Voters in Laguna Beach will decide next November if they want to limit how many years consecutively city council members can serve in office.
The city is one of the last holdouts in Orange County yet to implement term limits. but that could change after residents collected over 2,200 valid signatures for a ballot initiative that would implement two consecutive 4-year term limits to serve on the city council.
Under the initiative, once the two terms are done, officials will have to wait two years before they can run again.
[Read: Term Limits Could be on Horizon for Laguna Beach City Council]
Mike Morris, a proponent of the initiative who started the petition, said the signatures gathered and the support for the initiative show term limits are long overdue in the coastal town.
“The broad nonpartisan support across registered Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Libertarians, NPPs (No Party Preference) and others, underscores the appeal that the idea of term limits for elected office holds as a means of fostering greater democratic participation, reducing cronyism and back room dealing and leveling the playing field for newcomers at election time,” he said at the Dec. 9 city council meeting.
At that meeting, city council members unanimously voted to place the initiative on the November ballot without much debate after city staff said they couldn’t adopt the initiative without a vote of the people or place the measure on the June primaries ballot.
Currently, Laguna Beach City Council members serve four year terms but are not limited to how many terms they can serve on the dais with councilman Bob Whalen currently serving in his fourth consecutive term.
If the measure is adopted by more than half of the voters, the limits would apply moving forward – meaning the term count for current city council members would reset to zero and they would be able to serve two more terms before the required hiatus.
A couple of residents spoke out against instituting term limits on elected officials, questioning if term limits were needed in a city the size of Laguna Beach and arguing elections themselves allow voters to decide how long they want to keep people in office.
“If we could just not do this at all, I’d love it,” said Mary Clifford, a resident, at the meeting.
“I find the democratic process is to allow people to vote for who they want to vote for, and to not limit the pool. I mean, we don’t live in an Olympic pool size city like Irvine. We live in a kiddie pool. We don’t have that many people that are able to step up and do this.”
Hosam Elattar is a Voice of OC reporter and corps member with Report for America, a GroundTruth initiative. Contact him at helattar@voiceofoc.org or on Twitter @ElattarHosam.