committee on School District Organization (LACCSDO), part of the Los Angeles County Office of Education (LACOE), will host the first meeting at Santa Monica College’s Malibu campus multipurpose room. The second hearing will be held on Feb. 10 at 9:30 a.m. at SMMUSD District Offices, 1717 4th St. Both will focus on a proposal to establish trustee voting areas but no decisions will be made at either meeting.
Malibu attorney Kevin Shenkman submitted the petition on behalf of two residents to establish district based voting for SMMUSD in 2022 saying the at-large system is unfair to minority voters. SMMUSD has strongly opposed the plan to implement districts saying the maps are not legal and that there’s no evidence the current system disenfranchises minority voters.
County officials tabled discussion of the concept after a tentative agreement was reached to split Malibu from Santa Monica creating two entirely distinct school organizations.
Though the district petition and the petition to form a Malibu Unified School District are different actions, County officials and proponents of splitting the district said any effort to establish districts would be moot if Malibu were to separate and in addition, a letter from Dale Larson, an attorney representing SMMUSD in the trustee area petition, stated that SMMUSD could not pursue work needed to achieve unification (the legal term for splitting Malibu into its own district) if it also had to attend to the trustee area petition, and that the trustee area petition should be delayed in order for SMMUSD to “undertake significant public outreach” on unification.
Legal counsel representing SMMUSD and City of Malibu both echoed that statement in recent months, with SMMUSD legal counsel David Soldani saying public hearings on the trustee area petition would delay special legislation in the unification process by a year. Soldani added that “it does not make sense” to review the trustee area petition “on the cusp” of a unification petition, since that would “necessarily address trustee areas” by making Malibu its own district. Legal counsel Christine Wood representing the City of Malibu said the City “would not be happy” if the process to get special legislation started for unification was delayed, and that the City “want[s] to move forward” with unification.
Framework for the divorce settlement between Malibu and SMMUSD has been in the works for years. In the fall of 2022, both Malibu City Council and the SMMUSD Board of Education approved a “term sheet” for a school district split, with negotiations between the parties based around a tax revenue sharing agreement, an operational agreement and a joint powers agreement. On September 6, 2023, Wood stated that the parties agreed to a formula to monetize the term sheet, and during a November 1, 2023 meeting, Wood added that parties have made “substantive” progress on revenue sharing, and that a joint powers agreement “shouldn’t be difficult” for the sides to achieve.
According to LACCSDO, Shenkman expressed doubts that proposed special legislation to branch Malibu into its own district would take place in 2024 and continued to make the case that the petition should be thoroughly examined regardless of progress in splitting the district. At a December 6, 2023 committee meeting, Shenkman declared that the trustee area voting petition was not linked to the unification petition and should not be delayed.
The upcoming hearings will focus on the impact a recently passed law, AB764, has on the proposal. The new law puts restrictions on redistricting and the creation of district maps.
According to a letter sent to the participants, the hearings will not delve into matters beyond the legality of the proposed maps.
“The purpose of this letter is to respond to your request for clarity on the subject of these hearings,” said the Jan. 3 notification. “As we stated previously, during these two hearings the Committee will focus only on whether the map provided in the SMMUSD TAV Petition conforms to statutory requirements given the recent passage of Assembly Bill 764. These hearings will not focus on matters outside that scope, such as whether there is evidence of racially polarized voting and vote dilution, and whether the SMMUSD TAV Petition furthers the purposes of the California Voting Rights Act (CVRA) or whether the SMMUSD TAV Petition map is an appropriate remedy for vote dilution.”
The maps attached to the districting proposal split SMMUSD into seven districts. Part of Malibu is merged with Santa Monica’s Sunset Park neighborhood to create District 1 and the other half of Malibu is combined with a swath of Santa Monica’s NOMA/Wilmont neighborhoods to create District 3.
Shenkman also currently represents plaintiffs in the case of Pico Neighborhood Association et al. v. City of Santa Monica, which alleges that the city’s at-large voting system unfairly discriminates against Latino voters and violates the CVRA.
