When a new swimming pool in Martin Luther King Jr. Park in East Yakima opens next year, it will be the first public pool in the neighborhood in two decades.
After a whole generation of Latino and Black children had to travel several miles to the nearest city-run pool, government leaders are stepping up for the neighborhood.
The new pool’s May groundbreaking — the first in the area since the mid-2000s — attracted more than 150 community leaders and government support, illustrating the project’s widespread popularity.
But Yakima City Council member Dulce Gutiérrez says the new pool communicates something more specific and perhaps more important: It’s a tangible result of a district-based city council system created by a monumental court decision issued 10 years ago this month.
In August 2014, a federal court ruled that the Yakima City Council’s at-large election system violated the U.S. Voting Rights Act. The ruling in the case, Montes v. City of Yakima, led to the creation of a district-based system for electing members of the Yakima City Council and eventually inspired similar changes in the county and nearby cities.
More than a year later, during the 2015 general election, Gutiérrez and Avina Gutiérrez (not related) won in two Latino-majority districts in the city’s first district-based Council election. A third Latina, Carmen Mendez, also won. Their notable success occurred just 15 months after the Montes court decision.
This story is part of an ongoing series examining local politics in Yakima, Central Washington’s largest city. The first story in the series examined evangelical Christianity’s influence on local politics.
Representation from two Latino-majority districts in East Yakima meant specific needs — like a pool — could more easily be brought to the Council. Two years after their election, two Latina representatives Dulce Gutiérrez and Avina Gutiérrez would help establish an ad hoc committee to pursue options for a new pool in the area.
“Something as simple as a municipal pool in the most disenfranchised community in a desert area would not be possible [without a district-based election],” Dulce Gutiérrez said.
A decade later, the new pool is one of many successes of the Montes ruling. Many voter advocates believe the ruling also paved the way for other successful voting-rights cases, such as one that created a Latino-majority voter district in the 14th Legislative District. But advocates say plenty of barriers remain for Latino voters and candidates in the Yakima area.
David Morales, a local attorney who has a passion for advancing the interests of the Latino community, served on the Commission for Hispanic Affairs, a group appointed by Gov. Jay Inslee, and is part of a group that sued the redistricting commission for not properly creating a Latino-voting age majority district with the 15th Legislative District. Morales is seen here in Yakima in this July 27, 2022 file photo. (Amanda Snyder/Cascade PBS)
One of the first of its kind
Yakima has been at the center of several voting-rights court fights that reformed how lawmakers are elected in Central Washington.
La Rond Baker, legal director for the ACLU of Washington, who worked with Yakima voters to bring the Montes case to court, says the 2014 ruling on the Voting Rights Act case, filed in 2012, was novel in its time.
Another lawsuit a few years earlier had been brought by the U.S. Department of Justice against Yakima County over insufficiently providing election materials in Spanish. However, the Montes case was one of the early legal efforts to address voting rights law violations in a city's election system.
Yakima officials received plenty of notice that a legal case was brewing. As early as 2010, the ACLU of Washington’s legal team warned it could pursue legal action if the city didn’t change the current at-large election system. A 2011 attempt to establish a district-based system through a citizen initiative on the ballot failed.
Baker believed they had a legal case under federal voting-rights law, but finding a Latino resident in Yakima willing to serve as the plaintiff was challenging.
“It was really a hostile environment for even discussing this issue [in Yakima],” Baker said. “People were afraid of retaliation.”
Rogelio Montes ultimately was one of two Yakima voters who served as plaintiffs in the case. Like many others, Montes said he was intimidated by having to fight the city in court, but also knew the importance of addressing an election system that had negatively affected him, his family and his neighbors.
“I was concerned I was going to get intimidated by local officials, but at the same time, I got support from the ACLU,” he said.
Eliana Macias was elected to the Yakima City Council District 1 seat in 2019. The District 1 seat is now held by Leo Roy. (Jason Redmond for Cascade PBS)
City resistance
The case forced many city staff and elected officials to face the disparity between East Yakima and the rest of the city.
While East Yakima lost both its public pools, the city continued to operate pools in other neighborhoods. When the city of Yakima and the local YMCA built an aquatic center, it was located in West Yakima and closer to Scenic Drive, where many million-dollar homes stand.
“I think some people back then were very much denying the obvious segregation in this town,” said David Morales, a local attorney and board member for the South Central Coalition of People of Color for Redistricting, a local group involved in advocating for voters in communities of color. The group was also a plaintiff in Palmer v. Hobbs, a lawsuit to address issues with the 2021 redistricting process, including what it said was a diluted Latino-majority legislative district in the 15th.
