With all councilmembers in attendance, the Clovis City Council held the first meeting of the month on Monday, Nov. 2. Several items were discussed and voted on during the meeting including the consideration of district-based elections and the design of a city flag.
The first item discussed by the council was a resolution to consider the conversion of district-based elections beginning with an evaluation of the 2020 census and March 2021 election data. The resolution would create a schedule for the conversion of elections from their current format to district-based.
Meaning that if found in public interest, the elections for the city of Clovis will become district-based starting with the 2022 November election. Currently council members are elected at-large by registered voters who are residents of the city of Clovis.
Under the California Voting Rights Act, at-large voting is only permissible if there is no evidence of racially polarized voting in the city’s elections. Based on the last election’s data the city currently does not have any evidence of racially polarized voting.
According to the data, the current demographic makeup of the city council reasonably reflects the demographics of the city.
The data will be evaluated by mid 2021 and if the data shows evidence of racially polarized voting then by September or October 2021 the council will pass a resolution of intent to convert to district-based elections. There will be required public hearings in order to fully complete the processes of conversion to district-based elections.
The council received five emails from the public, two of those emails were in opposition to the resolution and the other three were in favor.
Councilmember Lynne Ashbeck asked about who had the ability of raising the issue of district-based elections. She was told that in order to raise the issue there has to be a letter sent to the city from a protected group who is a voter within the city of Clovis.
“I think it is really important for the public to know that this was not initiated by the council,” Ashbeck said. “I feel like the way we are approaching this, says, ‘let us look at the data, let us see if it’s happening,’ because if it’s happening, of course this is not something we want.”
Councilmember Bob Whalen said that it makes sense to look at the date, to see if it is indeed needed.
“I think our responsibility is to thoughtfully consider the data that we’ll be gathering as a result of the census,” Whalen said. “I think that this resolution that has set out the timeline for us, certainly makes a lot of sense.”
The council voted unanimously to pass the resolution and start the process to see if the elections become district-based.
The next item on the agenda was the introduction of the ordinance on campaign contribution limits.
Proposed in the October 12 council meeting, the ordinance will formally set no limit on campaign contributions for any candidate. However, the city will still have a candidate self-imposed $1 per resident of the city as a contribution limit.
The state’s limit to campaign contributions is set at $4,700 per individual, but it leaves each local jurisdiction to adopt the state’s limit or establish their own limits on contributions. The city of Clovis has established no limits on campaign contributions.
The ordinance will leave the current self-imposed $1 contribution limit, but will formally set no limit for campaign contributions.
Councilmember Whalen expressed his concern with the current no limit, saying that someone can come in and disregard the self-imposed limit to make a larger contribution to a campaign.
“There have been occasions in which large organizations or very wealthy people have decided that they were going to make large expenditures within a smaller market in order to control the messaging in a campaign,” Whalen said. “My concern is that if we were to handcuff ourselves and limited ourselves to $4,700…then an outside force can come in with hundreds of thousands of dollars in a smaller market like the city of Clovis and control the messaging.”
The resolution was passed unanimously by the city council.
Another item discussed during the meeting was the consideration of the design of an official flag for the city of Clovis.
Mayor Drew Bessinger had about 12 concept flags for the city council to look at during the meeting in order to vote on the best three flags. All the flags incorporated the city logo of the cowboy with the golden star in a blue or white background.
Councilmember Ashbeck said that she wanted the colors to be in consistency with those officially used by the city of Clovis. She also mentioned that there should be a place in the flag for the year the city was incorporated.
Councilmember Vong Mouanoutoua said he wanted Bronco Billy to be the main focus on the flag.
Councilmember Whalen said he would like something that is not too busy and incorporates what the city is about.
Mayor Bessinger said that they will come back and revisit the best flags and either vote on them or have a social media contest to see what the community prefers the most.
The decision by the council was to move forward and continue working on the design of the flag.
COVID-19 Workshop
City Manager Luke Serpa updated the city council on the COVID-19 status of the city. Serpa said that we are well below the summer peak, but that the city and county trended upwards in the past few weeks. However, he also reported that there were no new deaths reported in the city of Clovis in the last week.
Serpa mentioned that hospitalizations due to COVID-19 are consistent with the trends of the county, but we remain in the red substantial tier. He said that the new numbers for the county will not come out on Tuesday, but rather on Wednesday.
For the county the Equity Metric had come down in the last few weeks to 6.8 percent and that the current daily cases in the county were at 6.7 per every 100 thousand people. The positive rate for the county was also down to 5.0 percent.
Council Comments
During the council comments councilmember Whalen had some words regarding the elections happening Tuesday, Nov. 3.
“Regardless of what happens tomorrow, when you turn on your faucet, you will have clean water; when you flush your toilet, the waste will leave; when you put your garbage out, it will be picked up and when you dial 911 in the city of Clovis, you will receive a response quickly,” Whalen said. “I think that our shared experience has been that it seems to be a lot of noise, because what is really most important, is what happens here at the local level.”