The city of San Luis Obispo will maintain its at-large election model and not adopt city council districts after reaching a settlement with an attorney who’d accused it of violating the California Voting Rights Act.
SLO Mayor Erica Stewart told New Times that both parties in the negotiations, which date back to 2019, ultimately agreed that a by-district election model wouldn’t improve minority representation on the City Council due to the city’s demographics.
“One-size-fits-all just doesn’t work,” Stewart said of the by-district model. “My desire is to help increase diversity, equity, and inclusion in this community. If districts would have done that, I would’ve been 100 percent behind it. It just didn’t make sense.”
According to the written settlement agreement, SLO’s Latino population makes up 18.6 percent of the city—but that population is spread out across the city in a manner that makes creating a district to empower it next to impossible. Only seven of the city’s 705 census blocks have a majority Latino population, totaling 82 people.
“In some communities, you have a Latinx community, or a Black neighborhood, or an Asian or Indian neighborhood. There are some communities where that’s how it is. We don’t have that based on our demographic studies,” Stewart said.
SLO couldn’t even create a district where the Latino population exceeds 30 percent of the population, per the settlement. Any attempt to carve out a Latino-influenced district would likely violate gerrymandering laws in turn, according to City Attorney Christine Dietrick.
“You would have to have the craziest looking district that sort of gerrymanders solely based on race in order to capture the Latino population,” Dietrick said.
Stewart added that splitting SLO into districts could have the opposite effect of empowering minority voices—it could diminish them. She said that the at-large system allows residents to gain broad-based support across the entire community.
“You can pull together in the city at large and activate around an issue,” Stewart said. “If we didn’t have that ability to come together, then you’re diluting the races even more.”
Under the settlement, SLO will pay Santa Barbara-based lawyer Robert Goodman—who represented resident Jamie Gomez in the Voting Rights Act claim—$17,257 in fees. Goodman’s office did not respond to a request for comment before press time.
Dietrick called the settlement a reasonable outcome to the case. It’s one that numerous other cities throughout the state have failed to reach. Litigation threats from the California Voting Rights Act Project—the larger campaign pushing the by-district model—spurred localities like Paso Robles, Arroyo Grande, and Grover Beach to change systems.
“The city was in no way suggesting that this might not be the right tool under the right circumstance,” Dietrick said. “Our analytics early on were very comprehensive and clearly demonstrated that this was not only not going to advance our diversity, equity, and inclusion objectives, but in fact be contrary to them.”
This article appears in Jan 5-15, 2023.