Santa Paula, Fillmore Also Study Voter Shifts

In the heavily Latino Santa Clara Valley, where minorities form a majority of the population, the recent court ruling challenging at-large elections has sparked interest in forming voting districts.

Latino leaders in both Fillmore and Santa Paula say that minorities have not been adequately represented in city government and on school boards, and would benefit from having their power concentrated into one or two voting blocs.

Fillmore, which is about 55% Latino, has had only two Latinos elected to the City Council and none presently serve on it. Santa Paula, which has about the same concentration of Latinos, has had Latinos on the council since 1968 but rarely more than one in any given year.

“It would certainly be advantageous,” said Ernie Morales, former mayor of Fillmore, which in 1985 became the first U.S. city to adopt English as its official language. “Any city that has the kind of numbers we have should have at least one or two Latino representatives on any policy-making board.”

But many city officials in the two farming communities say that carving out Latino districts would be divisive and would not give minorities any more voting power than they already have.

“In a town as small as ours, we need to be working together in a cohesive manner and this has a tendency to divide,” Santa Paula Mayor Carl Barringer said.

Fillmore Mayor Gary Creagle said: “Hispanics are the majority. The problem is that we historically haven’t had a lot of Hispanics voting. I don’t think you can say people aren’t represented adequately if they don’t partake in the election process.”

The ruling July 27 by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, however, stated that it was the electoral process itself that had prevented more minority candidates from being elected. “Low voter registration and turnout levels are indicative of lingering effects of past discrimination,” wrote the court, in ruling that at-large elections in the northern California city of Watsonville were biased against Latino voters.

Although Latino leaders in Fillmore and Santa Paula agreed that minorities need to vote in greater numbers than they have been, they also said that holding district elections would inspire more Latinos to go to the polls.

In Santa Paula’s primarily Latino east end, for instance, residents would be encouraged to vote if they were assured of electing a representative from their neighborhood.

“They just don’t get the services they should be getting, compared to the rest of the city,” said city Planning Commissioner Bob Borrego. “You have to live there to see that.”

Still, city officials said they would prefer to govern their communities as a whole, rather than see one neighborhood competing against another.

“We don’t want it to be a question of fighting for certain things in certain areas,” Barringer said. “We’re for the overall development of Santa Paula in the best way.”