Residents warn City Council directly elected mayor could undermine civil rights gains

Palm Springs residents on Wednesday overwhelmingly spoke out against a proposal from a citizens’ group to move the city to a system of directly electing its mayor.

Around a dozen residents voiced opposition during public comment at the regular City Council meeting, ahead of a broader discussion about the mayoral role.

The debate is rooted in the city’s relatively recent shift in how it elects its leaders. In 2018, Palm Springs moved from an “at-large” system — where all voters chose all councilmembers — to district-based elections following a legal threat under the California Voting Rights Act.

That change also reshaped the mayor’s role. Instead of electing a mayor citywide, Palm Springs now uses a rotational system, with each district’s councilmember serving as mayor for one-year terms.

The current proposal would reverse part of that shift by restoring a citywide elected mayor. But as city officials emphasized Wednesday, how a mayor is chosen does not necessarily change what the job entails.

In Palm Springs, the mayor position carries no additional governing authority beyond presiding over meetings and calling special sessions — powers shared in practice with the rest of the council.

“At the end of the day,” City Attorney Jeff Ballinger said, the mayoral role is “really just ceremonial.”

That distinction became central to the discussion. While some residents argued that electing a mayor directly would strengthen local democracy, Ballinger warned that the legal implications could be significant.

A ballot initiative proposed in March would put the question before voters in November, but Ballinger cautioned that making the change without further study could expose the city to litigation under the Voting Rights Act.

Because Palm Springs now uses district elections, reintroducing a citywide elected mayor could create what is effectively an “at-large” position — something that has triggered lawsuits in other cities.

Ballinger outlined several options for the council, ranging from maintaining the current system to placing competing measures before voters or adopting a change outright. But he repeatedly stressed that any move forward would likely require a demographic analysis to assess potential impacts on protected voting groups.

The legal risks are not theoretical. When the city of Downey attempted a hybrid system with both district and at-large representation, it faced a Voting Rights Act challenge and ultimately abandoned the plan.

If Palm Springs were sued and lost, officials warned “legal costs could run into millions of dollars,” and noted that “no city has ever won a CVRA case when it refused to transition to districts.”

Even so, supporters of the initiative urged the council to let voters decide.

“I urge the council to move quickly to the direct election of a mayor by putting the question before the voters in November,” one supporter said. “I believe this transition … would actually strengthen the ability of any protected class to influence the outcome of future elections and would bolster the democratic process by having a mayor elected by the majority of the voters.”

The speaker also opposed hiring a consultant to study whether the change would violate the Voting Rights Act.

But most speakers took the opposite view, framing the issue as one of representation and civil rights. Several pointed to the city’s history of racially polarized voting under the at-large system and warned that reinstating any citywide seat could undo recent progress.

Lex Ortega, a former co-chair of the city’s Voting Rights Act working group, described neighborhoods that had long been overlooked under the previous system.

“My street isn’t a street where an at-large mayor candidate would go to for big donor house parties or to engage with neighborhood leads,” Ortega said. “It is a street historically ignored by mayors and city council members, which is why we got sued.”

Ortega added that the previous system showed “the most racially polarized voting in the city.”

“This is a civil rights issue more than anything,” they said. “And the people who don’t see it that way … likely have never been part of a minority voting block as defined by the CVRA.”

Others highlighted how the shift to district voting has changed who holds office. In the decades before 2018, nearly every mayor was a white man. In the years since, the council has become more diverse, including the city’s first Latina mayor, Councilmember Grace Garner of District 1.

It was Garner who raised practical concerns about access to the role.

“I know this personally, a directly elected position for mayor would limit working people from being mayor, because it is a big commitment,” Garner said. “Making those types of sacrifices for four years — that’s a whole other conversation with your workplace.”

“I don’t know that a lot of people would be able to do that for four years,” she added. “I know certainly I would not be able to.”

Garner also called for more public discussion before moving forward.

“I think that there’s a lot more discussion that we have to have with our community,” she said. “Only having a ballot measure doesn’t allow for that really critical conversation.”

Councilmembers signaled they were not ready to act immediately, even those sympathetic to giving voters a say. Several called for broader community input before making a structural change to the city’s governance.

“I think we need to really tap into the wisdom of our residents, and not just one small group that’s come up with one option,” Councilmember Jeffrey Bernstein said.

By the end of the discussion, the council opted for a slower path forward, forming a committee of Garner and Councilmember Ron deHarte to develop a working group that will study potential changes to the mayoral role and guide a broader public engagement process.

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