Elect the board

The Triunfo Sanitation District should elect all five board members in an at-large election. That was the unanimous vote by the Oak Park Municipal Advisory Council (MAC) on Tues., June 24.

Currently, three Triunfo board members are appointed and do not have to live in the district, while only two are elected at large. I was elected to the board in November 2006 and am in favor of ratepayers having the right to choose all five in an at-large election.

Why not divide Triunfo into five divisions, and vote that way?

1. Triunfo too small to divide, having a total of 18,333 registered voters in the last general election in 2006.

2. How would you form five fair divisions? In that election, Thousand Oaks had 44 percent of voters, Oak Park 44 percent of voters, and Bell Canyon and Lake Sherwood had 12 percent together. It does not work to divide them up.

3. It would be too costly to divide up and rebalance the population numbers every few years.

4. Both the Oak Park MAC and the Thousand Oaks City Council are elected at large, and it works well.

5. If Triunfo went ahead and voted to elect by division in spite of all common sense, that means either Ron Stark or I would probably be barred from running for a board seat for two years. That's because we are the two elected board members now, and we would represent the same division because we live in the same neighborhood. Ron was elected in 2004, with his seat up for election this November, and I was elected in 2006. Which of us would get bumped off the board?

For all the above reasons, I commend the Oak Park MAC for supporting an atlarge election for Triunfo.It makes sense and only takes a majority vote of the Triunfo board to make it happen. Janna Orkney Oak Park Orkney is vice chair of the Triunfo Sanitation District