Council Will Consider Mandatory Election Ordinances

10 a.m. Jan. 2: Correction—A correction was made to the timeline at the bottom of the article.

After about an hour and a half of discussion at its Wednesday night City Council meeting, Moorpark still doesn’t have a valid ordinance to guide the process of filling a midterm vacancy of a mayoral or city council seat—but this is good news to the majority of the residents who spoke at the meeting.

Only one of the 16 speakers supported an ordinance proposed at a Dec. 7 meeting that would left it up to the city council whether to hold an election or appoint someone to a vacant seat. The others were all in favor of having a compulsory election to fill the seats.

And the city council listened.

By the end of Wednesday night’s discussion on the issue, the council instructed city staff, with a four to zero vote (Councilmember Keith Millhouse was absent), to draft an ordinance with two options that would both require an election to fill vacated seats.

“One of the options will be to always call a special election, whether it be for the office of mayor or city council, with no interim appointment,” explained Pollock. “And then the second ordinance would allow a nuance where we could call a special election for the office of mayor or city council but in the case of the city council we have the ability to make an interim appointment.”

The requested ordinances will closely resemble the city’s current policy. An ordinance that’s been in place since 2008 (and general policy that’s been in place for more than two decades) also calls for a mandatory election, but the law had to be updated because state codes to which it referred and with which it complied had changed.

The council will get a first look at the newly penned ordinance proposals at its next meeting, to take place at 7 p.m. Feb. 1.

Timeline

• The city's current ordinance (which now must be changed to comply with state law), which requires an election to fill seats that were vacated midterm was written in 1986.
• In 2008, the ordinance was unsuccessfully challenged when it was proposed the city repeal it altogether in order to eliminate the guaranteed election.
• In December, when the city council first addressed the updating issue, the mayor and all the city council members except Roseann Mikos supported rewriting the ordinance to not only make the changes to bring it in line with state code, but to give the city council the freedom to decide whether to hold an election to fill the seat or appoint someone to the vacated office, citing concerns of financial burden. Mikos supported simply making the required changes but leaving the mandatory election in place.

• At the next meeting, which took place on Jan. 4, Mikos proposed a compromise. Her proposed ordinance would allow for residents to petition to require an election. If enough signatures were not collected within a specified period of time, the decision of whether to hold an election or appoint someone would revert to the council. At the meeting, the council discussed different numbers and agreed 10 percent of Moorpark’s registered voters (roughly 18,500 people) would have to sign the petition within 30 days. The proposal was unanimously approved and the meeting adjourned with a required second reading planned for the Jan. 18 meeting. 

• At the Jan. 18 meeting, two council members, David Pollock and Roseann Mikos requested the council reconsider its vote for the compromise. In asking for the reconsideration, both Mikos and Pollock said they had spoken to many Moorpark residents who do not support the compromise and instead favor a mandatory election to fill vacant seats.

Mikos explained that any member of the council who votes with the majority can ask the council to reconsider a vote.

“Sometimes the procedures of the council can seem very esoteric—and sometimes they are—but with any kind of vote … if somebody who voted in the majority, after they’ve voted, has second thoughts and thinks they might want to change their vote, they can either ask to reconsider right at the same meeting if they think of it soon enough, which none of us did, or before the next regular meeting occurs,” she said.

The council voted to approve the reconsideration and, after much discussion agreed to instruct city staff to pen ordinances containing language requiring the election.

• City staff will present the options at the Feb. 1 meeting.