Griffin v. Board of Sup'rs of Monterey County

• Decision Date: 20 August 1963
• Citation: 384 P.2d 421,60 Cal.2d 318,33 Cal.Rptr. 101
• Court: California Supreme Court
• Parties: , 384 P.2d 421 Allen GRIFFIN, Petitioner, v. BOARD OF SUPERVISORS OF the COUNTY OF MONTEREY et al., Respondents. S. F. 21243.

Page 101

33 Cal.Rptr. 101

60 Cal.2d 318, 384 P.2d 421

Allen GRIFFIN, Petitioner, v. BOARD OF SUPERVISORS OF the COUNTY OF MONTEREY et al., Respondents.

S. F. 21243.

Supreme Court of California, In Bank.

Aug. 20, 1963.

Hudson, Martin, Ferrante & Street, Carmel C. Martin, Jr., and Donald H. Smith, Monterey, for petitioner.

Saul M. Weingarten, City Atty. (Seaside), as amicus curiae on behalf of petitioner.

William H. Stoffers, Salinas, for respondents.

GIBSON, Chief Justice.

Petitioner, an elector of the 5th Supervisorial District of Monterey County, acting on behalf of all such electors, seeks a writ of mandate to compel the board of supervisors to reapportion the supervisorial districts of Monterey County so as to make them nearly equal in number of electors. He contends that the board has arbitrarily and capriciously refused to redistrict the county and has thereby discriminated against the voters of the 5th district.

In the main the facts are undisputed. The county was districted in 1884 pursuant to section 16 of the Act to Establish a Uniform System of County and Township Government (Stats.1883, ch. 75) which required the districts to be 'as nearly equal in population as may be.' The districting ordinance was amended in 1886 and has since remained unchanged. There are five districts, each of which elects one supervisor. When the districts were established the difference in number of electors between the most populous and the least populous districts was 1 1/2 to 1. ¹ However, subsequent changes in population have caused a much greater disparity. In 1962 the number of registered voters in the county was 68,565. Thirty-four thousand and fifty-nine voters, or approximately 50 per cent, resided in the 5th district, which includes the Monterey Peninsula; 22,687 voters, or 33 per cent, resided in the 2d district, which includes Salinas; 5,677 voters, or a little over 8 per cent, resided in the 1st district; 5,204 voters, or a little less than 8 per cent, resided in the 3d district; and 938 voters, or less than 1 1/2 per cent, resided in the 4th district. Three supervisors, a majority of the board, are thus elected by approximately 17 per cent of the voters.

In 1956 an initiative ordinance altering the boundaries of the districts was rejected by the voters. Pursuant to section 25009 of the Government Code, enacted in 1961, a redistricting committee was appointed in Monterey County, and in August 1962 a majority of the committee, consisting of the members from the three districts having the least population, advised against redistricting prior to the 1970 census. ² In September 1962 petitioner demanded that the board of supervisors redistrict the county on a population basis. The board did not act on the demand and adopted the majority report of the redistricting committee.

The subject of changing the supervisorial districts of counties is dealt with in section 25001 of the Government Code, which reads: 'By a two-thirds vote of the members, the board may change the boundaries of any or all of the supervisorial districts of a county. The districts shall be as nearly equal in population as may be, except that in establishing the boundaries of the districts the board may give consideration to the following factors: (a) topography, (b) geography, (c) cohesiveness, contiguity, integrity, and compactness of territory, and (d) community of interests of the districts.'

Under this section apportionment according to population is the primary goal in redistricting, and the other factors enumerated may only be given a subsidiary effect and cannot warrant large deviations from equality of population. This construction is in accord with the position taken by this court in Blotter v. Farrell, 42 Cal.2d 804, 811, 270 P.2d 481, where, with respect to the redistricting of councilmanic districts, it was recognized that our system of government requires whenever possible equality of population among election areas and that drastic population differences may destroy the representative character of government. (See also Harnett v. County of Sacramento, 195 Cal. 676, 680, 235 P. 445.)

The legislative history of the provision confirms the above construction. Section 25001 was, with a slight change, derived from section 4029 of the Political Code as amended in 1943. ³ Prior to that year section 4029 provided that the districts 'shall be as nearly equal in population as may be' and did not mention any other factors which might be considered. As originally introduced, the 1943 bill to amend section 4029 (A.B. 1990) would have deleted this provision and would have listed population merely as one of the several factors to be considered. The fact that before enactment the bill was amended to retain the prior provision requiring equality of population shows a legislative intent that population remain the primary consideration.

The Assembly Interim Committee on Municipal and County Government, in a report on supervisorial redistricting dated November 1962, accepted the above construction of section 25001 as correct. (Assembly Interim Comm. Rep., 1961-1963, vol. 6, No. 18, p. 9.) It should also be noted that section 23361 of the Government Code, which relates to the...