BY DAVE PRICE
Daily Post Editor
The town of Los Altos has fallen for a scam that will cost taxpayers at least $30,000.
A Malibu attorney, Kevin Shenkman, sent the city a letter threatening to sue if the city wasn’t divided up into districts for electing council members. He cited a law that says if he doesn’t sue, he is entitled to a $30,000 fee from the city.
The idea behind the law is laudable. Minorities in some cities are unable to elect their own representative in at-large elections, but will have a greater chance of success if the city is broken down into smaller districts.
In Los Altos, the largest minority group is Asians, and they live throughout the city, not in one area. And the council has had a number of Asian-American members, such as Councilwoman Lynette Lee Eng.
So if Shenkman were to sue, he wouldn’t win.
But city officials are so risk averse, they’d rather pay him his $30,000 and switch the city from at-large to district elections.
Nobody on council had the guts to call Shenkman’s bluff.
The Palo Alto Unified School District got the same threat from another lawyer in 2018. The board tossed it in the trash. That lawyer hasn’t sued the school district.
When a city switches to district elections, the losers are the public. In the past, any resident of Los Altos could select all five council members over a two-year period. With district voting, a citizen would only get to vote on a candidate for one seat. That’s an 80% reduction in a citizen’s voting rights. So much for democracy. And instead of voting for council members every two years, all citizens would have to wait four years to vote for their council member.
Editor Dave Price’s column appears on Mondays in the Post.
Dave rags on City councils for this, but the real culprit is stacked state laws that make these cases incredibly hard for cities to win, and cities know it, so they settle. The guilty party here is Sacramento, which runs in horror from anything even remotely related to “DEI,” so don’t expect reform anytime soon. But the right place to call out for spineless isn’t Los Altos, it’s Marc Berman and Josh Becker.
Hey I had a bill on this issue this year and I couldn’t get it heard (was an end of session bill). Will be bringing it back next year
$30,000 to the Malibu attorney. $35,000 for outside legal services. $50,000 estimated for demographer.
It sure screwed up Menlo Park. Now nothing gets done.
Nothing gets done in Los Altos anyway, so it’ll just be the status quo. Business as usual.