Since the November election, the Voter Service team has been rather quiet. Things are beginning to pick up now, though.
Voter Service team members will be meeting in Suisun on Feb.7 (location TBD) to begin planning for spring high school voter registration for North County. We have new members and volunteers who are anxious to register youth voters in Fairfield, Vacaville, and Dixon. South County high school registration will probably not take on full steam until fall of 2019.
In 2018, we registered 1200 high school seniors between April and November 2018 and they would be the same students in senior classes in the spring of 2019.
More locally, Benicia Mayor Patterson and City Council have invited members of our League to take a seat with an ad hoc committee to address the very necessary issue of campaign finance reform which began the end of January. It’s a great opportunity for our local League to affect real change in our election process. The League Board will be discussing the request at their March meeting and decide if it’s something we have a process and resources to do. In the meantime, the Open Government Commission will continue with their formation of an ad hoc committee to consider recommendations from the council, position statements of the state League, and ideas from Valero, as well as other community groups. For more information about our election problems, check out KQED’s recent article on our city election. There’s more to the story, but it’s a good start.
//www.kqed.org/.../valero-backed-candidates-win-benicia-city-council-election.
Things are busting out all over! The Solano County Board of Supervisors will be redistricting the supervisorial districts for the 2020 election. There is a movement with Common Cause, sponsored by our Supervisor, Monica Brown, to create an independent redistricting committee for Solano County instead of relying on the Supervisors to create their own districts. The League of
Women Voters Benicia has been invited to participate in the process. Beginning meetings took place in January, but the
LWVB board will meet in March to discuss our possible involvement with this process.
