West Sacramento illegally divided Latino neighborhood in district map, judge rules

The city of West Sacramento illegally divided a historically Latino and low-income community into separate City Council districts, a Yolo County judge ruled on July 7.

Judge Samuel McAdam ruled last week that the district map the West Sacramento City Council adopted on May 18, which divided Broderick and Bryte into separate districts, violated the 2019 California Fair Maps Act. The act requires cities to review census information in the process of redistricting, keeping communities with common interests in the same district to ensure fair representation on the local level.

On Wednesday, West Sacramento agreed to move ahead with a district map drawn by the organization Neighborhood Elections Now, a plaintiff in the lawsuit against the city. Under the new map, the predominantly Latino and low-income residents of Broderick and Bryte will share a single City Council representative.

“We feel vindicated,” said María Grijalva, the founder of the Latino Information and Resource Network and the main plaintiff in the lawsuit against the city. “We felt the city had let us down… the judge was very sympathetic to the disadvantaged areas of Broderick and Bryte.”

Grijalva initially filed a complaint against the city in October 2021, representing the Latino Information and Resource Network alongside the Broderick Area Homeowners Association and Neighborhood Elections Now, according to the City of West Sacramento website. Together, the plaintiffs argued that the city’s failure to switch from an at-large council to district council elections violated the California Voting Rights Act.

In January 2022, the West Sacramento City Council adopted a resolution of intention to transition the city to district-based elections, beginning with the November 2022 election. As part of this process, the city proposed a district map, which the plaintiffs argued diluted the voting power of Broderick and Bryte by dividing its residents into separate districts.

McAdam’s ruling in favor of the plaintiffs sent a message to cities in the state that they could no longer “walk all over everything,” said Scott Rafferty, who is the executive director of Neighborhood Elections Now and the lawyer who officially filed the complaint against the city.

“The Fair Maps Act is nice on paper, but nobody’s ever enforced it before,” Rafferty said. “It’s very hard to prove, but we proved it. It really is a landmark case in that respect. They really did not respect neighborhoods, and they did it for purely political reasons. It’s a big victory.”

The alternative map proposed by the plaintiffs, under which the Broderick and Bryte community shares a representative in the City Council, is compliant with the Fair Maps Act, McAdam ruled.

The City Council unanimously moved not to appeal the court’s ruling, and decided after a meeting with the plaintiffs on July 13 to forge ahead with the plaintiffs’ map, according to the City of West Sacramento website.

“We won, they lost,” Rafferty said, “It’s really that simple, but it has a very powerful message to other cities in the state.”

This story was originally published July 14, 2022 at 5:14 PM.