The Supreme Court last week declined to overturn a superior court denial of a preliminary injunction that would have stopped the use at this year’s election of a newly drawn district map for the San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors.
Although denying the preliminary injunction, the lower court concluded a lawsuit had a “probability of success” in establishing a violation of the state’s new FAIR MAPS Act because “the Board did not proceed in the manner required by law when it failed to consider evidence that the Adopted Map favored or discriminated against a political party.” A San Luis Obispo Tribune editorial says the map, which was “approved by the three conservative members of the Board of Supervisors, radically adjusted decades-old boundaries to give Republicans the advantage in three of the five districts, even though Democrats hold a countywide majority.”
The court denied preliminary relief because, it said, the likelihood of ultimate success in the continuing case was outweighed by “a substantial risk of harm to the County and the public as a whole” because of various factors, including “the time sensitive nature of the duties of the County’s Clerk Recorder” and “considerations of comity and judicial restraint.” However, the court acknowledged that allowing the upcoming election to proceed based on the challenged map “is an imperfect outcome.”
Five days after the superior court’s ruling, the petitioners filed in the Supreme Court a supersedeas petition and a stay request. (SLO County Citizens for Good Government, Inc. v. County of San Luis Obispo.) The Supreme Court denied the petition the next day, but did so “without prejudice to any challenge brought after the trial court’s final determination on the merits.” The brief denial order quoted from an earlier opinion: “A trial court does not abuse its discretion in denying equitable relief where ‘the propriety of preliminary relief turns upon difficult estimates and predictions from a record which is necessarily truncated and incomplete’ and ‘[n]either the trial court nor this court could undertake a final adjudication of plaintiffs’ lawsuit under such circumstances.’ ”