South Bay voters pass term limits for hospital district board

Out of more than 100 races and measures on ballots across Santa Clara County this November, the single least controversial item flew largely under the radar, garnering little attention and no campaign fundraising.

Measure S, which establishes term limits for the El Camino Healthcare District’s board, passed in a landslide, receiving 92% support as of Sunday. That’s the largest vote share of any ballot item, except for a handful of uncontested races with only a single candidate. The measure will limit board members to serving no more than four full four-year terms, or 16 years in total.

The El Camino Healthcare District is a little-known public agency that oversees El Camino Hospital. The district’s board manages the tax-funded district and serves on the nonprofit hospital’s board of directors.

Ahead of the election, no formal opposition statement was submitted for inclusion in the county’s voter information guide and no campaign spending was reported, either in support or opposition of Measure S. The term limits also won’t have a practical impact for at least the next 16 years, because it only applies to terms that start after Dec. 1, 2026.

The measure’s overwhelming success was likely due, at least in part, to voters’ general support for term limits, said Vivien Leung, an assistant professor of political science at Santa Clara University.

“In California, there aren’t very many term limits on local offices, but there is a lot of appetite for term limits generally,” she told the Mountain View Voice.

Leung pointed to a survey conducted by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, which showed that 70% of respondents supported eight-year term limits for positions including county supervisors, sheriffs and district attorneys.

The caps can also encourage more effective governance, Leung said. If an elected official has unlimited terms, there’s less incentive for meaningful change. She said it can also dissuade newcomers from throwing their hats in the ring.

“It makes it hard if you are a young and up-and-coming person to want to run in those elections,” Leung said. “Name recognition in low-level elections is so important, and if you have been in office for some time, you have that name recognition, so it’s really easy for people to get reelected.”

Near-universal voter support for the measure also reflects a broader national sentiment, Leung said, that “our elected officials are too old and aren’t providing opportunities for younger people to get involved.”

El Camino Healthcare District board member Julia Miller said she didn’t expect support for the measure to be so overwhelming, but she did expect it to pass based on national trends.

“When you look at all the other election returns, people want fresh faces,” Miller said. “It was time for the healthcare district to do it.”

While the measure was wildly popular with voters, it didn’t receive unanimous support among the healthcare district’s current board members. Back in May, the board voted 3-2 — with John Zoglin and George Ting dissenting — to place Measure S on the ballot.

Zoglin, who was first elected in 2008, said at the time that he opposed the measure because it felt like “a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist.” At a June meeting, Ting told the board that he did not recall opposing the measure and ended up voting in favor of the board submitting a formal argument backing it.

The El Camino Healthcare District, founded in 1956, encompasses most of Mountain View, Los Altos and Los Altos Hills, a large part of Sunnyvale, and portions of Cupertino, Santa Clara and Palo Alto.

This story originally appeared in the Mountain View Voice. Christina Casillas is the education and general assignment reporter for the Mountain View Voice.