The Altadena Town Council will have a closed meeting tonight, before its regular monthly session, to go over recommendations for Altadena's two seats on a Pasadena Unified School District task force charged with carving up the school board into population-based districts.
According to town council chair Gino Sund, the council will not vote on the candidates in the closed meeting, but will approve two candidates during the regular, publicly-open meeting that follows. Nominations from the floor will also be considered in the public meeting, Sund said.*
The candidates were chosen by the executive committee of the council. Sund said that there were nine candidates on the list: "we developed a pretty extensive criteria list, and we interviewed the top two, and I think we're down to three [candidates].
PUSD is trying to forestall potential future Voting Rights Act lawsuits by switching from its present system, where school board members are elected "at large," to a system where they are elected in seven geographic districts. The task force, which will meet for about 14 months, is charged with divvying up the school district among Pasadena, Altadena, and Sierra Madre.
Sund defended Altadena's process: "We don't have any staff, and we only had a month to do this. We knew this was coming, but we got the letter from [the school district] the day of the last town council meeting.
"Actually, we had some pretty good candidates in the final analysis," Sund said. "I put my name in, fearful that we didn't have anybody, but it's not gonna be me, that's good news."
* Ed. Note: the indicated sentence was inadvertently dropped when we were compositing the story, and was reinstated about 8 AM today.
