The Clovis City Council this week reluctantly voted to switch from at-large to local district elections, a change that council members said would divide residents and endanger their “Clovis way of life.”
The city was one of the last of its size to still use at-large voting to elect the members of the five-person City Council, but Clovis leaders this week said they would not fight what would have almost certainly been a losing legal battle.
“We’ve been thinking and working on this for four years and here we are,” Mayor Lynne Ashbeck said.
Malibu-based law firm Shenkman & Hughes sent a letter to the city of Clovis in August threatening a lawsuit on behalf of Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, saying the at-large system violates the California Voting Rights Act of 2001.
The council voted 4-1 on Monday to vote by districts starting in November 2026. Councilmember Vong Mouanoutoua, who said he was insulted by the letter, was the lone dissenting vote.
Mouanoutoua, who is Asian, said minorities in Clovis don’t vote for candidates based solely on race but rather based on the “Clovis way of life,” a saying that’s common among residents often proud of the local schools and community.
“They were smart and looking for people who uphold the Clovis way of life,” he said of voters in the most recent elections.
A city of about 125,000, Clovis has avoided district elections for significantly longer than many others in the central San Joaquin Valley.
For example, the city of Merced got a similar letter, albeit from a different law firm, a decade ago when it was made up of about 80,000.
The Clovis Unified School District last year moved from at-large to district elections following a legal threat from Shenkman & Hughes. One longtime school trustee recently described the change as “the worst thing that’s happened to our district.”
The law firm argues, as the lawsuits commonly go, that the at-large system continues to elect a governing board that does not represent its people, especially by ethnicity.
The law firm cites two recent hopefuls of Latino descent, Paulo Soares and Martin Salas, who ran for election in the city of Clovis and lost their bids. Though the city is more than 30% Latino, the representation has historically been sparse, the letter says.
Councilmember Diane Pearce said the letter’s examples were not serious candidates, saying they didn’t raise money or participate in debates.
“We are being divided against our will and are really being held hostage to the budgetary challenges we are currently facing,” she said.
The current City Council is made up of two white women, two white men and an Asian man.
Ex-Councilmember Jose Flores, who was Latino and a retired police officer, departed in 2022 after being first elected to the Clovis City Council in 1999, and last served as mayor. Clovis’s mayor is appointed by a vote of the council.
The firm’s letter also cites a case Clovis lost last year because it failed to build low income housing, saying the lack of diversity in the council adds to the problem. The city has made very little progress on more of the housing.
Shenkman & Hughes has made a name for itself pushing the issue with cities all over the state and winning.
“If we can’t win, because no one has, it would irresponsible of us to waste several million dollars on a battle we can’t win,” Councilmember Drew Bessinger said.
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