Santa Clarita Officials Consider Direct Election of Town’s Mayor : Politics: City leaders are split over a plan to scrap the current system, in which the post rotates among council members.

Santa Clarita voters may get a chance to elect their mayor directly, replacing the current system under which the post rotates among City Council members.

The council told city staff workers Tuesday to study the idea and report back by the beginning of next year.

Supporters of the idea said it would make the mayor more accountable to the voters, but reaction from some members of the council ranged from lukewarm to flatly opposed.

“I can’t support having a directly-elected mayor at all,” Mayor Jan Heidt said during the meeting. “Part of your being on this council is taking your turn at being mayor. Sometimes it’s fun, sometimes it’s not.”

In arguing against the proposal, Heidt and other speakers at Tuesday night’s meeting invoked negative images of political jockeying in “a city south of us,” referring to Los Angeles and its current mayoral campaign.

“I don’t think that this is an idea whose time has come just yet,” said Councilwoman Jo Anne Darcy, who was the third mayor of the young city of 113,400 people.

But Darcy and Heidt were outvoted by the other three council members, who favored leaving the issue up to the voters in a ballot initiative.

“Whatever the people want to do is OK with me,” Councilman George Pederson said before discussion of the item began.

Pederson was himself involved last year in a minor dispute over the order in which council members take turns as mayor. Under the city’s rules, council members are rotated into one-year mayoral terms, with those who got the most votes in early elections going first and newly elected members going to the end of the line.

Under that system, Pederson, who won a seat on the council last year, would not have had a turn at being mayor before his council term expired. A resolution was reached when Darcy, who had previously served a term as mayor, gave Pederson her spot in the rotation.

“The way we choose a mayor is pretty political, and there’s no way of getting around it,” said Councilwoman Jill Klajic, who placed the elected-mayor proposal on the agenda. “If we elected our mayor . . . it would put the politics with the people where it belongs, not here with us.”

Klajic said after the council meeting that she would favor a directly-elected, full-time mayor who did not wield significantly more power than the current mayor or have a separate staff.

As of last year, 140 of the 469 cities in the state had directly-elected mayors, said Debbie Thornton, spokeswoman for the League of California Cities. Most large cities in the state have directly-elected mayors, including the 10 most populous.

At the same time, Thornton said, relatively tiny Monterey, with only 30,000 people, also has a directly-elected mayor.

Escondido, a city of 115,000 in San Diego County, elected its first mayor last year after more than a century of incorporation.

“It gives the community the feeling that they are directly in control of who they want to represent them as a spokesperson for the community,” said Escondido Mayor Jerry Harmon, who said his duties have not changed much and that the change was implemented at little cost to the city.

Huntington Beach Mayor Grace Winchell, whose city of 185,000 is the largest in California that does not elect its mayor directly, said Huntington Beach has never considered switching to a direct election.

“I can see a mayor being elected by the people having an ego that could cause divisiveness or fractures in the team,” Winchell said. “And believe me, there are enough things out there that cause fractures without us creating them.”