On March 7, 2018, the City received a letter from the law firm Shenkman & Hughes threatening to sue the city for alleged violations of the California Voting Rights Act ("CVRA") (Elec. Code §§ 14025-14032) unless the city voluntarily converts to a by-district election system. Mr. Shenkman and his firm have served similar letters and subsequently filed numerous actions in recent years against dozens of cities and other public agencies for alleged CVRA violations.
The CVRA only applies to jurisdictions, like the City of Torrance, that utilize an "at-large" election method, where voters of the entire jurisdiction elect the members of the City Council. The threshold to establish liability under the CVRA is extremely low, and prevailing CVRA plaintiffs are guaranteed to recover their attorneys' fees and costs. As a result, every government defendant in the history of the CVRA that has challenged the conversion to district elections has either lost in court or settled/agreed to implement district elections, and been forced to pay at least some portion of the plaintiffs' attorneys' fees and costs. Several cities that have extensively litigated CVRA cases have been eventually forced to pay multi-million dollar fee awards, as well as millions of dollars to their own attorneys.
At its April 3, 2018 meeting, the City Council adopted Resolution No. 2018-27 expressing its intention to move from its current at-large method of election to by-district system, pursuant to Government Code section 34886 and Elections Code 10010.