While there was much jubilation in the months following her election and that of her Latina colleagues, Gutiérrez said the challenges of being one of the first councilwomen elected under this new system hit hard.
The city, for one, kept going with efforts to appeal Montes and roll back any reform that came from it. By the time the city dropped the appeal in 2016 — several months after the 2015 general election — the city had spent more than $1 million on the case. And with the additional $1.8 million the judge made the city pay the ACLU for legal costs, the total cost was nearly $3 million.
“We were still going against the grain,” Gutiérrez recalled. “Even though there was reform to the [election] system itself, there were gatekeepers that had a tremendous amount of knowledge inside City Hall who were unwilling to be collaborative.”
Eventually they piled up some other wins, including finding money to bring much-needed sidewalks and road improvements to areas like East Yakima. The vote to create the tax revenue, generated from a vehicle license fee, required a majority, but it took two of the three new Latina members to gain the needed votes.
Another notable win was the ad-hoc committee investigating the possibility of a new pool in East Yakima. While it would take years for the fruits of that work to grow, forming that committee was a crucial first step.
Gutiérrez said each win during her four-year term was hard-fought. “Basically, resistance to any new ideas and new leadership,” she said.
The era of three Latina Council members was short. In 2017, Avina Gutiérrez lost in her district primary, and Mendez and Dulce Gutiérrez opted not to run for reelection when their terms were up in 2019.
No Latino or Latina Council member has served more than one term since the new system was implemented in 2015, but at least one Latino has been on the Council since then.
Yakima City Council member Danny Herrera of District 2 speaks during a scheduled meeting Tuesday, June 18, 2024. (Jake Parrish for Cascade PBS)
The one Latino Council member now is Danny Herrera, who represents District 2, one of the two Latino-majority districts, through 2025. Herrera remembers voting in that monumental election in 2015. But it took some time for him to pursue public office himself. Finally, in 2021, when he was working as an educator, which provided some schedule flexibility, he could pursue the seat.
Herrera admits he has experienced a bit of a learning curve. He’s had to become comfortable speaking up during Council meetings and learn to encourage his constituents to participate in the political process and make sure the city was using the services supported by their tax dollars. “[Many residents] still only think about City Hall as the place to pay your garbage, water and sewer,” he said.
While Gutiérrez kicked off efforts to build a pool in East Yakima, Herrera finished the job by voting to include funding for the pool in the city's budget. “I was glad I was able to be a little part of that history, making sure that happened,” he said.
Barriers remain
Despite the successes since the Montes decision, plenty of barriers have remained to civically engaging Yakima-area Latinos.
“We can’t snap our fingers after years of disenfranchisement and ignoring of [Latino voters],” said Roxana Norouzi, executive director of OneAmerica, the Seattle-based immigrant advocacy organization. OneAmerica has organized in Yakima and been involved in voting-rights cases.
While the election system has allowed Latino residents to choose their own candidates, turnout has remained low. In the last Yakima City Council election in 2023, just 15% of residents with Spanish surnames in District 1, one of the Latino-majority districts, returned their ballots. That turnout was even lower than the already dismal 19% voting rate for District 1 overall.
“The turnout was profoundly bad in the 2023 Council races,” Morales said.
In the two Latino-majority districts, turnout among those with Spanish surnames peaked in 2015, the monumental election in which Latinas were elected in both districts, with rates of 20% and 19% in District 1 and District 2, respectively.
Such a low turnout means just a few dozen votes can decide an election. And there have been a handful of times a Latino or Latina candidate has lost.
In 2023, Gutiérrez ran again for the Yakima City Council in District 1, where she won in 2015. She ultimately lost to Leo Roy, a non-Latino candidate.
Gutiérrez said that while some organizations have helped with door-knocking and other campaign activities, Latino candidates in the region still don’t have consistent support — neither organizers or funding — especially for local elections.
She notes that Roy, whose win contributed to establishing a conservative majority in the Yakima City Council, received backing from the local Republican party, which put a lot of effort into engaging voters, including running “in-person” voting centers at local churches where they could help voters fill out their ballots and submit them on their behalf.
In addition, conservative factions of the city have also used bilingual campaign materials and organizers to get non-Latino candidates to be more successful in Latino-majority districts, Gutiérrez said.
