There’s a new effort underway to bring neighborhood-based voting to Kent, the south-of-Seattle suburb that’s King County’s third largest city.
A campaign called “Kent for Districts” launched Thursday, announcing plans to collect petition signatures for a November ballot measure that would switch five of seven Kent City Council seats to district elections. Currently, all seven seats in the city of about 136,000 people are elected at large.
Proponents say the move would promote equitable representation for Kent’s different communities. They say politics in the sprawling city have traditionally been dominated by leaders from certain neighborhoods, which can result in less representation for, and less attention paid to, other areas.
Led by civic activists Mónica Mendoza-Castrejón and Cliff Cawthon, Kent for Districts must collect at least 10,572 valid signatures by midsummer to qualify for the ballot. That could be a heavy lift, but two current council members — Marli Larimer and John Boyd — have endorsed the campaign. An attorney is working on the campaign’s petition, Mendoza-Castrejón said.
Mayor Dana Ralph wasn’t available for comment Thursday, a spokesperson said.
“I support district elections for Kent because we are the sixth largest city in the state, the sixth most diverse city in the nation and we have distinctly different subareas, between East Hill, West Hill and the Valley,” Larimer said in a Kent for Districts news release, arguing the switch to neighborhood voting would make leaders more connected and accountable to residents.
Mendoza-Castrejón is a law school student, and Cawthon is a housing advocate who ran unsuccessfully for a Kent council seat in 2021. The campaign will announce more supporters soon, Mendoza-Castrejón said.
More than two dozen cities across Washington state elect some or all of their council members using districts, according to a list compiled last year by the Seattle-based Municipal Research and Services Center, a nonprofit.
Seattle is the only city in King County on the list. Seattle switched seven of nine seats to district voting in 2015 under a change approved by the city’s voters in 2013. Yakima moved to district voting in 2015, after Latino residents represented by the American Civil Liberties Union won a lawsuit against the Central Washington city’s previous system, Mendoza-Castrejón noted.
Kent’s population and its current council are majority people of color. Most of the council members live in East Hill neighborhoods. Because the city is so large and spread out, candidates with less money and institutional support can struggle to campaign successfully, Mendoza-Castrejón said.
In King County, only Seattle and Bellevue have more residents than Kent. But turnout for last November’s elections was 24% in Kent, versus 46% in Seattle. District elections could boost voter participation in the city, Cawthon said.
“Some people don’t even know that Kent has a West Hill, and there’s going to be light rail there,” Mendoza-Castrejón said, referring to a Sound Transit extension now under construction. “There can be so many more conversations brought up from all the neighborhoods.”