BY DAVE PRICE
Daily Post Editor
The fad in national politics is to talk about how democracy is dying, or how one candidate or the other is going to end democracy.
I don’t know about that, but if you want to see a democracy on its deathbed, visit Menlo Park.
It used to be that a November council race would draw four, five or six candidates for two or three openings on council. Not bad for a city of 33,000 people.
Everybody had a say
Then, in 2017, the city threw out its method of electing city council members. Previously, every voter had a say in electing everyone on council. In one year, voters would elect three candidates and two years later, the same voters would elect two candidates. Everybody had a say. And everybody could run.
A lawyer with a client he wouldn’t identify claimed that system was unfair because blacks and Latinos in the east end of town couldn’t win a citywide election. He threatened to sue on behalf of this mysterious client. So the council, without knowing who the aggrieved party might be, switched from at-large voting to five districts.
Voters found their choices were drastically reduced in the 2018 election. They could only elect one person for their district, and they had no say in the other seats on council. Their rights to select a council were reduced by 80%.
Fewer candidates
It also made it harder to run for council. In the past, any voter could enter the race, regardless of where they lived. But under district voting, you’re only able to run for the seat for your district, and you have to wait until the election for that seat, which might be as long as 3½ years.
The number of people running for council has plummeted since district voting began.
In 2018, there were eight candidates seeking the three seats on council. In 2020, the number of candidates had dwindled to four. And this year we have just three candidates — and one of them, Greg Conlon, is 91 years old. He’s running against Jennifer Wise, who, when our reporter first interviewed her, wasn’t aware of the well-publicized plan by Russian businessman Vitaly Yusufov to build a 50-story skyscraper on the Sunset magazine site. Conlon and Wise are running in District 5, the district to the west of town that includes Sharon Park. The other candidate is Jeff Schmidt, an environmentalist who is unopposed for District 3, which includes Linfield Oaks.
And that’s it. Not much of a race.
Menlo Park faces some big challenges just ahead including the redevelopment of the SRI site, the aforementioned skyscraper plan and yet another attempt to rejuvenate downtown after the city was duped by developers in 2013 who gobbled up most of the available office space in the first few weeks — space that was supposed to last for years.
Menlo Park’s best, brightest?
I have my doubts that this new system of selecting council members will result in the best, most capable candidates. It doesn’t take many votes to win a council district election. A soccer club could endorse a candidate and that would change the outcome of a race.
Los Altos is foolishly going down the same road as Menlo Park. The Palo Alto Unified School District, on the other hand, ignored such a threat and was never sued.
Before succumbing to pressure from somebody threatening to sue, carefully consider the pros and cons of district elections.
Dave Price is editor of the Daily Post.
There’s one sleazebag lawyer in Southern California making a cottage industry out of these shakedowns, but Dave P ought to do his homework. The real culprit here is state laws and courts that make that guy’s lawsuits very hard for cities to win, with painful penalties when they lose, and cities all know it. Lambasting city councils as spineless might produce a cheap headline, but they’re just as stuck as voters are, while Dave gives Sacramento a pass. Instead his spotlight should be on Josh Becker and Marc Berman, who complain a lot about Trump instead of taking on a Democracy problem that they own right here in California.
Actually all a city has to do to stop these lawsuit threats is switch to a charter city. The law that forces these districts won’t apply, and the Legislature can’t do anything about it.
We always get the dumbest people on city council. They make bad decisions because they rarely challenge the opinions of the city manager and city attorney. When billionaire Karen Grove became the puppet master of three of them, it only got worse.