Major change coming to how Clovis residents decide City Council races. Here are the details
The creation of new districts marks a major step in Clovis' reluctant shift from at-large to district-based elections. The five-person City Council selected the map at a public hearing Tuesday night out of more than dozen options.
Map 502, as it's called, mostly keeps neighborhoods intact and resembles the Clovis Unified School District's trustee areas, said Jeff Tilton, senior consultant for National Demographics Corporation.
Besides District 1 in southwest Clovis, which has the largest Latino population at 44%, the remaining four areas each comprise about 50% white residents. District 3, located in the southeast, has a larger proportion of the city's Asian-American population, at about 22%.
Most council members favored options that had clear boundaries along main roads and did not separate neighborhoods. With strong support from Mayor Vong Mouanoutoua, the council chose Map 502 since Districts 1 and 2 are divided at Clovis Avenue, where Old Town Clovis is situated.
'I think it gives two council members to our most struggling areas, and more is better when it comes to representation,' said Councilmember Drew Bessinger.
Mouanoutoua said Map 502 put Old Town and southern Clovis in the same districts, and 'Old Town keeps the south alive and valuable,' he said.
Mayor Pro Tem Diane Pearce cast the lone vote in favor of Map 508 because it maintained an 'at-large feel' for the city, with each of the areas having a boundary at or near Shaw Avenue. 'The core of Clovis is met in every single piece of those districts,' she said.
The current members of the City Council will complete their full terms serving the community at-large. In future elections, candidates must reside in the district they run to represent.
No incumbent council members live in District 1, Mouanoutoua told The Bee. Two council members, Matt Basgall and Pearce, live in District 4, according to their 2022 election forms.
With roughly 125,000 residents, Clovis is one of the last California cities of its size to change to a district voting system. The transition started after Malibu-based law firm Shenkman & Hughes threatened in August to sue the city for its at-large system, alleging it potentially discriminated against communities of color by denying them an equal opportunity to elect officials to represent them.
The five-member council reluctantly voted last October to replace the voting system, saying they would not spend millions of dollars on a lawsuit they were likely to lose.
'All of us as council members didn't like the idea of having to go to districts, but this is where we're at, and let's make the best of it,' Basgall said last week. 'The concern is that it becomes territorial, 'I just concentrate on my area,' as opposed to the entire city.'
Bessinger told The Bee that he thinks the district voting will make it easier for candidates to win because they only need to focus on one geographic area rather than the whole city.
'When I ran for City Council in 2017, I didn't have any development money, I didn't have any union money. I got out there, I knocked on probably 2,500 doors city-wide, and I got 68% of the vote,' said Bessinger. 'Assuming that this is the case, the districts will be obviously smaller. Somebody could run a one-person campaign out of their garage.'
At the early stages of the mapping process, the council also considered dividing the city into four districts with a mayor elected by voters from the whole city. Council members ultimately abandoned the idea and retained the mayor rotation within the City Council.
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