Hollister’s Mickie Luna, a councilwoman and longtime advocate for Latino voting rights, said a certain district is next in line for targeted efforts to create electoral districts.
That would be the San Benito High School District, she said.
“I don’t know that they’re doing anything,” Luna said of high school district officials. “If they don’t, the community will.”
Luna made her comments following the hospital board’s vote last week to change from at-large elections to five district seats. Luna and others with the county chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens had been in discussions with the San Benito Health Care District about moving to district elections when a lawsuit from former District Attorney John Sarsfield’s firm forced officials’ hands.
Luna mentioned San Benito High School as the next priority but she talked about seeking district seats for the Hollister School District as well.
Both the San Benito High School and Hollister School districts elect respective, five-member boards through at-large systems in which all seats are open to every eligible citizen. On top of the schools, Luna expressed interest in looking at other types of districts, too.
Advocates for district-based elections believe they protect minority ethnic groups’ ability to elect people of their own choosing. Luna pointed out how in the case of the current hospital board, two directors live in San Juan Bautista and the other three live relatively close to one another.
“That is not representation of this community,” Luna told the Free Lance.
High school district Board President Ray Rodriguez, serving his second four-year term as a trustee, responded to Luna’s comments about looking at SBHS next and said he was speaking only on his own behalf.
Rodriguez said he would be concerned about the potential cost of a demographer study and contended current trustees are distributed fairly, geographically, throughout the county.
He said there have been no board discussions about district elections to this point.
“I really don’t have anything against it,” he said of district elections. “I totally buy into guaranteeing a say across the district and across different demographics and how that can become very uneven, very quickly, in an at-large type of setting.”
Rodriguez, however, said splitting into five districts is more complicated than matching up with the county board boundaries, which is basically what the hospital board directors ended up doing. He mentioned how areas such as San Juan and Aromas aren’t included in the San Benito High district.
“Some people would very quickly say do it like the supervisors,” he said, “but our district doesn’t match the county.”
