On City Council Districts

So Myers says there’s an organized effort afoot to bring big-city style Council Districts to our community:

It appears that SOL leadership decided that bringing districts to the mix would somehow damage the seeming invincibility of incumbents.

To bring electoral districts to Santa Clarita would require a citizen referendum that would require about 15,000 signatures, or about 80 percent of the total actual voting pool in the 2010 election. In addition to this seemingly insurmountable task, any referendum would need to reverse the referendum that formed the current system that passed by nearly two-thirds in 1987.

Myers may be a perpetually negative Nelly and would like to downplay what this means (and he may be right) but I want to toss the idea around a little bit.

Say SOL was successful and ultimately, Santa Clarita was divided up into districts with or without an elected mayor position. Perhaps five, or seven or even nine different voting districts. How would the City work then? How would our views of the City change?

Well -regardless of who got elected- I predict almost immediately you’d see some of the efficiencies we have in local government end. You’d no longer see the City acting quickly to resolve problems, enhance services, or build new infrastructure. A new Newhall Community Center, conceived of and executed within a 2 or 3 year period? Gone. A unified City Council + Staff pushing relentlessly to fund a Cross Valley Connector-style road that serves the entire Santa Clarita Valley? Gone, or severely degraded. On these and many other issues, you’d probably see a divided City Council because, guess what? What’s good for the SCV may not be good for one member’s individual district, and vice versa. And district based Councilmembers can be expected to do what voters in their district want them to do, which may be at odds with what’s best for the entire community.

But that, in a way, would solve another problem we have with our City: mistrust and dogged opposition by community groups that feel no one represents them and their interests at City Hall. By giving each district their own Councilmember, we’d gunk up the work of local government, but we’d have a more democratic local government. For example, residents of the McBean neighborhoods concerned about Mayo expansion would have a real voice at City Hall who was looking out for their interests alone (traffic and aesthetics), not the entire valley’s interests (healthcare delivery and accessibility). A Latino councilmember representing east Newhall might not be so enthused about aggressively building a Cross Valley Connector for the north valley when constituents in her district have to walk through mud and dirt because there’s no sidewalks on Newhall Avenue.

All those coalition groups that pop up in the news now and then, like the old Calgrove Coalition (formed to fight the Avenues project) or the neighbors who argued relentlessly (and to no avail) for the City to shut off Benz Road would truly have an advocate at City Hall, someone who could cut deals with other Councilmembers in exchange for votes. They too, would feel more represented at City Hall.

So it breaks down like that. Under a District Council system, the City of Santa Clarita would become much less focused on big-picture items like the CVC or the stupid Whitaker-Bermite development deal. It’d become much less efficient in carrying out tasks that require valley-wide planning and coordination. Our Councilmembers, in contrast, would become much more selfish, spending most of their time trying to keep voters in their Districts happy rather than thinking of the City as a whole. But that would mean the City would be, as a whole, more representative of its population, more democratic.

That’s the paradox of districting and it’s as old as American representative democracy itself.