The city council has directed their staff to look into the cost of hiring a consultant to help them draw up the district boundaries needed to comply with the by district elections to be held in 2010.  At issue is only two seats come open in 2010.  Scott Mann and John Denver’s seats are open for the 2010 election.  Unique to a FIRST council in a new city, that's the law and it was based on total overall election results.  The bottom 2 of 5, in a by district council, only serve 2 years.  It’s highly possible that districts would be drawn now, based on the 2000 census plus tax roles, etc., and naturally fall into separate districts without any gerimandering.  Through numbering them as district 2 and 4 we could vote by district, and only those two districts  would be allowed to vote for those two seats.

In 2010 we will also have a new census, so before the 2012 elections where Kuenzi, Twyman  and Edgerton are up for re-election, we’ll have a new population totals and new districts would be drawn again.  If we use geographic districts based on population then Twyman and Kuenzi or even Edgerton, may all be running for the same district, and districts 1, 3 and 5 would vote.

By law, the city council in establishing the boundaries of the districts, may give consideration to the following factors: 

(1) topography, (2) geography, (3) cohesiveness, contiguity, integrity, and compactness of territory, and (4) community of interests of the districts.

We also were not given the choice of whether to elect a mayor independent of the city council.  Under general law incorporation we could have had an elected mayor.  The way we are set up now, the council selects the mayor and we rely heavily on the city manager to do the real city work.

Scott Mann weighed in on last nights Menifee Matters at blogtalkradio.com.  Hosted by Therese Daniels [archived at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/menifeevalleyradio], that we also were not aware of the real options of how we could be governed, since the options were not presented to us at the time of the June election.   The fact is there were 5 forms of government available to us, but only LAFCOs recommendation made it to the ballot.

Cityhood passed, but by law we could have chosen any one of the following forms of government for our new city.  Not only did we not get the choice of FROM district, where candidates must reside in a given district, but the entire city votes for all districts, but we also didn’t get a choice of whether we have an elected mayor or not.  I think those are both viable methods for Menifee, and they were not even on the ballot.

(a) By districts – where only the district votes for their home district candidate
(b) From districts – where the city votes for candidates from 5 districts
(c) By districts, with an elective mayor – Where we elect mayor separate from council

(d) From districts , with an elective mayor – where we elect mayor separate from council

Scott has agreed to answer questions for us on our blog talk radio show after the holiday.  So on Dec 3^rd at 7pm we will have him available to answer any questions.  If you have some ideas on how to set up the districts, and or feel strongly about wanting the FROM district option as well, we should definitely let the city council know how you feel.  

Last changed: Nov 20 2008 at 1:53 PM

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