While the City of Santa Monica awaits a court ruling on the future of municipal elections, a much delayed proposal to force the local school district into districted voting will get a pair of public hearings in the coming weeks.
At 6 p.m. on January 31, the Los Angeles County Committee on School District Organization (LACCSDO), part of the Los Angeles County Office of Education (LACOE), will host the first meeting at Santa Monica College’s Malibu campus multipurpose room. The second hearing will be held on Feb. 10 at 9:30 a.m. at SMMUSD District Offices, 1717 4th St. Both will focus on a proposal to establish trustee voting areas but no decisions will be made at either meeting.
Malibu attorney Kevin Shenkman submitted the petition on behalf of two residents to establish district based voting for SMMUSD in 2022 saying the at-large system is unfair to minority voters. SMMUSD has strongly opposed the plan to implement districts saying the maps are not legal and that there’s no evidence the current system disenfranchises minority voters.
County officials tabled discussion of the concept after a tentative agreement was reached to split Malibu from Santa Monica creating two entirely distinct school organizations.
Though the district petition and the petition to form a Malibu Unified School District are different actions, County officials and proponents of splitting the district said any effort to establish districts would be moot if Malibu were to separate and in addition, a letter from Dale Larson, an attorney representing SMMUSD in the trustee area petition, stated that SMMUSD could not pursue work needed to achieve unification (the legal term for splitting Malibu into its own district) if it also had to attend to the trustee area petition, and that the trustee area petition should be delayed in order for SMMUSD to “undertake significant public outreach” on unification.
Legal counsel representing SMMUSD and City of Malibu both echoed that statement in recent months, with SMMUSD legal counsel David Soldani saying public hearings on the trustee area petition would delay special legislation in the unification process by a year. Soldani added that “it does not make sense” to review the trustee area petition “on the cusp” of a unification petition, since that would “necessarily address trustee areas” by making Malibu its own district. Legal counsel Christine Wood representing the City of Malibu said the City “would not be happy” if the process to get special legislation started for unification was delayed, and that the City “want[s] to move forward” with unification.
Framework for the divorce settlement between Malibu and SMMUSD has been in the works for years. In the fall of 2022, both Malibu City Council and the SMMUSD Board of Education approved a “term sheet” for a school district split, with negotiations between the parties based around a tax revenue sharing agreement, an operational agreement and a joint powers agreement. On September 6, 2023, Wood stated that the parties agreed to a formula to monetize the term sheet, and during a November 1, 2023 meeting, Wood added that parties have made “substantive” progress on revenue sharing, and that a joint powers agreement “shouldn’t be difficult” for the sides to achieve.
According to LACCSDO, Shenkman expressed doubts that proposed special legislation to branch Malibu into its own district would take place in 2024 and continued to make the case that the petition should be thoroughly examined regardless of progress in splitting the district. At a December 6, 2023 committee meeting, Shenkman declared that the trustee area voting petition was not linked to the unification petition and should not be delayed.
The upcoming hearings will focus on the impact a recently passed law, AB764, has on the proposal. The new law puts restrictions on redistricting and the creation of district maps.
According to a letter sent to the participants, the hearings will not delve into matters beyond the legality of the proposed maps.
“The purpose of this letter is to respond to your request for clarity on the subject of these hearings,” said the Jan. 3 notification. “As we stated previously, during these two hearings the Committee will focus only on whether the map provided in the SMMUSD TAV Petition conforms to statutory requirements given the recent passage of Assembly Bill 764. These hearings will not focus on matters outside that scope, such as whether there is evidence of racially polarized voting and vote dilution, and whether the SMMUSD TAV Petition furthers the purposes of the California Voting Rights Act (CVRA) or whether the SMMUSD TAV Petition map is an appropriate remedy for vote dilution.”
The maps attached to the districting proposal split SMMUSD into seven districts. Part of Malibu is merged with Santa Monica’s Sunset Park neighborhood to create District 1 and the other half of Malibu is combined with a swath of Santa Monica’s NOMA/Wilmont neighborhoods to create District 3.
Shenkman also currently represents plaintiffs in the case of Pico Neighborhood Association et al. v. City of Santa Monica, which alleges that the city’s at-large voting system unfairly discriminates against Latino voters and violates the CVRA. The case is under further review after the California Supreme Court overturned an appeals ruling favoring the City, with Justices stating the case should be reheard and re-evaluated under different criteria.