The case is under further review after the California Supreme Court overturned an appeals ruling favoring the City, with Justices stating the case should be reheard and re-evaluated under different criteria.
thomas@smdp.com
From <https://smdp.com/2024/01/23/two-hearings-set-to-evaluate-multi-city-voting-districts-for-school-board/>
A powerful California law is reshaping how you vote. Lawyers are making millions off it
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
IMAGE: The invoice sent by Shenkman to the Martinez Unified School District. The invoice totals $34,390.20 but Shenkman requested $30,000 for reimbursement.
Redwood City School District also made the switch from at-large elections to district-elections in 2018.
Before the switch, the school board had one Latina member and four white members.
After elections in 2018 and 2020, ethnic representation on the board remains the same.
Elsewhere, the law has spawned unexpected outcomes.
UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES - NIMBY WINNERS, FAR RIGHT WINNERS
Housing becomes harder to build in many cities, because districts give NIMBYs more leverage to reject unpopular projects, potentially worsening the state’s dire housing crisis, according to research on home permitting. Fewer candidates are running for office in some towns, leading to canceled district elections and disenfranchised voters.
In conservative pockets of California, the CVRA has boosted the fortunes of Christian evangelicals and other hard-right candidates, helping them take over school boards and pass policies that restrict LGBTQ+ rights and ban books about race.
According to experts on election law, at-large systems can make sense in some places. Citywide elections don’t always harm minorities. But the CVRA is a blunt instrument, without a precise test to separate valid claims from invalid ones. Even state judges, who lean heavily Democratic, have sometimes struggled to understand when to apply it. So in practice, plaintiffs and their attorneys are the ones making those calls, pressuring agencies of all shapes and sizes to adopt districts.
“To me, it’s a perfect example of how the one-size-fits-all approach just does not work,” said Randy Groom, the former city manager of Exeter and Visalia. “There are absolutely places where it made a positive difference. But boy, in many other cases, it not only serves no valid purpose, it does damage.”
There are also places where the law’s failure to increase minority representation has exposed barriers faced by those groups that can’t be fixed just by drawing new lines on a map. “I don’t think you can wave a magic wand and take a city to court and fix representation issues automatically,” said Robb Korinke, a data analyst formerly with the California League of Cities, which has argued in court that the law is being misapplied in some towns. Sometimes the true scope of the problem becomes clear only after the CVRA has come to a place and disrupted it.
“It’s throwing a hand grenade into local politics,” he said.
CVRA IN RESPONSE TO EROSION OF VOTERS RIGHT ACT
Proponents say California’s law provides crucial guarantees to minority voters in a world where other protections are crumbling. In the last decade, conservative courts have eroded the power of the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965, one of the key achievements of the Civil Rights Movement.
“As voters across the country can no longer rely on the federal government to uphold these protections, California’s voting rights laws are even more important,” U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla wrote in an opinion article earlier this year, calling the CVRA part of the “long march” toward equality that began with Martin Luther King Jr.
The CVRA was born from a mix of progressive ideals and frustration with Republicans.
It was February 2001. President George W. Bush had just taken office after the Supreme Court intervened to stop a recount in Florida, where GOP officials had purged some Black voters from voter rolls. Newly flush with power, conservatives began to chip away at the federal Voting Rights Act.
“The Supreme Court was turning conservative,” recalled Robert Rubin, a longtime civil rights attorney in San Francisco who ended up co-writing the CVRA. “We had to do something.”
Rubin, an expert on federal voting protections, had spent years in the Deep South, challenging governments that brutally repressed Black people. He worked for the Lawyers’ Committee, a nonprofit civil rights group, and often collaborated with another voting rights crusader, Joaquin Avila, a brilliant Latino attorney who had grown up poor in Compton.
Avila and Rubin were “completely revered” in the legal community, recalled Ruth Greenwood, director of the Election Law Clinic at Harvard Law School. “They’re legends.” They also had close ties to Richard Polanco, then the state Senate’s majority leader and chairman of the California Latino Legislative Caucus. The two Democratic lawyers wrote the text of the CVRA, and Polanco pushed it through the Legislature.
The bill was the first of its kind. At the time, there were no state-level voting rights acts, although many states have passed them since. “California was a trailblazer here,” said Rick Hasen, an election-law expert at UCLA.
