A City of Commerce City council member is running for a fourth term despite a city law that appears to make that illegal.
Whether Ivan Altamirano can run in the Nov. 3 election is expected to be decided Thursday in Los Angeles County Superior Court, where a former mayor has appealed to keep the council member’s name off the ballot.
One election expert indicated that, although the council member’s arguments deserve their day in court, they appear to fly contrary to the will of City of Commerce voters who in 2011 adopted limits of three terms for council members and a maximum of 12 years in office.
“I don’t think that the council member’s argument is frivolous,” said Richard Hasen, an election law expert at UCLA School of Law. “But I think that a better reading is that he’s barred from running.”
Altamirano said in an email that he’s running again because of a “tremendous outpouring of support” he has received from City of Commerce residents asking him to run again. He declined to speculate on his chances in court.
“Whatever the outcome, I respect the process,” he wrote. “My focus remains where it has always been: serving the residents of Commerce and continuing to work every day to leave my city better than I found it.”
The Los Angeles Daily News previously reported on the lawsuit.
The small-town brouhaha is noteworthy at least in part because term limits have been something of a national fixation in recent years, given President Trump’s past comments that he could serve a third term in the White House, despite constitutionally being limited to two.
Local term limit disputes are not uncommon and include recent ones in Long Beach and Beverly Hills.
City of Commerce civic center, where councilman Ivan Altamirano is trying to run for a fourth term despite a three-term limit.
(Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times)
City of Commerce’s former Mayor Lilia Leon filed a lawsuit Aug. 10 claiming that allowing Altamirano to run again would be “an unconstitutional amendment that invalidates the voter’s right to exercise the initiative power.”
“It’s about honoring the vote of the residents,” Leon said in an interview. “Not about Councilman Altamirano.”
At issue are a raft of local and state laws that, in one side’s reading, plainly state that the city allows a maximum of three terms, which bars Altamirano from serving on the council again.
The other side — Altamirano’s — claims he can run again, because any terms he served before 2022 shouldn’t count against his limit. That was the year voters passed an amendment to the original term limits, removing a 12-year total limit in order to be able to comply with a new state law mandating that local elections coincide with state regulations.
According to Altamirano’s team, removing the 12-year limit changed the definition of a “term.” Under California law, they argue, only terms served after that change can count toward the term limit.
Leon’s lawyers, meanwhile, argued that the amendment removing the 12-year total limit was just that — an amendment — and not a fundamental change in the law. Indeed, the amendment didn’t remove the three-term limit, according to an analysis the city performed at the time. And there are recent cases in which judges ruled that previous terms can count toward term limits put in place after the fact, including one involving the previous Beverly Hills mayor, Leon’s lead attorney, Beverly Grossman Palmer, said in a text message.
The 2022 measure “did not repeal, relax, or extend the City’s three-term limit. Rather, it clarified that a full term may exceed four years when authorized by state law,” Leon’s lawyers wrote.
Based on his reading of the 2022 measure, Hasen concluded that the intent behind it clearly wasn’t to create a new term limit law, but to amend the existing one.
Ultimately, though, “it’s a legal question” that the courts will have to decide, Hasen said. Which side wins should be seen this week. Thursday is the last day the county can add or remove a candidate’s name from the Nov. 3 ballot, Monica Flores, an elections official with the Clerk’s Office, has said in court filings. The court is scheduled to hear arguments that day.
Altamirano is no stranger to controversy. In 2016, when he was mayor, he agreed to pay $15,500 in fines for multiple violations of state political ethics law. He was cited because he had a conflict of interest when on three occasions he voted to appoint his sister to the City of Commerce Planning Commission while she was one of his tenants and, thus, a source of income, according to a California Fair Political Practices Commission summary. He also had a conflict of interest when he voted to put in place an all-way stop sign within 150 feet of his home and property, according to the FPPC.
In 2019, when Altamirano was mayor pro tem, a council member accused Altamirano of sucker-punching him.
Altamirano’s official city biography says he is working on a memoir about his “transformation as a community leader,” a book that the biography says “will be a message of hope for anyone trapped by their past, showing that redemption is possible and powerful.”
“Commerce is the city where I was born and raised,” Altamirano said in an emailed response to questions. “It was a difficult place for me to survive as a teenager, but it became the city that gave me the extraordinary opportunity to serve. I want to repay that opportunity by leaving Commerce better than I found it.”
