Ruling threatens Santa Clara election.
Santa Clara will have to change way it elects City Council members
SANTA CLARA >> After a judge’s recent decision that the city’s current at-large elections dilute the vote of Asian-Americans, Santa Clara must change the way its council members are selected in the coming months or the November election may not move forward.
Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Thomas Kuhnle made his decision final — after the June 5 election — in the lawsuit against the city by a group of Asian-Americans who argued that although they make up more than 30 percent of the city’s eligible voters, they are not fairly represented on the council. Not a single Asian-American has won a council seat since the city charter was adopted in 1951.
Now, both sides are set to meet July 9 to begin sorting out how to make the system fair for everyone. The plaintiffs are backed
by the lawyer Robert Rubin, who has a history of winning such cases statewide. Their side would like to see a series of neighborhood districts like those in San Jose, where the city is carved into a series of six or seven neighborhoods and each neighborhood sends a representative to the council. That would make it easier to draw neighborhood lines where Asian-Americans and other minorities would have a chance of sending a representative who looks like them to the council, Rubin said, and ensure that council members are geographically diverse, too.
“You want to have somebody who knows your community,” Rubin said. “You want to know when you drive to work and you run over that pothole that your representative is also running over that pothole on his drive to work.”
But on the other side, attorneys for the city and current members of the council have so far balked at the idea of such districts. Several council members live near each other and could potentially be forced to move or forego running for reelection under a neighborhood district system.
“The cynical among us would say that they’re interested in protecting their incumbency,” Rubin said.
City attorney Brian Doyle, when asked if the city would propose a particular remedy, said in an
email only that the council “is contemplating its alternatives.”
Mayor Lisa Gillmor told the Mercury News recently that she supports the idea of two districts. Gillmor and her allies on the council had backed a two-district ballot measure — with each district using rank choice voting to select three representatives — on the recent June ballot, but voters rejected the idea.
“I want to go back to the voters with a clean measure for two districts that will help diversify our council,” Gillmor said last week.
That idea has already drawn criticism from some of the people who championed Measure A. In a letter to the mayor and council this week, around a dozen residents who support rankchoice voting said Gillmor’s idea “would not solve the problem of minority representation in our city. We are strongly opposed to this proposal.”
Kuhnle, the judge, has given little indication he’ll accept a two-district solution, which Rubin’s side has insisted would still dilute the vote of Asian-Americans.
If the two sides can’t agree, Kuhnle could decide to prevent a November election from moving forward (or at least prevent whatever the results are from being solidified), a move that could have major repercussions. Gillmor is set to be up for reelection in November, as are two other council seats. If the judge intervenes, he could propose his own solution and call a special election for a later date, which would likely leave the current council in place until that time.
“I would rather not speculate as to what the court may do,” Doyle said when asked about the possibility.
Complicating all of this is the fact that one seat on the seven-person council remains vacant after the resignation of former councilman Dominic Caserta, who quit amid allegations of sexual harassment.
The remaining six council members are expected to vote on appointing an applicant to the seat this month for a term to expire in November, when the seat is currently scheduled to be up for election. But if five of them can’t agree on a candidate, the seat could remain open. (Several well-known residents and past candidates — including Hosam Haggag, Kevin Park, Mohammed Nadeem and Chris Stampolis — have applied, but it’s unclear any of them can generate enough support among the bitterly divided council members to win the seat.)
Regardless of what happens, Santa Clara taxpayers are set to be stuck paying millions in legal fees and possible damages for the case. Rubin estimates that the plaintiffs’ side has racked up in the range of $4 million in legal fees, which the city, as the losing party, is set to shoulder. Doyle declined to say exactly what the city has spent on the case so far, but said the “legal fees have been less than a quarter of Mr. Rubin’s.”