The City Council race in Mission Viejo is notable this year not only because it’s the city’s first election held by-district, but also because voters in all five newly drawn districts will get to choose who they want to represent them.

After a pair of lawsuits roiled the city’s politics this year, the election leaves open the possibility of a dais comprised of entirely new faces. An Orange County judge in June ruled that all five seats would be on the ballot this year, and each incumbent has at least one challenger in their district.

In District 1, a trio of new faces are running: Bob Ruesch, a city planning commissioner; Linda Shepard, a businesswoman and mother; and Deborah Cunningham-Skurnik, a small business owner. No incumbents live within the boundaries of the district, which encompasses the northeastern part of the city.

Incumbent Brian Goodell faces a challenger in retired educator Stacy Holmes for District 2, which runs south of Alicia Parkway and east of Marguerite Parkway. In District 3, current council members Greg Raths and Ed Sachs are competing for the same seat, along with Cynthia Vasquez, a small business owner.

Trish Kelley, the incumbent in District 4, is running against Terri Aprati, a corporate paralegal and notary, for that seat. And in District 5, current mayor Wendy Bucknum faces Jon Miller, a former supply chain consultant.

Mission Viejo is one of many cities across the state that switched from at-large elections to by-district in recent years, but the journey getting there has been far from smooth for the south OC municipality.

After the city was sued in 2018 over its at-large method, Mission Viejo’s leaders tried to go a different route for the 2020 election by implementing a system called cumulative voting, which they believed would best address the issue of racially polarized voting.

When they couldn’t get cumulative voting up and running that year due to pushback from the state, they delayed and ultimately scrapped the plan all together, saying they would go with district-based voting in 2022.

A pair of lawsuits this year challenged the terms in office of the council members who were elected in 2018 and in 2020 while the city was working to implement cumulative voting. In both elections, candidates were initially intended to serve two-year terms while city officials worked to get the new method going, but when plans were pushed back and eventually discarded, the council members stayed in office for full four-year terms.

An Orange County Superior Court judge ruled in August that the terms of Bucknum, Raths and Sach, who were elected in 2018, ended in 2020, and he ordered the members removed from the council. Attorneys representing the trio appealed, and an appellate court halted the removal for now.

All five council members who win after Tuesday’s election will serve a four-year term.

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