A City of Commerce council member wanted to run for an illegal fourth term. A judge just shot it down
-
Click here to listen to this article - Share via
See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search. Set us as preferred
- A City of Commerce city council member’s bid for a fourth term, despite a voter-approved three-term limit, has sparked a high-stakes legal showdown over the city’s term-limit rules.
- Former Mayor Lilia Leon is suing to keep Ivan Altamirano off the Nov. 3 ballot, arguing City of Commerce voters’ 2011 term limits still bar him from another term.
- A court must weigh competing interpretations of a 2022 charter amendment before Thursday’s ballot deadline.
A City of Commerce City Council member who ran for a fourth term, despite a city law that appears to make that illegal, got bad news from a judge Thursday.
Ivan Altamirano cannot run in the Nov. 3 election, a judge in Los Angeles County Superior Court ruled, after a lawsuit that pitted two of the city’s former mayors against each other.
One election expert indicated that although Altamirano‘s arguments deserved their day in court, they appear to fly contrary to the will of City of Commerce voters who in 2011 adopted limits of three terms for council members and a maximum of 12 years in office.
Judge Joseph Lipner agreed, writing in an order Thursday that the term limit law is “exceptionally clear.”
“Councilmember Altamirano is term-limited and cannot be on the 2026 ballot,” Lipner wrote.
The City of Commerce’s city clerk must remove Altamirano from the list of candidates qualified to run in the election, and the L.A. County registrar-recorder/county clerk cannot list him on the ballot as a candidate, according to a writ of mandate approved by the court.
Altamirano previously said in an email that he was running again because of a “tremendous outpouring of support” he received from City of Commerce residents asking him to seek reelection. He had declined to speculate on his chances in court.
The Los Angeles Daily News previously reported on the lawsuit.
Estuardo Mazariegos and Jose Ugarte both said they are committed to representing all their constituents equally, including Black residents who have expressed concerns about the change.
The small-town brouhaha is noteworthy at least in part because term limits have been something of a national fixation in recent years, given President Trump’s past comments that he could serve a third term in the White House, despite constitutionally being limited to two.
Local term limit disputes are not uncommon and include recent ones in Long Beach and Beverly Hills.
City of Commerce’s former Mayor Lilia Leon filed a lawsuit Aug. 10 claiming that allowing Altamirano, also a former mayor, to run for city council again would be “an unconstitutional amendment that invalidates the voter’s right to exercise the initiative power.”
“It’s about honoring the vote of the residents,” Leon said in an interview. “Not about Councilman Altamirano.”
Altamirano’s lawyers asserted that any terms he served before 2022 shouldn’t count against his limit and that he therefore could run again. In 2022, voters passed an amendment to the original term limits, removing a 12-year total limit in order to comply with a new state law mandating that local elections coincide with state regulations.
According to Altamirano’s team, removing the 12-year limit changed the definition of a “term.” Under California law, they argued, only terms served after that change can count toward the term limit.
The state’s high court heard arguments Monday in the dispute over whether Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco had the authority to seize more than 600,000 ballots in last year’s special election in what he claimed was an investigation into potential voter fraud.
Leon’s lawyers, meanwhile, argued that the amendment removing the 12-year total limit was just that — an amendment — and not a fundamental change in the law. Indeed, the amendment didn’t remove the three-term limit, according to an analysis the city performed at the time. And there are recent cases in which judges ruled that previous terms can count toward term limits put in place after the fact, including one involving the previous Beverly Hills mayor, Leon’s lead attorney, Beverly Grossman Palmer, said in a text message.
The 2022 measure “did not repeal, relax, or extend the City’s three-term limit. Rather, it clarified that a full term may exceed four years when authorized by state law,” Leon’s lawyers wrote.
Altamirano is no stranger to controversy. In 2016, when he was mayor, he agreed to pay $15,500 in fines for violations of state political ethics law. He was cited because he had a conflict of interest when on three occasions he voted to appoint his sister to the City of Commerce Planning Commission while she was one of his tenants and, thus, a source of income, according to a California Fair Political Practices Commission summary. He also had a conflict of interest when he voted to put in place an all-way stop sign within 150 feet of his home and property, according to the FPPC.
In 2019, when he was mayor pro tem, a council member accused Altamirano of sucker-punching him.
Altamirano’s official city biography says he is working on a memoir about his “transformation as a community leader,” a book that the bio says “will be a message of hope for anyone trapped by their past, showing that redemption is possible and powerful.”
“Commerce is the city where I was born and raised,” Altamirano said in an emailed response to questions. “It was a difficult place for me to survive as a teenager, but it became the city that gave me the extraordinary opportunity to serve. I want to repay that opportunity by leaving Commerce better than I found it.”
More From the Los Angeles Times
Podcasts
The latest effort is coming from the L.A. County Board of Supervisors. They just announced a $3 million program in conjunction with some nonprofits groups to test and clean the soil at homes still standing in the areas impacted by the Eaton Fire.
The Hillside Strangler murders terrorized Los Angeles in the late 1970s. The killers were a pair of sadistic cousins. One confessed. The other was set to stand trial—until L.A. prosecutors flinched.
Hosts Fidel Martínez and Suzy Exposito sit down with Dr. Vanessa J. Díaz, professor of Chicano and Latino Studies at Loyola Marymount University and co-author of P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance.