The CVRA shares some similarities with the federal VRA. Under both, a minority plaintiff has to prove the existence of “racially polarized voting” — different racial groups voting as blocs in a way that stifles the minority.
But the federal law sets up extra hurdles that are eliminated in the CVRA. With the state law, “It’s easier for plaintiffs to win,” Hasen said. At the same time, the CVRA includes a more generous and straightforward set of financial incentives for winning attorneys. In a recent conversation, Rubin said that he and Avila, who died in 2018, included the fee awards to give the law teeth.
“Attorneys’ fees are about civil rights enforcement,” Rubin said. “We need to do all this work before we can sue. We need to line up the experts. We need to pay them $50,000, $60,000, $100,000.” Without fee awards, he said, worthy cases are too risky to take, so the law becomes ineffectual.
The law’s first decade was relatively sleepy. Rubin and Avila filed the first CVRA lawsuits, suing a range of cities and schools in Southern California and the Central Valley, usually on behalf of Latino clients in areas where Latinos were starkly underrepresented. The targets tended to settle out of court, paying six-figure awards.
That all changed in 2012, when Shenkman sued Palmdale, a 150,000-person city north of Los Angeles that was run by white Republicans despite being 69% Latino and Black. When Shenkman beat the city at trial, a judge forced Palmdale to pay him $4.6 million in fees and expenses.
After that, cities and their lobbyists began pushing for a change in the law that would immunize them against Shenkman-size fee awards. In 2016, the Legislature obliged, adding a provision that allows plaintiffs’ attorneys to collect $30,000 simply by sending a demand letter. If the agency agrees to “voluntarily” adopt districts and pays the attorney, they are immune from a lawsuit.
Proponents described the amendment as a “safe harbor,” saying it would cap the legal expenses of cities “that are making a good-faith effort” to adopt district elections.
But if the safe harbor amendment was supposed to trim the sails of plaintiffs’ attorneys, it failed.
Shenkman started mailing out letters in waves.
Beginning in Southern California and moving north, he encouraged a wide range of local governments to take advantage of the safe harbor. In every letter, he referenced his triumph over Palmdale, noting that the city’s decision to fight his clients ultimately cost them “millions.” He often wrote that he was representing local California members of a Texas-based nonprofit, the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project.
Shenkman typically cited a few past results from local elections — like losses by Latino candidates — to argue that racially polarized voting was taking place. But the letters were short, three or four pages, and mostly legal boilerplate. They lacked detailed evidence of CVRA violations.
Unlike the Palmdale case, which involved a midsize city, he began targeting smaller places as well. Big Bear Lake, a ski town that counts only 3,000 registered voters and is home to almost as many bald eagles as coffee shops, received one of his letters.
So did the Bonita-Sunnyside Fire Protection District, a tiny fire station with one building and two fire engines near San Diego. There are 380 independent fire agencies in California, many of which, like Bonita-Sunnyside, often dispatch crews to help battle wildfires. They can be sued under the CVRA, as Mike Sims was surprised to learn.
“I spoke with a lot of other fire departments across the state, and they said yeah, we got that letter too,” recalled Sims, Bonita’s fire chief.
Mike Sims, fire chief of the Bonita-Sunnyside Fire Protection District. Ariana Drehsler / For The ChronicleGoie Cosca, left, does chores while Sonny Felkins, right, checks the gear and fire engine at the Bonita-Sunnyside fire station after a call. Ariana Drehsler / For The Chronicle
Sims didn’t mind switching to district elections, but he was reluctant to pay the lawyer’s $30,000 fee. For one, he needed the money for capital improvements and equipment costs. The station’s yearly budget is only $3.3 million. But he had another reason to push back on the fee — one that involved a weird coincidence.
In 2018, not long after Shenkman mailed his letter to the fire station, a wildfire broke out in the Los Angeles area, the Woolsey Fire, and Sims sent his main engine north to help battle the blaze. One day, with the flames approaching Malibu, the Bonita crew found themselves in Shenkman’s neighborhood, protecting his office — his home — from destruction. Afterward, Sims emailed someone on Shenkman’s team.
