City Council Preview for April 4 - Part 2

Yesterday we looked at changes in animal services and the ethical and moral issues surrounding the fact that Mayor Voigts works for the Mayor of Irvine who works for Lake Forest’s law firm. Today we look at two more issues coming up Tuesday night.

DISTRICT ELECTIONS (Item #11)

Quite some time ago, former Councilman Adam Nick suggested that we adopt the district system for electing Council members. His idea was defeated, but events in the greater community suggest that now we should move to a district system.

A new system enacted this year allows a city to move to a district system (4, 6, or 8 voting districts) and decide whether or not the Mayor should be elected city-wide. To do this, the City must establish the voting districts and go through a series of steps to insure that the process is transparent. The costs of doing this are between $20,000 to $40,000.

According to the Electoral Knowledge Network the district system has the following advantages -

• "provide voters with strong constituency representation because each voter has a single, easily identifiable, district representative;
• encourage constituency service by providing voters with an easily identifiable 'ombudsman';
• maximise accountability because a single representative can be held responsible and can be re-elected or defeated in the next election;
• ensure geographic representation."

The major advantage of a district vs. city-wide system is to create greater representation of the entire population of a city so that no one group of residents can dominate the Council. This is particularly important when a city has distinct geographic areas with distinct demographics.

Lake Forest is one of those types of cities. We have the Foothill and Portola areas that are geographically separated from the rest of the city and that have a homogeneous population of white upper middle class people living in single family homes. In the middle of the city (Between the 241 and Muirlands) we have a more heterogeneous population, though still predominately white and well educated, and in the southwestern parts of the City we have a higher proportion of Hispanics and generally lower socioeconomic status, as well as a concentration of seniors.

We should be moving toward district elections and my preference is for 6 districts along with a Mayor elected city-wide.

FWIW - several cities have 7 districts (Anaheim,. Garden Grove, Newport Beach) and even more have 5 districts (Santa Ana, Seal Beach, Buena Park, San Juan Capistrano, Fullerton). Some of these cities are among our largest cities (Santa Ana, Anaheim, Garden Grove), but others are not (Buena Park, San Juan Capistrano, Newport Beach). Several cities have city-wide elections of the Mayor. These include Garden Grove, Irvine, Santa Ana, Westminster, Anaheim, Orange)

CAMPAIGN FINANCE (Item #12)

Campaign finance is a big issue in Lake Forest and elsewhere. Here in Lake Forest, 3 members of the Council rely on contributions from developers and from companies doing business with the City or seeking to do business with the City. Council members Voigts, Robinson, and Hamilton put little of their own money into campaigns and in the past few years received more than $200,000 from these “vested” or “special interest” groups.

Until I was elected in 2014, every single election in the history of the City was won by the person who spent the most money. The person who came in 2nd was the person who spent the second most money. Etc. etc. In 2014 I was not one of the top money spenders but I came in #2 in votes. In 2016 Leah Basile was not one of the top money spenders, but she came in #1. So while it’s not impossible to get elected without buckets full of special interest money, it is certainly very very difficult and only happened twice in our city's 25 year history.

Staff reviewed legislation about campaign financing. Some examples include limiting contributions (cash or loans) made by any person to any candidate for any election. The limits vary from $300 (Irvine), $450 (Dana Point), $500 (San Juan, Fountain Valley, Huntington Beach), to $1000 (Laguna Niguel, Orange). To do this, a City must show that it is in the city’s “interest in combatting corruption and the appearance of corruption” (Buckley v Valeo). That would be pretty easy to do in the case of Lake Forest due to the “large contributions from a small number of special interests” and “preferential treatment of and access to government officials by contributors” (Buckley v Valeo).

It would also be easy to prohibit companies with city contracts from contributing to campaigns by including this prohibition in their contract.

My colleagues who rely on special interest money argue that at least people know that they take the money (Of course, until I started bringing up this issue, they never revealed the money connection when voting, so people didn't know what was really happening). If we prohibit the practice of allowing them to take the money, they argue, the money will go "underground" and now we won't know that they take the money and who gives it or how much they took. This argument implicitly accepts the idea that money is given to influence the vote, something that all my three colleagues deny happens. In any event, while some money may go "underground", some money will not. No one makes laws thinking that the law by itself will solve the problem. Just because it's against the law to murder doesn't mean people will stop murdering. But laws do stop some people from disobeying the laws, and to that extent, some of the corruption will be stopped.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Jim Gardner is on the City Council for Lake Forest. You can check him out on LinkedIn and/or Facebook and you can share your thoughts about the City at Lake Forest Town Square on Facebook. His comments are not meant to reflect official City Policy.

Dr. Gardner has office hours every Tuesday from 4 pm to 6 pm at the City Hall. In addition, he holds a Town Hall meeting every quarter. The next meeting will be in May.