
Revised Council Ward boundaries are set for approval at Tuesday’s Santa Ana City Council meeting. Ward boundaries have not been changed since 1992 and are required due to population shifts since then. The significance of the Ward boundaries is limited to the residency of candidates to represent specific wards. Election of Council members is conducted city wide.
The process used by the Council committee of has been criticized for a lack of transparency and public input into the map formation process. The committee met in secret to draft the proposed lines and published multiple versions of the Ward maps prior to their initial approval in December. The City Clerk informed the Council that no alternative maps had been submitted by the public for consideration prior to the meeting. While Council members cited this as an example of the great work performed by the committee, critics pointed out that no process was in place to provide direction on how, or in what format, proposed maps could be submitted.
While the City did post the maps online for public review, finding them was difficult because no link to the information was available on the website main page, or council pages. The only link to the proposals was through press releases that had dropped from view during the comment period.
Despite the criticisms, the Council approved the proposed revisions in December and the vote on Tuesday will set the boundaries for the next ten years. If any changes are made by the Council on Tuesday, the final vote will need to occur at a later meeting date.
In another demonstration of how the city feels about transparency, the agenda for this meeting is not posted online on the city website.
If it was, the public would have been able to see the staff packet that contains the summary of the item and all the maps attached.
This is the second meeting in a row that the city of Santa Ana website has not had an agenda posted 72 hours before the meeting, and the last meeting agenda wasn’t even posted til after the meeting.
Sloppy work or a concentrated effort to minimize transparency?
Mr.Bungles-
You are correct that the agenda is not posted in the grid under the “Council Agenda & Minutes” link on the home page of the city website like it should be.
If you have the time to spend testing various links and departments on their site, you can eventually find a copy on the “Clerk of the Council” page under “City Council Meetings” then “Agenda” (yeah, that’s buried 3 pages deep!).
Most people won’t ever know to look for it there, since there is supposed to be a link right to it from the home page.