LAFCO passes on opportunity to let Pajaro/Sunny Mesa customers vote for their board.

A chance to let North County residents have more say in their utility service governance slipped by this week.

The opportunity arose when Pajaro/Sunny Mesa Community Services District annexed five water systems it’s owned and operated for 10 years. The Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO) approved the annexations in April. No one raised any objections at the protest hearing June 1.

“There was only public benefit involved,” LAFCO Executive Officer Kate McKenna says.

The annexation makes more residents eligible to serve on the district’s board. But those seats are appointed by the county supervisors, not elected. That’s an issue former Pajaro/Sunny Mesa General Manager Joe Rosa raised in a 2009 letter to the Board of Supervisors.

In 1992, “due to a bureaucratic error that has never been corrected,” he wrote, LAFCO converted the district’s elected board to an appointed one: “[T]he voters and residents of our district were denied the right to elect their own representatives.”

A 10-year-old state rule requiring the election of new community service district boards doesn’t apply to Pajaro/Sunny Mesa, McKenna says: “This district was grandfathered in.”

Board President Stephen Snodgrass says the point of the annexation was to broaden the pool of applicants. “We have a very hard time finding board members,” he says. “This thing’s quite a lot of work for quite a bit of grief.”

Judy Vazquez-Varela, the district’s operations coordinator, notes anyone in the district can apply: “Everyone has an equal opportunity of trying to get on the board.”

Update 6/4/15: LAFCO Executive Officer Kate McKenna has provided more information about that 1992 decision to have the Pajara/Sunny Mesa Community Services District board appointed rather than elected, which she says was not an error as Joe Rosa alleged. Click here for her explanation.