“Our guys saved your building,” Sims said he told them. “Can you waive the fee?”
According to Sims, they responded saying no, but agreed to drop the price by $5,000.
Shenkman said he “vaguely” remembers the incident.
“I know that I did give them a discount,” he said.
Why not waive the fee altogether? “We have to pay our experts,” Shenkman said. “We have to pay our demographics firm.”
By that time, Shenkman’s letters were pushing into the Bay Area.
Some of the letters achieved dramatic, quick results.
Brittni Kiick never considered seeking public office until a friend urged her in 2020 to run for City Council in her East Bay hometown of Livermore, and even then she wasn’t sure. A mixed-race, bisexual mother, Kiick didn’t know if people like her could win. The council had been white and male for a long time. That year it featured “three white men named Bob,” Kiick recalled.
But after receiving a Shenkman letter in 2018, the city switched from at-large to district elections, and Kiick decided to run in the first-ever round of district contests. Getting her message out on Instagram and recruiting high school students to campaign, she won handily, becoming part of a new guard: “We went from three Bobs to three women — two queer women — all in just a year.”
Another huge shift happened on the San Rafael City Schools board in Marin County. Before Shenkman sent the board a letter forcing a switch to districts, three out of five board members were white, even though 70% of students in that system are Latino. Today, three of five on the board are Latino women.
The first of that trio to run was Marina Palma, a grandmother of nine from the city’s Canal neighborhood, which is home to many immigrants from El Salvador, Mexico and Guatemala. Palma is Salvadoran. “It is a community full of hardworking people” and “very resilient,” she said. But for years, they felt their views weren’t represented on the local school board, Palma said.
In 2020, a mentor encouraged Palma to put herself forward. “I don’t really do very well speaking in front of the public, especially in English,” she said. “But he told me that we needed to be represented.” She ran unopposed to represent the newly created District 5, which overlaps with the Canal area.
It sparked a chain reaction. Lucia Martel-Dow, a 46-year-old lawyer and immigrant from Venezuela, said she ran for the school board last year after seeing Palma’s success: “You feel like you can also do it.” Then Carolina Martin, a 50-year-old Mexican immigrant and mother, campaigned in a different district. “Marina, Lucia — they’re women like me,” Martin said. “I think representation really matters.”
The three Latina members of the San Rafael City Schools board of education: Lucia Martel-Dow, Carolina Martin and Marina Palma. They form a majority on the board, and their success shows how the California Voting Rights Act can make local government more representative. Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle
San Rafael is a textbook example of a city ripe for districts, according to research by Asya Magazinnik, a political scientist at the Hertie School in Germany and an expert on the impact of U.S. districting policies. She said districts have the biggest effect on minority representation in places where there are large, clustered minority neighborhoods, like the Canal area. Although it’s a relatively small space — bounded by the San Rafael Canal, San Francisco Bay and Highway 101 — it contains 13,000 people, 90% of whom are Latino, so it’s easy to draw a strongly Latino district there.
If a city lacks these types of features, districts won’t necessarily lift more minorities into public office, Magazinnik said.
To be sure, there are no certainties, only probabilities. People don’t just vote for candidates of their own race, and the Canal is an extreme example of a compact minority neighborhood. Sometimes, districts can help smaller minority communities grow political power, build coalitions and win elections. Other times, however, little or nothing happens once the new lines are drawn.
The Chronicle analysis found wide variation in the law’s impact on diversity.
We examined 45 local boards that switched to districts under legal pressure, mainly from Shenkman. This sample included city councils, school boards and other kinds of local agencies serving an average population of about 100,000.
In that group, 22 of 45 councils and boards became more diverse after the switch to districts, with Latino and Black officials benefiting the most. The number of Latinos doubled. Before the switch, out of 218 officials on those boards, 26 were Latino and 11 were Black. After the switch, 50 were Latino and 14 were Black.
Meanwhile, on the other 23 councils and boards, the move to district voting created no increase in diversity. Sixteen saw no change; seven became whiter.
