Early election results suggest voters in Huntington Beach, California – the wealthy, majority-white surf town south of Los Angeles – may approve ballot measures to require voter ID in local elections, and to amend the city charter to ensure that Pride flags cannot be flown on city property.
California’s attorney general warned last year that the voter ID measure “conflicts with state law and would only serve to suppress voter participation without providing any discernible local benefit” and that the city risked state enforcement action if it moved forward with the policy.
But for some in Huntington Beach, deliberately flouting state law appears to be a feature, not a bug.
“A lot of this is taking Huntington Beach back to how it was,” the mayor, Gracey Van Der Mark, told NBC News in a recent interview. “A lot of cities are afraid to push back because they don’t want to be the target of Sacramento. We’re not afraid.”
Nicknamed “Angrytown, USA”, Huntington Beach made headlines for huge anti-lockdown protests early in the coronavirus pandemic, and later proclaimed itself a “No Vaccine and No Mask Mandate” city. The city council previously voted against flying Pride flags at city hall, amid suggestions that LGBTQ+ rights were “divisive”.
Last year, the city, in Orange county, sparked a state lawsuit by refusing to comply with affordable housing development rules, with the mayor at the time saying that state policy was designed “to urbanize quiet, private property-owning communities”. (Census data shows the current population of Huntington Beach is only 1% Black.) The California governor, Gavin Newsom, has accused the city of being a “poster child for nimbyism” and pledged state officials would crack down on localities that “flagrantly violate state housing laws”.
Last December, the city attempted to replace Black history month and Pride month with alternative holidays, like “Black Gold Jubilee” month, celebrating the role of oil in the city’s history, and “Revolutionary and Civil War” month, featuring a re-enactment of the civil war in a public park.
And in February, public librarians in Huntington Beach started the process of complying with a city council resolution requiring them to remove any books with inappropriate sexual content from the children’s section, with the supervision of a to-be-created “parent and guardian review board”.
“It’s pretty wild what’s happening here,” said the Huntington Beach city council member Dan Kalmick, who is part of a three-member minority on the council that regularly opposes the four-member majority’s agenda.
Kalmick said that the initial success of the two ballot measures in a relatively low-turnout primary election should not be seen as representative of the majority of city residents.
“I don’t think the people of Huntington Beach are against LGBTQ people,” he said.
He noted that the language of the ballot measure did not explicitly mention the Pride flag, but limits flags displayed on city property to the US flag; the state, city and county flags; the six armed forces flags, the POW-MIA flag, and the “Olympic flag during the summer Olympic Games”, while requiring a unanimous vote of the city council to approve any other flag.
But Kalmick warned that the city’s culture war agenda was expensive, as well as bigoted: holding a special election to vote on the ballot measures in March had been estimated to cost the city $400,000 to $500,000, he said. And responding to legal actions by the state attorney general and others would also continue to be costly, he said.
Rhonda Bolton, who became the city’s first Black city council member in 2021, said in a video posted on X on Monday: “In decades’ worth of records, the OC registrar of voters recorded no cases of voter fraud in the city of Huntington Beach.”
And the ballot measure designed to bar Pride flags from city property might have unexpected political results, she said. If it passed, “the Blue Lives Matter flag in the lobby of the police department would be in violation of the city’s charter”.