She noted that organizers campaigning for Roy focused less on her past work on the Council and instead highlighted her support for reproductive rights in hopes of getting religious and conservative Latinos to vote against her. Ultimately, she believed, her loss was less due to such tactics than to not having enough resources to boost Latino voter turnout.
State Senate District 14 candidate Maria Beltran hands out campaign flyers at the Yakima Pride parade. Beltran is looking to unseat Republican Curtis King in November. (Genna Martin/Cascade PBS)
Voting math
Morales of the Southcentral Coalition of People of Color for Redistricting said it’s clear that local organizations face an ongoing challenge of gaining enough resources to energize and mobilize Latino voters.
A robust organizing effort happened in 2015, but resources and organizing activity has waned since, he said — a negative turn considering the already formidable voter-turnout challenge.
According to statistics from the Yakima County Auditor’s Office, the turnout among Yakima County residents with a Spanish surname was 56%, 28 percentage points lower than those with non-Spanish surnames — whose turnout rate was 84% — in 2020, a presidential election year when more Latinos voted.
Norouzi of OneAmerica wants more efforts in leadership development, to identify and develop Latino and Latina candidates who are qualified and motivated to run for office.
Norouzi believes the early success following Montes, such as the election of the three Latina City Council members in 2015, did spawn interest. She notes that numerous Latina candidates are running for 14th Legislative District state House and Senate seats following the creation of the Latino-majority district.
She believes that Maria Beltran, a Latina running for state Senate in the 14th District, provides a model for others. She’s had strong backing locally and from the state Democratic party, but she’s also garnered experience fostered relationships working for the party over the past few years. That’s led to strong fundraising that has enabled her to reach more potential voters.
Susan Soto Palmer, the plaintiff in Palmer vs. Hobbs, is also looking to make history by being the first Latina elected to the Board of Yakima County Commissioners. Dulce Gutiérrez ran as a Democrat for the same seat in 2022, but lost to Republican Kyle Curtis.
But Norouzi believes that more work is needed to sustain progress, so the onus isn’t on a few candidates to carry the entire Latino community. “It’s a long game,” she said. “We have to do more work and be intentional of the opportunities and how we’re investing in people, not just this year or next year but in the future.”
Despite the challenges, Gutiérrez says what matters is that there is always an opportunity for Latinos and Latinas in Yakima to take action and elect representatives who can advocate for their communities’ needs.
Some may see the constant turnover as indicative of a district still seeking and failing to achieve sufficient representation, but Gutiérrez isn’t discouraged.
“I expect we’ll continue to see turnover in Council members until we find people who won the hearts and minds of the [Latino] community and have the stamina and longevity to stick with it,” she said.
Ongoing reform
Baker maintains that the impact of the Montes ruling has expanded beyond Yakima, showing what is possible when citizens address disparities in their own communities.
“It spurred long-overdue work around creating fair election systems where communities of color can elect candidates of their choice to governing bodies,” she said.
Two years after the Montes decision, the ACLU of Washington was successful in another case that brought district-based voting to Pasco, in Franklin County, about 85 miles southeast of Yakima. Like Yakima, Pasco now has Latino-majority districts.
More importantly, the case was influential in the 2018 passage of the Washington State Voting Rights Act, or WVRA. Under that law, there is a path outside the courts for citizens to request a change to local election systems that violate the Act — generally to switch from at-large to district-based elections. The idea is to provide a way for municipalities to address violations without an expensive legal process.
“There are so many jurisdictions that have the same flawed structure — at-large systems that are diluting the votes of communities of color,” Baker said.
So far, Yakima and Franklin counties have switched to district-based elections for their county commissions to settle separate lawsuits under the WVRA brought by voters. The voters were aided by OneAmerica in Yakima County and League of United Latin American Citizens in Franklin County.
The Wenatchee School District switched to district-based elections, starting in 2023, for its school board. More recently, Empowering Latina Leaders & Action and the Sunnyside School District reached a settlement in which the district will implement a district-based voting system in 2025.
Baker hopes that municipalities will ultimately be able to identify and address violations in their voting systems without being pushed by legal action. This new approach is likely going to be less expensive and more collaborative.
In 2022, the Yakima City Council completed a redistricting plan that included a third Latino-majority district. The district was drawn based on feedback from voters and advocacy organizations, including the ACLU of Washington and the South Central Coalition of People of Color for Redistricting. The seat in the new Latino-majority district will be up for election in 2025.
“It makes me hopeful that people and city leadership have come to recognize the importance of ensuring that no part of their community is silenced,” Baker said.