Judge Rules All 5 Mission Viejo Councilors Must Be up for Election in November

The entire Mission Viejo City Council will be up for election this November, after a judge issued a tentative ruling June 28 in a lawsuit between the city and a resident.

While three councilors—Ed Sachs, Greg Raths, and Mayor Wendy Bucknam—were already up for re-election in November, Mission Viejo resident Michael Schlesinger sued the city, arguing that councilors Trish Kelley and Brian Goodell should also appear on the ballot.

The city disagreed, submitting a hearing request for Orange County Superior Court Judge Walter Schwarm to dismiss the case as meritless—which Schwarm also denied on June 28.

Bill Curley, the city attorney, did not object to Schwarm’s decision at the hearing.

However, Curley said with the final decision still pending, the city may consider designating some seats in the 2022 elections for four-year terms and some for six-year terms—before each seat returns to the regular four years in the following elections.

This would stagger elections to avoid the rare occasion of having all five councilors on the same ballot again.

Curley told The Epoch Times that the city is considering these four- and six-year terms to “open opportunities up more” to encourage grassroots or less-funded candidates to run.

“We are trying to make elections welcoming to potential candidates rather than limit them to the wealthier folks,” Curley said. “A two-term candidacy campaign will cost as much as a four-year term campaign, but the short 2-year term may cause lower-income or small fund candidates to choose not to try to run. That’s opposed to the city’s goal of opening up election opportunities.”

Schlesinger’s legal team, however, filed an ex-parte application June 28 seeking to block the city from implementing a six-year term, and a request that the court requires the city to stagger two- and four-year terms.

The court will hold a hearing on June 29 to discuss the length of council terms for the next election.

“We believe that the proper method is to stagger four-year and two-year terms, with the two-year terms elected every four years thereafter,” Lee Fink, an attorney for Schlesinger, told The Epoch Times. “We do not believe that there is any basis to have a six-year term.”

Schlesinger’s lawsuit, filed back in April, claimed all five seats should be up for election in 2022—following a 2018 lawsuit settlement in which the city agreed to change its voting model to cumulative voting to allow each voter to cast up to five ballots, which can go to any of the city’s five council seats.

The 2018 lawsuit, which the Southwest Voter Registration and Education Project won against Mission Viejo, claimed the city’s at-large voting system—in which all voters could vote for all seats in an election—disenfranchised Latino voters and violated the California Voting Rights Act.

As a solution, the cumulative model was to begin at the November 2020 elections, which elected councilors to two-year terms instead of the city’s regular four-year terms.

However, after several setbacks with getting state approval for changing to cumulative voting, the city announced in July 2021 that it will instead move to a district-based election system in November 2022. The district-based system divides a city into several districts, each represented by one councilor to be elected only by voters within the district.

Meanwhile, the council extended all councilors’ terms from two to four years, meaning that Bucknam, Sachs, and Raths—elected in 2018—would appear on the ballot in 2022 instead of 2020, and that Kelley and Goodell—elected in 2020—won’t be up for reelection until 2024.

This extension prompted Schlesinger to file his suit to force Kelley and Goodell onto the election ballot.

Schlesinger also filed a quo warranto—a special form of legal request to test whether a person has the legitimacy to hold his or her current public office—with the state in May to remove Sachs, Raths, and Bucknum from office ahead of the November elections.

Schlesinger argued that the councilors do not legally hold office because they were elected to two-year terms in 2018 and never re-elected in 2020.

All three councilors were served a summons and complaint, and their responses are due to be filed July 11.