Windsor Town Council advances plan for district elections, with at-large contest for mayor

Mayor Dominic Foppoli rubbed his eyes and shook his head in noticeable exhaustion.

He was attending a fourth special meeting in five weeks Monday night in Windsor, where frustration is now a common sight among council members.

The topic of the meetings? How to change the way elections are conducted in Sonoma County’s fourth-largest city - and defuse a threatened lawsuit by ensuring that Latino voters have an undiluted voice in picking their municipal representatives.

For nearly two hours, council members, residents and consultants debated ways to draw the town’s first voting districts, replacing a 25-?year-old system of electing members of the Town Council through a citywide vote.

The same eight residents in attendance on Monday have been familiar faces at most of the previous meetings in the past two months on redistricting, with the town working on a switch that must come by April 3 to avoid a threatened lawsuit.

Beyond that date, the town would be vulnerable to a legal challenge stemming from a complaint of voter disenfranchisement lodged last year by a Southern California attorney - the same lawyer who two years ago instigated similar election shifts by the city of Santa Rosa and the city’s public school system.

For Windsor, Sonoma County’s youngest city, the process of switching from an at-large voting system has been nothing short of a whirlwind, with some of the special meetings running over three hours. Concerns have touched on how to balance district populations, preserve ?communities of interest and keep census blocks whole.

Analysts from a San Francisco consulting firm have outlined a series of ways the town of 27,000 might be carved up into voting districts.

On Monday, Foppoli said the Town Council was situated to make its final decision to jump to district elections and settle on the voting districts that would underlie that move. It’s a transition that council members and some voters have embraced begrudgingly.

“I know we are all exhausted at this point and are ready to make final decisions but we need to just keep moving forward,” Foppoli said.

A key element of the deliberation has been whether the town would be better off with districts for each of its five council seats, or with four districts and an at-large contest every two years for the mayor, which is now a appointed post rotated annually among incumbents.

Foppoli, who started as mayor late last year, favored the four-district scenario, raising concern over the risk of competing provincial interests if the council were to be drawn strictly from five districts.

“My concern is because we are so small I don’t want to break us up into five districts because representatives may inadvertently start representing their own district,” he said.

Hours into Monday’s meeting, a majority of the council followed Foppoli’s lead and endorsed pursuing a four-district plan with an at-large mayor.

“I advocated for four districts plus an at-large mayor, because more representation is better,” said Mike Wall, a Windsor resident who previously ran for a seat on the council. “More votes every four years is better and a mayor with two-year terms means we could theoretically have three votes every four years.”

Before the decision, Councilwoman Esther Lemus voiced concern that four districts would still leave room to dilute the voting power of ?Latino residents.

“My reasoning is that I am looking at the very nature of this lawsuit and the whole nature of it is voter dilution,” Lemus said on Monday night. “My opinion is that the at-large mayor defeats the whole purpose of what we are doing in the first place and recreates the whole problem.”

Foppoli, Councilwoman Deb Fudge and Councilman Sam Salmon formed the majority in favor of four districts, with Councilman Bruce Okrepkie absent.

The endorsed plan will now be the focus of public meetings over the next several weeks dedicated to refining the district boundaries before a formal decision, which could come as soon as March 20.

The tentative electoral change has occupied much of the town council’s attention since Windsor received a letter in October from Malibu attorney Kevin Shenkman. He urged the council to switch to district-style elections or face a lawsuit. The letter contended that Windsor’s at-large voting system diluted the voting power of Latino residents, therefore violating the state’s Voting Rights Act.

Council members weighed fighting the lawsuit in December, but ultimately decided to forgo the risk of losing millions of dollars in litigation and instead have worked since then on a switch to district-based elections.

Resident Bob Kruse has attended most of the meetings, and on Monday emphasized his concerns about keeping neighborhoods and other areas of common interest in tact in the same district.

“In my area near the Town Green we have to put up with event parking and the disproportionate number of rental units” said Kruse, 31. “We need really good representation for that area because of all of the proposed development and potential hotels.”

A decision in favor of district elections later this month would initiate the switch for the 2020 council elections.

Consultants from San Francisco-based Q2 Data and Research were hired by the town to assist in the process, at an estimated cost of $50,000, the town reported Monday.

Wall, the former council candidate, echoed a sentiment shared by many at the meeting, reminding council members that achieving some consensus in the process was paramount.

“We don’t want to do this and we are all being forced to do this,” Wall said. “But the more decisive we can be the better. Consistency is the message.”

The next meeting on redistricting is set for 6 p.m. Wednesday at Town Hall.

You can reach Staff Writer Alexandria Bordas at 707-521-5337 or alexandria.bordas@pressdemocrat.com.