Why Burbank Should Elect Its City Council by District

On November 3 you will be asked whether Burbank should elect its City Council by district instead of city-wide. We think it should, and the clearest reason has nothing to do with maps. It changes who a council member has to answer to when the hard item reaches the desk.

It is two measures, not one, and you need both

Today all five members of the Burbank City Council are elected at large — every voter in the city votes on every seat. Changing that takes two votes on your ballot, and this is the part most people will miss.

Measure CD is the one that does the work. It divides Burbank into five districts on Map 130, each electing its own council member. Districts 2 and 4 would vote first, in November 2028; Districts 1, 3 and 5 follow in 2030.

Measure CC is the one that makes it legal. Burbank’s Charter currently requires council members to be elected “at large,” and a Charter can only be changed by a vote of the people. Until that clause comes out, districts cannot exist no matter how many people vote for them.

This is not our reading of it. It is what the City Attorney tells you in the official impartial analysis of Measure CD: if the voters approve it, “it cannot go into effect unless the voters also approve the Charter amendments as proposed in Measure CC.”

The full history, the settlement and the court record are on our Gutierrez v. City of Burbank page. The short of it: rather than spend years and public money defending at-large elections, the City agreed to put the question to the voters.

The real argument is about who you owe

A city-wide race is expensive. To win one you must persuade the entire city, and that is very hard to do without organized help — the kind that comes with a mailing list, a phone bank and a bloc of votes attached.

That is exactly what makes a city-wide endorsement so valuable in Burbank, and so difficult to turn down. Six City employee organizations will offer to interview or endorse every candidate for the Council this year, and their pay, overtime, staffing levels and contracts are what that Council will spend the next four years voting on. We wrote to the candidates about that separately, in our open letter on endorsements and overtime.

A member elected by district answers first to the neighborhoods in that district, and can be returned to office by the people who live there. A member elected at large depends on whoever can mobilize across the whole city. Neither is corrupt. They are simply different debts, owed to different people, and they get called in at different moments.

It also lowers the cost of running

When you campaign in one part of town instead of all of it, a race costs a fraction as much. You do not need to be wealthy, and you do not need to already be well known. You need to be willing to knock on your neighbors’ doors. That opens the Council to people who want to serve rather than to whoever can raise the most money, and it means the person representing your streets actually lives on them.

Burbank already does this — for the schools

This is not an experiment. The Burbank Board of Education already elects by trustee area. Every argument now being made about the City Council was made about the school board, and Burbank adopted it, and the schools did not fall over. The City Council is the last body in this city still elected the old way.

Where we stand, and what part we played

The Burbank Republican Party supports by-district elections for the Burbank City Council. We are not neutral on this and we will not pretend to be.

We also had a hand in how it came about. We had reached the view that Burbank’s at-large system needed to change, and we helped identify counsel with the experience to take that question on. We claim no more than that. The case was brought by a Burbank resident in his own name, the work of seeing it through was his and his attorneys’, and the credit belongs to them. We say it here only because readers are entitled to know where we sat before they weigh what we write.

One thing worth saying plainly: this is a question about how Burbank elects its Council, not about which party wins. District elections do not favor us. They favor whoever the neighborhood actually wants, which is the point.

Do not let the letters cost you your vote

There are three Burbank measures on this ballot and every one of them begins with the letter C: Measure C, Measure CC and Measure CD. Two of them are two-letter codes that differ by a single character.

We have been asked whether that was done to confuse people. It was not, and we would rather tell you the truth than score a cheap point. The City of Burbank does not choose these letters. Both resolutions the Council adopted in July say the measure “shall be designated by letter by the Los Angeles County Registrar of Voters,” and the City’s own draft ballot language leaves the letter as a blank line because Burbank had no idea at the time what it would be.

So nobody set out to muddle you. It is muddling all the same, and a voter who mixes up one letter votes the opposite of what they meant. Here is the whole ballot, in the order you will see it, with where we stand.

That is the easiest way to keep it straight: Measure C is the tax, and the two-letter measures are about how you elect your City Council. We will have more to say about Measure C separately — it is a general tax, and what the City may spend it on is not what the campaign for it describes.

One thing we will not hide from you

Measure CD contains a clause, Section 5, that lets the City Council amend or repeal the district ordinance after the 2030 election — by its own vote, without returning to the voters. And Measure CC does something broader: it takes the method of electing your City Council out of the Charter, where only a vote of the people can change it, and puts it into an ordinance, which the Council can change on its own. There is no sunset on that. It is permanent.

We had first intended to recommend a Yes on both. Then we read the settlement agreement that produced these measures — the whole court file is on our Gutierrez v. City of Burbank page — and three of its terms gave us pause. The lawsuit was dismissed with prejudice within five court days of signing, so it is finished. The plaintiff and his attorneys agreed not to bring, or to help anyone else bring, another voting-rights case against the City. And the City’s only obligation was to put these measures on the ballot — not to pass them, and nothing is owed if they fail.

Our support for district elections has not changed and will not. What we are still weighing is whether the Charter change is a price worth paying for them, when the safeguard we would have relied on afterwards — the threat of another voting-rights case — has been contracted away. We would rather tell you we are still thinking than tell you something we are not sure of. We will publish our position on Measure CC here, and we will show our reasoning, before ballots arrive in October.

Then show up

This is on the same November ballot as everything else, and Burbank has a habit of not voting on the things that cost it the most. In June, 40,264 registered Burbank voters did not vote on the sales tax that takes effect on October 1 — more than three times the number it would have taken to defeat it countywide. We wrote about that in The Tax That One in Five Burbank Voters Passed.

A charter change decided by a fraction of the city is a poor way to settle something this permanent. Whichever way you intend to vote on it, vote on it.