Return to Goal 1. Restore Democratic Health

Implement District Representation

Democratization, District Elections and Council Size Reduction in Richmond

The City of Richmond has always had at large elections, a system where, theoretically, each candidate has to run for a city council seat across the entire city. The idea behind this system is the notion that a candidate who runs for office and is elected by the electorate at large will more effectively represent the interests of the entire city.

For most of the 20th Century until now Richmond has also had nine council seats regardless of the size of its population. Anyone who has been witness to the meetings of the Richmond City Council knows that it has disintegrated into an embarrassing chaos of personal agendas at the expense of the good of, or the will of the people, in part because nine people feel compelled to posture a position on everything.

The size of and composition of the population of Richmond has ebbed and flowed since the rapid expansion of it population during World War Two. The lines of the communities where endemic poverty and underdevelopment and the concomitant social problems that attend them can be drawn on a map of Richmond and those lines will be the same on the maps from any decade, especially since the late 1960’s.

The ability of those community members who live in the more affluent neighborhoods of the city to have greater access to and more involvement in the political life of Richmond has given the more affluent neighborhoods disproportionately greater representation. The persistence of poverty and discrimination in lower income neighborhoods has a debilitating and discouraging impact on the successful participation of the residents of these neighborhoods in civic life resulting a disproportionate lack of effective representation. Subsequently, Richmond suffers from endemic low voter registration and electoral turn out reinforcing the notion that the people in lower income neighborhoods don’t care therefore the political establishment doesn't’have to pay attention to their interests.

Richmond has over 30 Neighborhood Council districts. The members of the current Council are clustered in just four of those neighborhoods representing just 10,500 residents. The three most populace Neighborhood Council districts; North and East, Belding Woods, and the Iron Triangle have a combined population of 35, 600 and have had virtually no representation on the City Council in recent memory.

The cost of running a citywide campaign for the Richmond City Council has skyrocketed in the past several decades imposing an additional barrier to potential candidates of lesser means. These costs are generally borne by candidates willing to take money from vested interests who have long held sway over how business is conducted in the city. District elections will allow candidates to run in a specific geographic area where the interests of the neighborhood may take precedence over special interests.

The maintenance of this system of representation undermines the fair and democratic involvement and representation of the majority of the residents of the City of Richmond. Thus, the Richmond Progressive Alliance supports the establishment of district representation and a reduction of the current nine seats on the city council to a more manageable size of five or seven. These could both be accomplished by the adoption of an ordinance by the City Council or election initiative.

Richmond’s current population is over 102,000. A five-district system would have 20,400 people per district. A seven-district system would have 14,571 people per district. Having districts of these sizes would allow people to run a more grassroots campaign based on neighborhood issues and ensure the representation of a greater diversity of economic, demographic and neighborhood interests on the City Council. In the Bay Area, San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, San José and Vallejo have district elections. In the outlying areas both Sacramento and Stockton all have district elections.

The challenge of any districting system is designing fair and equitable districts. The designing of political districts is as much art as it is cold political calculation. Questions about community contiguousness and social class mixing become much debated issues. Since several incumbents live near each other, it is unlikely that they would support the adoption of either districts of council size reduction.

Both of these issues have been raised before and even put to a vote. Since that vote, a number of groups have revisited the questions and explored the feasibility of a special election. The stumbling block always seems to be raising enough money to both promote the merits of the proposals, but also to take on the fight of the institutional opposition.

This leaves the strategy of developing enough votes on the council to adopt these ideas by ordinance. In order to accomplish this it takes five votes on the council and a willingness of those on the council who vote for the change to accept that they may be designing their own new electoral challenge of being pitted against a council colleague in a new election.