City District-Election Initiative Qualifies for Ballot Spot

For the sixth time in 18 years, a measure to change the San Diego City Charter and allow district-only elections for the eight council seats has qualified for the Nov. 8 ballot, the city clerk’s office announced Monday.

Supporters of the controversial change submitted 60,000 petition signatures to qualify the measure, and a sampling of the names showed that 49,724 were valid--a comfortable margin over the 40,292 minimum needed, said Mike Haas, the city’s election officer.

Ruth Duemler, a spokeswoman for Neighborhoods for District Elections, the group sponsoring the measure, said she expects developers and the building industry to lead the opposition against district-only elections.

“They seem to control the city with campaign contributions and they’re the ones that opposed it before when it came up on the ballot,” said Duemler.

Section 10 of the City Charter now allows for district-only elections during the June primary to determine the top two candidates from each council jurisdiction. A candidate can win outright in the district-only primary by garnering a majority of the votes.

If he fails, however, the contest is thrown open to the entire city in November, and all San Diegans are allowed to vote on who will represent the council district.

Duemler said such citywide votes have run up the cost of local politics, giving well-heeled developers an advantage over community groups in dealing with elected officials who are looking for campaign contributions. The result, she argued, is that council members are more sensitive to developers’ demands than to the concerns of the neighborhoods in their districts.

“Their pocketbooks are what they think about first,” said Duemler.

Other critics of citywide elections claim that the contests are stacked against minorities, especially Hispanics, who have failed to win a council seat outright unless first appointed to fill a vacancy.

“The Hispanic community is frozen out in San Diego,” said attorney Michael Aguirre, who lost a hotly contested council election last year to Bob Filner in District 8. “If there are no district elections, you’ll never see a Hispanic voted outright. A Hispanic will never get elected outright in citywide elections in San Diego.”

In February, Aguirre filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking to overturn the citywide elections based on civil-rights considerations. He said Monday that the case has been stayed pending the outcome of the November vote on the proposed charter change.

Others, including Mayor Maureen O’Connor, have argued that citywide elections are good because they require council members to make decisions based on what is good for San Diego at large.

“If they were only accountable to people in their district, the theory is that they would be more concerned about the needs and problems with their district than general citywide issues,” said Paul Downey, O’Connor’s press secretary.

Downey said, however, that O’Connor has no reservations about the question being put to voters.

So far, San Diegans have opted to keep the citywide voting process, despite five attempts in the last 18 years to make elections district-only. The last time was in 1981, when a district-only measure failed narrowly.

Duemler said Monday that she expects her group to conduct a low-keyed campaign that will use human billboards and speakers to community organizations to push the district-only measure. Gathering the signatures just to put the proposed charter change on the ballot cost the group $22,000 of the $30,000 it raised from about 500 donors, said Duemler.

Neighborhoods for District Elections is not the only group considering whether to change citywide elections. The city’s Charter Review Commission, headed by former state Appeal Court Judge Edward Butler, will also consider the topic and may submit its own proposal for the ballot.

Of the nation’s 10 largest cities, only San Diego and Detroit do not elect council members in district-only contests.