A Commerce City Council member is running for a fourth term in the November election with City Hall’s support, even though an ordinance prohibits any councilmember from serving for more than three full terms.
Ivan Altamirano should have termed out this year under a plain reading of the city’s ordinance. He was first appointed to the City Council in 2012 and then won subsequent elections in 2013, 2017 and 2022.
Yet attorneys for Altamirano and the city now argue that a voter-approved amendment months after Altamirano’s most recent election effectively reset the clock through a technicality.
Former Mayor Lilia Leon, who left office following a failed reelection bid in 2017, is now suing to challenge Altamirano’s attempt to run again and the city clerk’s decision to allow him to appear on the ballot at all.
“It is not about liking Ivan, or disliking Ivan,” Leon said in an interview. “It could be Susy Jones or Tom Jones, it is about respecting the voters. That’s the bottom line.”
Altamirano declined to comment because of the pending lawsuit, but did provide a statement about his bid for office.
“One of the wonderful things about our state is that it recognizes the fundamental right to seek public office and the right of voters to elect the candidate of their choice,” he wrote. “I’m hopeful that, at the end of this process, I’ll be able to run in November and the voters elect me to continue representing our great City.”
City Clerk Eduardo Sarmiento, who determined that Altamirano is qualified to run, did not respond to a request for comment.
Limits imposed in 2011
More than 72% of Commerce voters supported the three-term limit in 2011, a year before Altamirano’s initial appointment. At the time, Leon wrote the opposition in the official voter guide and called term limits “undemocratic,” but says she has since come to “wholeheartedly support” the prohibition.
Measure A established three limitations: a person is ineligible to hold office if he or she has served three full terms; a person cannot hold office for more than 12 years total; and if someone is appointed or elected to a vacated seat with more than two years remaining, it will count as having served a “full term.”
In 2022, the City Council put the matter back on the ballot specifically to delete the 12-year cap on the grounds that it had created a situation where some councilmembers, including Altamirano, would have to leave office midway through their final terms. Others had terms extended due to a shift to coincide with state election dates.
The amendment passed narrowly, by less than 2%, in 2022. Besides deleting the 12-year limit, the final version added language stating that a full term “may exceed a four-year period if authorized by state law.”
Before the vote, the same city attorney submitted an impartial analysis to voters promising that Measure SL would “retain the prohibition against any person serving more than three full terms.”
A staff report, prepared by the city clerk and approved by the city attorney, took it a step further and used Altamirano as an example of how the change would apply: “Appointed 2012, Elected 2013, Re-Elected 2017, Re-Elected in 2022 would serve approximately two (2) years or half of the term and would step down in 2024 under the current term limits ordinance. The proposed amendment would allow for the councilmember, now recently re-elected in 2022, to serve until the end of the full term until 2026.”
Should be ineligible
Beverly Grossman Palmer, the attorney for Leon, in court filings, believes that is exactly how the ordinance should be interpreted now.
“The one-time extension of Altamirano’s current term resulting from the City’s transition to statewide general elections did not create an additional term, interrupt his existing third term, or authorize him to seek election to a fourth full term,” she wrote. “Properly construed, Commerce Municipal Code section 2.08.160 renders Altamirano ineligible to seek election to another term on the Commerce City Council because he has already served the maximum of three full terms permitted by the City’s voter-enacted term-limit provisions.”
The opposing interpretations that Altamirano can run again hinge on the fact that state law generally establishes that term limits cannot apply retroactively to terms served prior to the enactment of a limit.
Altamirano’s attorney, Matthew Slentz, argued in court filings that Measure SL changed the definition of what constitutes a “full term” and only terms meeting that new definition apply.
The city’s staff report stating that Altamirano would only be allowed to serve until 2026 should not be considered because it wasn’t presented to voters, he said.
In a separate response to the lawsuit, City Attorney Arnold Alvarez-Glasman similarly wrote that Measure SL — drafted by the city under his firm’s watch — should have been more specific about whether prior terms applied. Ambiguity in the language should now be resolved in the “favor of candidacy, and with it, the voter’s right to choose among candidates rather than have that choice narrowed by implication,” he said.
Legal challenge appropriate
Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law, said the arguments seem “to go against both the language of the revised ballot measure as well as the intent of the voters.”
However, the legal battle playing out now is the appropriate challenge when there is a question about a candidate’s eligibility, he said.
“These election cases get a priority because of the time constraints,” he said.
The Los Angeles County registrar-recorder, named in the lawsuit, did not take a stance on Altamirano’s eligibility and has asked the court — and the court has agreed — to settle the matter by Aug. 27 so that it can make the necessary modifications to the ballot in time.
The next court hearing is scheduled for that date and is expected to determine if Altamirano is termed out.
Other challenges
Candidates attempting to find loopholes in term limit laws have found varying success. In 2016, Long Beach Councilmember Dee Andrews sought and won reelection to a full third term as a write-in candidate, because city law at the time allowed incumbents to run for an unlimited number of terms, but to only appear twice on primary ballots.
Long Beach voters passed Measure BBB in 2018 to fix that loophole and increased the number of terms that a councilmember can serve to three. The change similarly spawned a fight over whether the change meant that councilmembers could run for three more terms, or only one more.
Both the argument in Long Beach and the new one in Commerce cite a 2000 case, Woo v. Superior Court, in which an appeals court ruled that former Los Angeles Councilman Michael Woo was eligible for two more terms because the city’s term limits were not instituted until after he left office the first time.
In Long Beach, unlike in Commerce, Deputy City Attorney Amy Webber concluded that terms served under the prior term limits would count toward the new cap.
“The only people that could serve three fresh new terms are any council people who might be there with walkers and wheelchairs … who served prior to the current (term limits law) which took effect in 1992,” Webber said.