All Costa Mesa Sanitary District board members fall into different divisions in new voting-area map

Unless any of them moves, none of the current Costa Mesa Sanitary District board members will have to run against another for reelection under the agency’s new district-based election system.

Despite speculation from some community members, officials said this week that keeping incumbents from having to face off in a future election wasn’t a consideration when crafting the voting-area boundaries the board approved July 26.

The adopted map — chosen unanimously from a field of seven options — splits the sanitary district’s service area into five divisions with populations ranging from 22,728 to 23,552.

Starting in 2020, residents in each region will elect one board member from their area to represent them. Historically, board members have been chosen at large — with residents able to vote for any candidate, regardless of where they live — but a Malibu-based lawyer who threatened to sue the sanitary district this year alleged that method diluted the electoral power of Latinos and therefore violated the California Voting Rights Act of 2001.

On the ballot in 2020 will be the seats for Division 2, home to board Vice President Jim Ferryman, and Division 4, where board member Art Perry lives.

The other board members — President Mike Scheafer, Bob Ooten and Arlene Schafer — hail from Divisions 1, 3 and 5, respectively. They are up for reelection this year but would not have to run in those districts until 2022.

Scheafer said he supported the revised map because he found the relatively even population spread appealing and felt it would do a good job accounting for local growth since the 2010 U.S. Census, which was the basis for the district’s population information.

He said he and his board colleagues were not involved in drawing the boundaries and that “there was no ploy” to strategically station themselves in separate districts.

“We accepted a map that was given to us by one of the advisory committee members,” he said Tuesday. “We didn’t draw that map.”

The first version of what became the chosen voting-area map was submitted by Phil Marsh, a member of the sanitary district’s citizens advisory committee. However, officials said the original configuration wasn’t considered viable because it created voting divisions with too great a difference in population.

Still, sanitary district staff “believed it was a good map for the board and the [committee] to consider, but needed minor amendments,” district General Manager Scott Carroll wrote in an email Monday.

Staff instructed the district’s demographer to make it “viable by making [as] few changes to the boundaries as possible to minimize the spread, but keep the integrity of the original plan,” Carroll wrote.

Those changes lowered the biggest population spread among the divisions from 12.58% to 3.55%.

The demographer — Deborah Diep, director of the Center for Demographic Research — said protecting incumbency wasn’t a factor when reconfiguring the map.

“The revisions were made based on the differences of each division with the target/ideal population,” she wrote in an email Tuesday.

Since last week’s board vote, Carroll said the district revised the numbering for voting areas 1, 2 and 5. The division originally called No. 5 is now No. 1, the original 1 is now 2 and the original 2 is now 5.

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