The year’s last meeting of the Healdsburg City Council was fraught with signs and portents of the future, some of them just business as usual—the selection of a new mayor and vice mayor—and some of them with years-long impact.
In the former category, Evelyn Mitchell’s elevation from vice mayor to mayor for 2025, per the usual process of civic courtesy, was a given. But a bit of a surprise occurred when one of the two possible vice mayor candidates nominated the other, as Ron Edwards put Chris Herrod’s name forward.
Edwards, coming off his re-election to a four-year term, could have been perceived as a favorite, and in fact Linda Cade in public comment following the nominations thought Edwards should be the mayor in 2024, skipping the stepping-stone seat altogether.
But as Edwards said later, “I am not on the council for Political advancement. I also like to be very prepared when I do something.””
Herrod was happy to accept Edwards’ nomination, and the eventual unanimous decision to make him vice mayor, and thus the presumed mayor for 2026.
Mayor’s Role
While the role of the mayor in Healdsburg is largely ceremonial—to chair meetings, issue proclamations and be the city’s public face—it is not entirely so. With the imminent elimination of the at-large election of City Council members to accord with the 2002 California Voting Rights Act, the role of the mayor could become much more important.
Paul Mitchell, of the consultancy Redistricting Partners that the city has engaged to manage the process of dividing Healdsburg into election districts, gave a lengthy but necessary overview of the coming change. Though it is technically not a redistricting, but a “districting,” the process requires five public hearings of which Monday’s City Council meeting was the first.
There were two different pathways toward a CVRA-compliant model for council elections: A five-district model, with a single council member for each district and the mayor selected from the five (as in fact occurred in Monday’s meeting itself).
The four-district model would have four City Council members elected by the voters in their district, while a fifth seat (to prevent tie votes in any civic legislation) would go to a mayor elected “at large” by all voting residents.
This is the process followed in Windsor, the most recent jurisdiction in Sonoma County to adopt a CVRA-compliant structure: four district-elected council members, and a mayor elected at large for two years. A similar structure is at play in Petaluma, though it has six districts and an at-large elected mayor. However, while council members are elected for four-year terms, the mayor is also elected for four years.
Healdsburg’s population is less than 12,000, while Windsor’s is more than twice that at 26,000 and Petaluma’s is almost 60,000. Santa Rosa, with a population of more than 176,000, has a similar structure to Petaluma’s, but with seven council members and a rotating mayor selected from among them.
Five, Six or Seven?
Based on size alone, the current default structure of five districts seemed reasonable to the council members. And the idea of electing an at-large mayor who would be more likely to represent the whole city than a specific district did not garner much support among the sitting council members, though both Herrod and Kelley seemed open to the idea.
But Edwards, Michell and Hagele—a by-now-familiar alliance—leaned into the conservative approach of keeping five districts, and the “power-sharing” approach of a mayor selected from them. And while both City Manager Jeff Kay and redistricting consultant Mitchell repeated that no decision was required in this first meeting, the sense of the majority was clearly to stick with the accustomed structure—“It’s working,” they repeated among themselves several times.
That direction was not entirely supported by the residents who viewed the meeting.
The assumption throughout Mitchell’s presentation was that there would be either four or five districts drawn in the city, based not so much on overall population but on numbers of registered voters. However, in a letter to the council received in advance of the meeting, and from comments made during it, the argument for a seven-district council was proposed.
While that would divide Healdsburg, with only 3.56 square miles, into relatively small districts, it would also increase the possibility that a minority member (most likely Latino) would be elected to serve.
Phil Luks, the outspoken former chair of the Planning Commission and still a member, said that if the council created five districts without providing a demographic area from which a Latino member could be elected it would mean that redistricting was “a failure,” in terms of the CVRA requirements.
Mark McMullen, an even-more frequent public voice in council meetings, sent a letter to the council for the record in which he argued for enhanced representation and diversity through more than five districts.
“With more districts, there’s a higher likelihood of representing Healdsburg’s various communities, including our significant Hispanic population (28%) and other minority groups,” he wrote. “This directly addresses the concerns raised in the lawsuit.”
It would also, he said, “create a more responsive, inclusive, and future-proof governance structure for Healdsburg.”
The council’s advocacy to keep things as they are, with a five-district council and selected mayor, also drew criticism following that decision. Merrilyn Joyce said she approached the council members during the break following the redistricting discussion but was “not heard.”
She wrote that her “passion for democratic process is strong and that passion went on high alert last night after your unanimous decision to lock in the number of districts and the mayoral question in this first ever districting hearing which had minimal public input.”
Rebecca Miller also weighed in by a message to the Tribune, “The council’s actions last night railroaded this decision through, without community input or even acknowledgement of the proposed process that was laid out in advance.”
The second of the six required meetings on the redistricting is scheduled for the next City Council meeting, the first of 2025, on Jan. 6. Following that Mitchell and Redistricting Partners have five weeks to work up a proposed districts map, which would be presented Feb. 18.
Two meetings will follow on March 17 and April 7, when the final map would be presented.
The city’s information page on the process can be found at Healdsburg.gov/districtelections.
