Cerritos Mayor Naresh Solanki (right) and Mayor Pro Tem Chuong Vo
December 11, 2024
By Brian Hews
Los Cerritos Community News has learned that Cerritos Mayor Naresh Solanki and Mayor Pro Tem Chuong Vo have withdrawn from the City’s March 2025 City Council election, throwing the upcoming contest into a real competition where three seats will now be open.
The revelation will be particularly insulting to Cerritos residents who had to watch helplessly as Solanki, Vo, and Bruce Barrows, who was appointed, not elected, voted 3-2 in 2023 to extend their City Council terms one year.
At the time, current Cerritos Councilman Frank Yokoyama blasted Solanki, Vo, and Barrows in an exclusive statement to LCCN, “The three Republican councilmembers, including appointed Councilmember Barrows, selfishly extended their City Council terms almost one year. I voted no. I see no meaningful benefit to Cerritos residents. There is no legal reason for changing the City Council election date. Rather, this election date change lowers voter turnout and increases wasteful spending of taxpayers’ dollars. This is simply petty partisan, self-serving Republican election manipulation.”
The process to move the election from March 2024 to March 2025 was full of hastily called and questionably noticed public meetings, approved during two sparsely attended Cerritos City Council summer meetings conducted in April 2022 and July 2022.
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At those meetings, the City Council staff report cited “significant operational and legal challenges due to the election’s close proximity to the California presidential primary scheduled for March 5, 2024,” despite the fact Cerritos’ municipal election was thirty-four days later on April 9.
According to sources at the April meeting, six residents spoke and eleven sent in comments, all against the election move.
The next meeting was held at Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, a group of protesters assembled outside with signs opposing the election delay.
Despite the protesters, the motion to move the election date was made by Barrows, seconded by Solanki, then passed 3 to 2, with Vo, Barrows, and Solanki voting yes and Councilmembers Lynda Johnson and Frank Yokoyama voting no.
The approval set into motion a time-sensitive process to move the election date from 2024 to 2025, which was placed on the April 10, 2023 Special Meeting agenda, nine months after the initial July 2022 vote.
Under city and state law, the meeting to change the election date must be properly noticed, meaning the public must be given an opportunity to read the proposed changes and provide public comment, but even that process was questionable.
According to the staff report, the April 10 meeting was “properly noticed [Wednesday] April 5, 2023. Under normal circumstances, the City would also publish a “Notice of Special Meeting” in Los Cerritos Community News, which is the paper of record for the City, alerting residents of the April 10 meeting, but a notice was not published.
Instead, the staff report indicated, “the meeting notice and agenda report materials were distributed [Wednesday, April 5] to the City Council and city staff, posted on the City’s website and made available at the city clerk’s office. The notices were also posted at the City’s designated posting location and were emailed through the City’s GovDelivery system to over 1,100 subscribers.”
There are nearly 50,000 residents and 16,000 homes in Cerritos.
The April 10, 2023 staff report described in great detail the reasons and process to move the election from 2024 to 2025 but failed to mention the obvious conflict of interest that Vo, Barrows, and Solanki will financially [and politically] benefit when they vote to move the election to 2025.
It was not a certainty that one or two of them would have been reelected in 2024; Barrows was appointed and has served nearly twenty years, residents have complained saying they want someone new, and those same residents complain that Mayor Vo is seldom seen in Cerritos.
The move by Solanki, Vo, and Barrows should have been scrutinized by California’s Fair Political Practices Commission and the California Secretary of State, but no one filed a complaint.
Under FPPC rules and regulations, “a public official has a disqualifying conflict of interest in a governmental decision if it is foreseeable that the decision will have a financial impact on his or her personal finances or other financial interests. In such cases, there is a risk of biased decision-making that could sacrifice the public’s interest in favor of the official’s private financial interests.”
“To avoid actual bias or the appearance of possible improprieties,” the FPPC clause stated, “the public official is prohibited from participating in the decision.”
Solanki, Vo, and Barrows voted to move the election to April 10, adding another year of financial benefits paid to them by the City of Cerritos while also cashing checks as members of outside municipal committees, which amount to thousands of dollars.
Councilmember Vo wanted another year. LCCN reported that Vo was taking “cash in lieu” of his health coverage with Cerritos. Vo has health coverage with his employer, the Torrance Police, and coverage with Cerritos, but instead of declining to take the coverage from Cerritos and saving taxpayers thousands, Vo takes the cash, which is nearly $20,000 a year.
Now, because Solanki, Vo, and Barrows adopted the ordinance, the City’s election date on the first Tuesday in March of each odd-numbered year will remain the election date unless the Council adopts a subsequent ordinance.
And Solanki, Vo, Barrows, and the minority Republican voting bloc are attempting to make the odd-year-low-voter-turnout voting date permanent under Measure J, which is on the upcoming Cerritos March ballot.
Measure J “would amend the Charter to replace [in the Charter’s text] the City’s general municipal election date as the first Tuesday after the first Monday in March of each odd-numbered year, and to clarify that this date could not be changed except by future vote of the Cerritos residents.”
A “Yes” vote is in favor of adding, in the Charter’s text, the current general municipal election date and thereafter requiring City voter approval by Charter amendment to change this date.
A “No” vote is against adding, in the Charter’s text, the current general municipal election date, leaving in place Cerritos’s current law that allows Council to establish the general municipal election date by ordinance. If a simple majority of the electorate voting on this measure vote “Yes,” then Measure J will be adopted.
Both Solanki and Barrows are on the record supporting Measure J, which would take the power out of the hands of the City Council to change the voting date; a power they used to change the date in the first place.
A no-vote victory would allow a majority City Council to change the date back to a higher-turnout general election even year.
