What came out of last night’s Twentynine Palms City Council meeting is that a huge wave of change is likely to hit Twentynine Palms soon.
A quiet tsunami sweeping through California. That’s how a Twentynine Palms demographer described the effects of a law requiring cities to transition from at-large to district-based elections. The idea is to avoid drowning minority voices in the swallowing of their neighborhoods. But if the change is a tsunami, the entire populace of this small community is about to get drowned.
“It’s worse than an uphill battle. We’re trying to scale a cliff that is virtually impossible.”
That’s Mayor John Cole describing his opposition, a sentiment shared by virtually the entire Council and every speaker at a recent public hearing. At last night’s Council meeting, however, they all got cued in by the city’s legal counsel; fighting, he said, would likely cost millions and still result in a loss.
So now the question isn’t so much how to stop it as how to live with it. Surviving a tsunami, after all, requires life jackets. The search for them will continue during three more public hearings.