That group of 23 includes a number of smaller towns and obscure special-purpose boards. Several officials at these agencies said the CVRA put them through an inflexible, expensive process that seemed designed for big cities with large minority populations but didn’t fit their circumstances.
“I really believe the whole thing was a scam,” said Tom Lando, a retired white government employee who serves on the board of the Chico Area Recreation & Park District, which maintains a nature center, athletic fields, a pool and community centers in Chico, a city of 100,000 in Butte County. “Somebody can write a three-page letter with inflammatory comments and collect a check.”
The recreation board received a Shenkman letter in 2021, saying its at-large system was unfair to Latino voters. Annabel Grimm, a Latina of Mexican heritage and the agency’s general manager, was “taken aback” by the allegation.
Annabel Grimm, general manager of the Chico Area Recreation & Park District. Chris Kaufman / Special to the Chronicle
Yes, the board was all white, but as far as she could tell, it wasn’t related to their voting rules. The reason seemed simpler: Being on the board is an unattractive job. Members are paid “a whopping $100 per meeting,” Grimm said. Still, they capitulated to Shenkman, sending him a $30,000 check and switching to district voting. Grimm said she “walked away angry.” For $30,000, “I could buy a brand-new fleet vehicle. I could buy two standing mowers.”
The change to districts has had no impact on the board’s diversity.
“I mean, we had the districts created,” Lando said. “We had three middle-aged white men run, and they all ran unopposed.”
Shenkman said the Chronicle’s data show that the law is achieving major results. “I would challenge anyone to pick out any other kind of reform” that has increased minority representation to this degree “in such a short period of time,” he said.
WHEN MAPS CANNOT BE DRAWN--EVEN RACIAL DISTRIBUTION
There may be another reason that nothing changed in Chico: The city’s Latino voters are pretty evenly spread out across the city. So it wasn’t possible to create a strong Latino district unless the board drew some unnatural, obviously gerrymandered shape on the city map. Other boards face the same situation, like the Martinez school board.
The Martinez education system is small by East Bay standards, with just four elementary schools, one junior high, a single comprehensive high school and 4,000 total students (neighboring Mt. Diablo has 29,000). Skirting the town’s massive oil refinery, you can drive from one elementary school to the other three in about 10 minutes, through well-kept neighborhoods that are more racially integrated than elsewhere in the county. The voters are 75% white and 14% Latino, while Latinos are 31% of the students.
Backpacks hang outside a classroom at John Swett Elementary School in Martinez. Gabrielle Lurie / The Chronicle
The school system has never had a lot of money, but 2017 was particularly lean. There was less cash than ever in its financial reserve, which funds salary increases for teachers and helps offset the high cost of living in the Bay Area. “Our margins were very, very thin,” said Deidre Siguenza, then the board president.
After years of deficit spending, the board had begun making painful cuts, saving $1.3 million by laying off or cutting the hours of teachers and staff. They also delayed a $100,000 investment in new textbooks and closed the libraries in elementary schools two days a week. At the administrative office, funds were so scarce that leaders were mailing letters to parents.
“Our support staff was gone,” remembered Superintendent Helen Rossi. “You want to mail something? You go get the envelope. You go down to the post office and get the postage.”
Martinez school district Superintendent Helen Rossi at John Swett Elementary School in Martinez. Gabrielle Lurie / The Chronicle
In the middle of all that, Shenkman’s letter dropped.
“It sent shock waves through everyone,” recalled Jonathan Wright, then one of the board members, a white labor organizer married to a Latina immigrant.
The letter was spawned by a group of local Democratic activists that included Anamarie Avila Farias, a former Martinez vice mayor and member of the Contra Costa County Board of Education who is now running for state Assembly.
Farias, 50, the granddaughter of Mexican immigrants, grew up in the county and has been the first Latina to serve in a number of public roles there. Despite its large and growing Latino population, “People of color are not holding positions of leadership in our community at the level that we’re growing,” she said. “That’s not right.”
