Mission Viejo voters won’t see any City Council races on their November 2024 ballots.
Instead, all five seats will be up for election in November 2026. The city’s municipal code states that the term for each seat is four years, and all five members on the dais — Mayor Trish Kelley and Councilmembers Bob Ruesch, Wendy Bucknum, Brian Goodell and Cynthia Vasquez — were elected in November 2022.
“City council members shall hold office for four years from the Monday succeeding the county clerk’s certification of the election and until their successors are elected and qualified,” the code says.
Like several cities in Orange County, Mission Viejo was sued in 2018 by Malibu-based attorney Kevin Shenkman over its at-large election system, in which all voters in a city cast their ballots for all members of the council. The lawsuit argued that the city’s system diluted the community’s Latino vote.
The city initially decided to keep in place the at-large system and proposed that voters be given as many votes as there are open seats. For example, if there were five open seats, then a voter could cast all five to one candidate or distribute them among several candidates in a process called cumulative voting. However, officials ultimately dropped that effort and made to switch to district-based elections in 2021 after the secretary of state’s office objected.
In 2022, the city was sued again over its election system by a resident challenging term limits. A lawsuit alleged that Bucknum and then-Councilmembers Greg Raths and Ed Sachs, who were elected in 2018, were only elected to two-year terms and had stayed in office illegally since 2020. At the time, the city said those councilmembers stayed beyond their terms when the city faced a delay in getting cumulative voting set up.
The three councilmembers were removed from office following a ruling from an Orange County Superior Court judge, but because the ruling did not bar them from running for office again, all three were on the 2022 general election ballot. Raths and Sachs lost their races; Bucknum was re-elected.
Kelley and Goodell were elected in 2020 to serve fixed two-year terms, and so their names were also on the ballot in 2022. That means all five seats were also up for election then as well.
When asked whether Mission Viejo will ever consider having staggered elections, which means at least one council seat will be up for election every election year, city attorney Bill Curley said the City Council will work with the administrative staff to consider the options, which will be done in “sufficient time for use in the 2026 election cycle.”
While no council seats will be up for election this year, voters in Mission Viejo will still be able to cast a vote on Measure Y, which if passed will increase the tax the city collects on hotels, motels and property rented from apps like Airbnb and Vrbo, from 8% to 12%.
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