Residents to Discuss Vacant Council Seat Ordinance

 A meeting organized by Moorpark residents to discuss an ordinance scheduled to come before City Council Wednesday will take place at 7 p.m. Tuesday. The ordinance residents will discuss pertains to how the city will go about replacing vacant seats when a mayor or city council member leaves office mid term.

Tim McGarry and Patty Cooper had lived in Moorpark less than a month when they decided to attend the first city council meeting of the year. They weren’t familiar with the city’s politics and didn’t know what was on the agenda before they got there. They certainly didn’t know they’d land in the middle of one of the council’s few contentious meetings.

A proposal before the council would leave it up to the city council whether to hold a special election or to appoint someone to the position until the next regular election. The mayor and all the council members, with the exception of Roseann Mikos, appeared to support the ordinance, which went through a first reading at the council’s December meeting.

Mikos, who supports having a special election to fill vacant seats came to the meeting with a compromise. Under her proposal, residents would have the option of collecting signatures to force a special election. If enough signatures were not collected, the choice would revert back to the council. Under the compromise ordinance, 10 percent of Moorpark’s registered voters’ signatures would have to be collected within 30 days—numbers hammered out at the meeting—in order to force the election.

Council members were ready to compromise, but the people weren’t.  The four people in the audience who had registered to speak all voiced their opposition to what they saw as losing their right to vote.  The city also received emails in opposition to changing the code to allow the council to decide how to fill the seats.

McGarry and Cooper, though they didn’t speak, also found fault with leaving it to the council and decided to learn more about it, research the ordinance and learn and share with others in the city by organizing two evening meetings where residents could talk about the issue.

At the first of the two meetings last week, about 10 people huddled in a hallway of the Arroyo Vista Recreation Center. The residents present all opposed a change in policy from the previous ordinance, which guaranteed the right to vote for new council members.

“Since the age I was 6, I was in the Boy Scouts and . . . they constantly told us, ‘You’re American and you have the right to choose. Your vote counts. Every vote is counted,’ ” said McGarry.

“That really stuck with me and, especially in today’s climate with the National Defense Authorization Act and certain parts of the Stop Online Piracy Act . . . all these things are really restricting our rights as Americans,” he said.

Those present at the meeting also included two council members—David Pollock and Mark Van Dam—and parks and recreation commissioner Tom Pflaumer.

“I’d rather vote my representative in rather than have them appointed and have to react upon the discretion of or the disappointment of the chosen person,” said Pflaumer. “Can you put a price tag on your right to vote? More or less, that’s the bottom line.

Pflaumer went on to say that while he trusts the current city council, he worries that in the future someone could take advantage of the appointment option.

“Somewhere down the road somebody could put a lap dog in there. It would be a crack to open up the dam,” he said.

Neither Van Dam nor Pollock announced which way they’ll be voting, but both provided factual information in terms of the history of the issue and ordinance.

Pollock did say residents’ reactions weren’t what council members expected.

“I don’t think any of us understood the depth of the feeling on this issue and it’s something worth reconsidering,” he said.

The city council will take up the issue again at its meeting on Wednesday, to take place 7 p.m. at City Hall, 799 Moorpark Ave. The ordinance is the first action/discussion item on the agenda.

Tonight’s residents’ meeting, which is open to the community, is scheduled for 7 to 8:30 p.m. at Arroyo Vista Park. Participants will meet in front of the recreation center. For more information, contact McCarry and Cooper by email at righttovoteinmoorpark@gmail.com.