IMAGE Martinez school district Superintendent Helen Rossi, center, walks through John Swett Elementary School in Martinez. Gabrielle Lurie / The ChronicleRossi, center, participates with students as they sing holiday songs in a classroom at John Swett Elementary School in Martinez. Gabrielle Lurie / The Chronicle
Looking for ways to change that, Farias and a coalition of other activists stumbled onto the CVRA in 2017. The group began exploring lawsuits against the Martinez City Council, which was all white, and the school board, which had four white members and one Filipino.
But they didn’t call Shenkman first.
Initially, the activists spoke with Scott Rafferty, a Walnut Creek attorney.
Rafferty, a 67-year-old white lawyer and lifelong Democrat, had never handled a CVRA case, though he would send almost 30 demand letters in the years that followed, representing Latino and Asian clients and sometimes suing. Earlier in his career, he had sued the federal government to expand the voting rights of military members. He didn’t like the idea of bringing a CVRA case against Martinez agencies, he said.
“You can’t draw strong minority districts in Martinez,” Rafferty told the Chronicle. “They’re just too integrated. It’s great to be residentially integrated.”
Later, he ran the numbers, reviewing years of data on Martinez elections and outlining the results in a November 2017 letter to the school board. According to Rafferty’s analysis, there was no clear sign of racially polarized voting in the board’s at-large elections. He also examined how Martinez voted on Proposition 58, the 2016 state ballot measure that allowed bilingual education in schools. If there was racially polarized voting, precincts with more Latinos should have voted yes on Prop. 58 at higher rates, Rafferty wrote. Instead, the percentage of yes votes — 74% citywide — was about the same in white and Latino precincts.
Given this data, the Walnut Creek attorney wrote, switching to districts could do more harm than good in the school system. Its voting population was small to begin with — 22,000. Chopping it into five districts of 4,000 to 5,000 voters each might create districts so tiny as to be powerless, he wrote.
“You can come up with a map that makes it worse than before,” Rafferty told the Chronicle. “There have just been too many cases where (the CVRA) has been abused.”
Farias said the activists stopped talking with Rafferty when they realized he wasn’t a CVRA specialist.
Asked about Rafferty’s critiques, Shenkman said, “Scott Rafferty is not an expert on me or anything else.”
SHENKMAN WINS--BUT LEGAL COSTS RAISE CONCERNS
The Martinez school board initially considered taking Shenkman to court. “The way people like Shenkman have used the CVRA is a perversion of the original intention,” said Wright, the former board member. “It’s been manipulated.” But after researching the CVRA, they realized that he was following the law down to the letter, said Siguenza, who is a trial attorney. No one wanted to risk blasting a hole in the schools’ budget by opposing a lawyer with such a powerful weapon on his side.
In early 2018, the school board sent $30,000 to Shenkman. They also paid $57,500 to their own lawyer and a demographic consultant to deal with Shenkman and draw the maps of the new voting districts, bringing the total tab to almost $90,000.
“The impact of $90,000 on a school district our size is huge,” said Rossi, the superintendent, on a recent weekday in her office. A 62-year-old former math teacher, she had a basket full of snacks atop a nearby cupboard, for parent meetings. She said she buys the cups and snacks at Sam’s Club with her own money because “I don’t want anyone to think I’m charging.”
Asked what she could have done with that $90,000, Rossi reeled off a rapid list. That amount is almost enough to hire a full teacher, she said. It’s also enough to raise the salary of all 220 teachers in the system by one-third of 1%. Or it could keep the school libraries open five days a week instead of three.
The CVRA and Shenkman, she said, are “taking money away from my teachers and students.”
IMAGE: Kevin Shenkman practices for a California Supreme Court hearing on Pico v. Santa Monica, a voting rights case, in front of law professors in San Francisco. Michaela Vatcheva / Special to The Chronicle\
ARGUMENT FOR DISTRICT-ELECTIONS VS. AT LARGE ELECTIONS
Shenkman said that in the big picture, the benefits of district elections make them worth the costs that fall on places like Martinez.
“There is no price to elevating equitable representation,” Farias said, echoing him. “We know better public policy is created when we have diverse dialogue. And this school board desperately needed diversity.”
