In a stunning rebuke to the powers that run Monrovia City Hall, challenger Clarence Shaw beat out both an incumbent and one of the most omnipresent folks in town to tentatively take a seat on the City Council, coming in second with 1188 votes.  Long-time incumbent Joe Garcia won the race with 1437 votes. Shaw (whom I endorsed and know as a fellow comrade of the Veterans of Foreign Wars), squeaked out a 23-vote second place finish over well-known Monrovian Becky Shevlin.  That’s a margin of less than 2%.

Final official results will not be known until provisional ballots are counted, historically running about 2% of the total.

Shevlin, in turn, bested incmbent Dan Kirby by some 90+ votes.  Tribune/Star-News endorsee Paul Larsen came in 5th with about 610 votes.

In the Mayor’s race, May Ann Lutz brought in 2400 votes even, pounding long time City Hall gadfly Steve Grollneck who collected barely 550 votes.  Lutz’s seat will be vacated on the Council, and Shevlin is the automatic favorite to be appointed as her preplacement.

The more interesting question lies in Tom Adams’ promised resignation.  Will the Council re-appoint Kirby, even though he was clearly rejected by the voters.  Will they move to Larsen, who is clearly highly intelligent, but did not fare as well as expected in some quarters?  Or will Adams not resign at all, thus breaking his pleadge?

A variety of factors played into Shaw’s victory. First off, the “insider/incumbent” vote was badly fractured between Garcia, Kirby, Shevlin and Larsen.  If any one of those insiders had passed up the race, Shaw may well have been at the back of the leader’s pack. 

Second, there clearly was a large degree of anti-incument sentiment in the vote.  Approximately 3200 votes were cast for the three mayoral candidates, with Lutz grabbing exactly 75% with 2400 against the rather eccentric Grollneck and lack-luster Mario Duron. By contrast, Garcia, who had two chances for each voter’s consent against Lutz’s one managed to garner less than 1500.  Which is to say, 900 Monrovians who picked incumbent Lutz cast a vote for someone other than Garcia.  While some of those votes undoubtedly went to Shevlin (she bested Garcia in his own precinct), a large portion must have gone to Shaw.

The little-mentioned story of this election was the blatant attempt to disenfranchise a large swath of Monrovia.  While the City managed to create four precincts with three polling places North of Myrtle, there were only two polling places South of Foothill, where Shaw has his deepest roots.  One of those polling placed, Mt. Sierra College hosted two precincts - nearly 45% of the city’s total electorate.

The largest of the north of Foothill precincts was just 1743 voters, while Mt. Sierra was supposed to attract more than 8,000 from Mountain Avenue to the far Western border of the City.  Voters on the West side of town, just south of Foothill would have driven just past three other precincts’ polling sites (a home on Sunset Pl and the Presbyterian Church at Foothill and Myrtle) to get to their polling place.  And, enroute, they’d have to make a lengthy turn from Myrtle on to Huntington– and then a u-turn to go back West on Huntington before turning into the college parking lot.

It’s not as though there wer no other polling places available.  Potential polling places in that precinct include the VFW at Magnolia and Chestnut, Monrovia HS and Monroe School — plus City Hall itself.

For Southern Monrovians, the matter was even worse.  The Knights of Columbus Hall was the polling place from residents ranging from the area near Doray Circle and Plymouth School all the way to gang-plagued Sherman way on the East and the houses behind the Red Lobster on Huntington to the West.  In fact, the KofC Hall is pretty much completely out of the way for almost everyone in that region of the City.  By contrast, the North of Foothill polling places are along the natural lines of travel for residents in Monrovia’s wealthier areas.

What was the effect? At the KofC precinct, less than 200 votes were cast for Mayor out of 4115 registered voters.  At the #8 Precinct (Presbyterian Church Red), some 316 mayoral votes were cast out of less than 1600 registered.  That’s less than 5% turn out vs. nearly 20%.

Who did those precincts favor?  Shaw ran away with KofC with nearly 50% more than the #2 vote getter there.  He came in third at #8 - but had almost the same number of votes, even though #8 was less than half the size of KofC.

There’s no perfect solution to finding polling places, but it is impossible to believe Mt. Sierra College would have been a better choice for two precincts as opposed to a school, veterans hall or church, of which their are many.

So the question is, what else drove the selection?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 15th, 2009 at 12:41 am and is filed under City Politics, Featured, Monrovia, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.