WCCUSD experience shows what happens when an agency doesn’t respond to a demand for district elections quickly
Photo: The current WCCUSD school board with an appointed student trustee and Superintendent Cheryl Cotton. Taken from a recording of a school board meeting
El Cerrito residents who suspect the city gave up too easily when it agreed to transition to district elections need only look as far as the West Contra Costa Unified School District to see just how badly it can go if a public entity doesn’t react quickly.
According to a 2019 article from Richmond Confidential, the school district ended up getting sued before it relented and switched to district elections. According to the article, the school district was forced to pay attorneys fees for both sides for an estimated total of $538,600. Had the school district taken the matter to trial, rather than reaching a settlement, the cost would have been even higher.
And, the publication reported, the battle had “beleaguered board meetings for about a year.”
El Cerrito’s move to district elections was triggered when it received a letter from an attorney in March alleging the city’s at-large system violates the California Voting Rights Act. The intent of the act is to make sure the voting power of minority communities is not diluted by at-large elections. The letter does not identify any El Cerrito resident or residents concerned about the current system, only saying the attorney represents “a prospective plaintiff in a potential lawsuit.”
The city says it does not think it is out of compliance. But City Attorney Sky Woodruff told the council that no city has ever successfully fought a “demand letter,” and losing a legal battle is costly.
Instead, the city chose to follow a law that caps its cost to reimburse the legal and research fees for the challenge to roughly $40,000 if certain requirements are met. The city had to declare it was transitioning to districts within 45 days of receiving the letter and then complete the process within 90 days of that April 21 declaration.
In El Cerrito, the current City Council members are already scattered across the city. Under the district map the council approved July 7, four of the five districts already have a council member living in them. The current council members include an African-American woman, an Asian woman, a Filipino man, a white man, and a white woman.
The transition has prompted more puzzlement than enthusiasm, although many residents gamely tried their hand at using an online tool to draw possible district maps.
The circumstances under which WCCUSD found itself forced to transition to district elections were very different.
West Contra Costa Unified encompasses five diverse cities – El Cerrito, Richmond, San Pablo, Pinole, and Hercules, plus various unincorporated areas such as Kensington. According to Census Reporter, its population is 256,000 while El Cerrito’s is about 26,000.
Some WCCUSD residents had been pushing for district elections as far back as 2008, but unaware of the voting act, they didn’t invoke it, and their efforts were unsuccessful, according to the Richmond Confidential coverage.
In January 2018, Walnut Creek attorney Scott Rafferty sent WCCUSD a letter demanding a move to district elections. In his letter, Rafferty noted that at that point three of the five school board members were white people from El Cerrito.
But confusion and a desire by some of the board members to let voters decide led the school board to fail to declare its intention to move to district elections within the 45 days that would have limited its financial risk.
Rafferty moved ahead with a lawsuit with Linda Ruiz-Lozito, one of the residents who had pushed for district elections years earlier, as his client.
The school district eventually settled with Rafferty and Ruiz-Lozito but only after months of struggling to settle on a map for the new system. As part of the settlement, all five school board seats were up for election using the new areas in 2020, with some of the terms only lasting two years so that the elections eventually would be staggered.
The current West Contra Costa Unified school board includes two Hispanic women, one Hispanic man, one African-American woman, and one white woman.
However, the racial makeup of the school board had already begun to shift during the November 2018 election, even before the settlement was reached. In addition, when the map was created, it intentionally kept together an area with a high concentration of black voters and one with a high concentration of Hispanic voters. While the current board is diverse, looking at it in terms of race, the members weren’t elected in the districts the map would have predicted. The current makeup of the board could largely be due to representation on the board catching up with changing demographics, and candidates being able to avoid the time and money needed to campaign across the entire school district.
See also Map, schedule selected for El Cerrito district elections
Read the original Richmond Confidential coverage here:
For more information about elections in El Cerrito and the West Contra Costa Unified School District, including links to where financial disclosure forms are posted and where nomination papers will be posted see the El Cerrito Wire elections page
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