After switching to districts, the diversity of the Martinez school board has fluctuated. Two white members resigned, and two Filipino members did not seek re-election. A Latina candidate, Yazmin Llamas, ran for a board seat and won. Carlos Melendez was appointed in a mostly white district; he is a registered Republican and a “2nd generation Hispanic American,” he wrote in an email. The board today is three fifths white.
Rossi said she still doesn’t understand why they were targeted under the CVRA. Instead of helping the schools in Martinez, the state law seemed mainly to have empowered a wealthy lawyer in Malibu.
“Mr. Shenkman,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll ever forget that name.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the position of Deidre Siguenza when she received a legal demand letter from Kevin Shenkman.
Alexandria Bordas and Emma Stiefel contributed to this report. This story was reported as part of a partnership between The Chronicle and The Investigative Reporting Program at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
Credits
Reporting by Jason Fagone, Daniel Lempres and Alexandria Bordas. Data by Emma Stiefel. Maps by Todd Trumbull. Editing by Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, Lisa Gartner and Dan Kopf. Visuals editing by Nicole Fruge. Design by Danielle Mollette-Parks and Alex K. Fong. Design, graphics and development by Stephanie Zhu. Copy editing by Michael Mayer. Map data from the City of Jurupa Valley and Redwood City School District.
Originally published on Dec. 21, 2023
KTLA California designates Santa Monica as ‘prohousing’ community
by: Travis Schlepp
Posted: Jan 31, 2024 / 03:13 PM PST
Updated: Jan 31, 2024 / 03:13 PM PST
From <https://ktla.com/news/california/california-designates-santa-monica-as-prohousing-community/>
Who is to blame for AB1287?
AB1237 is a new state law that allows developers additional height and density for including moderate income housing in their project. When stacked on top of low income height bonuses, buildings can reach nearly 20 stories. Projects of this magnitude have already been submitted to the city.
As you can imagine, NIMBY heads are exploding as this is their worst nightmare come true. They have turned their anger towards The Slate of Change Council Members (Mayor Brock, Vice Mayor Negrete, de la Torre and Parra). Consistent with their past behaviors, these electeds they are seeking someone to blame as they refuse to lead us on this subject.
From <https://www.reddit.com/r/SantaMonica/comments/19czafb/who_is_to_blame_for_ab1287/>
REDDIT ON CVRA-LOCAL SANTA MONICA
K-Parks
2 points · 10 days ago
“Scam Artist” is more than just a bit of editorializing in the title here…
At the end of the day you either like the CVRA (California Voters Rights Act) or you don’t like the CVRA.
On net, it seems like district based voting is better than at large voting and so I don’t know why the legislature didn’t just pass a law that required everyone to switch to districts by X date.
As it is our legislature wrote a bad, ambiguous, law and gave a private right of action to figure it out. And now we are supposed to be shocked/upset that some enterprising members of the plaintiffs’ bar figured out how to force districts to switch and make some money along the way?
Biasedsm
1 point · 10 days ago
So you think voting for one council member every four years is better than voting for seven council members every four years? If de la Torre believes he is going to win, why doesn't he just do a ballot initiative?
And we currently have 4 Latinos on the council...tell me how at large elections in Santa Monica limit the opportunities of minorities?
K-Parks
4 points · 10 days ago
I honestly don’t know if districts or at large is a better form of local democracy.
But it seems like the state legislature made the decision that districts are better than at large because they think that districts are more likely to allow for minority candidates to succeed.
Mostly I think that the CVRA was a cop out by the state legislature. They wanted to say they were doing things, but wanted to allow some districts to maybe keep at large positions (probably because of lobbying / political capture) if they weren’t “bad”.
That is a silly system that is going to end up with people gaming the system, creates perverse incentives like these lawsuits, etc.
Basically I think the state legislature should either make bright line rules such as “all governing bodies need to use districts” or “the people in each governing body can decide if they want at large or districts”. Trying to have something in the middle was always going to be a mess.
Biasedsm
1 point · 10 days ago
In SM, we should think about the role money would play if we go to districts. Its easy to imagine developers funding a PAC to get 4 candidates elected. If they thought they could make $1B by changing zoning codes, you can bet investing $1MM in each district would be money well spent.
From <https://www.reddit.com/user/Biasedsm/>
