On Wednesday, on the first day of a three-day meeting, the California Citizens Redistricting Commission sat down to begin working through the process of turning proposed groupings of communities across the state into new district maps for state and federal representation.
The 14-member commission met with staff in Los Angeles but the meeting was available on its website. The public will be able to watch all three days of the meeting there.
On Tuesday, the commission released “visualizations,” which are mapped scenarios for how communities could be grouped into new districts for Congress, State Assembly and the state Senate.
Those visualizations weren’t received well by local officials on Tuesday, as they showed Lake County grouped far differently than it is currently.
That prompted the Board of Supervisors to vote to send a letter to the commission asking it to move the county into other potential district boundaries.
Under the visualizations presented on Tuesday, Lake might be placed with a large group of North Coast counties for Congress and the State Assembly, and with Napa and Solano counties for the state Senate. All of its current alignments would no longer be in place.
When the commission began its meeting on Wednesday afternoon, Chair Trena Turner told the members, “Time is not our friend,” in light of the amount of work to be done.
After a closed session that ran nearly an hour and a half, the commission returned to open session to begin going over Voting Rights Act requirements and public input statistics.
They started with the State Assembly Districts for the North Coast region, the large area running up the coast that includes Lake, Mendocino, Humboldt, Del Norte, Trinity, and portions of Siskiyou and Sonoma counties.
Commissioner Pedro Toledo, who hails from Sonoma County, said Lake has provided testimony that it wants to be paired with Sonoma.
As the discussion began, staff pointed out challenges with making large shifts, as it would have a large ripple effect and impact other areas. They also said that the commission’s previous direction had been to not have boundaries run across the Golden Gate Bridge.
Later in the meeting, some of the commissioners said they were willing to cross the bridge if necessary to get the right boundaries dialed in.
As the meeting progressed, some different options and alternatives were suggested.
One that appeared to pique interest was made by Commissioner Jane Andersen, a civil and structural engineer who lives in Berkeley, who suggested creating a wine country district that could include parts of Sonoma, Napa, Lake and Yolo counties.
Other commissioners suggested modifications to add more portions of Sonoma County, and as the discussion progressed, it was suggested that there might be more than one wine country district.
No firm decisions were made and the commission adjourned early Wednesday evening.
The meeting is scheduled to take place from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Thursday and 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Toledo told Lake County News in a Tuesday interview that the work being done at this week’s meeting will be used to draw maps in the coming weeks.
Those maps, in turn, will be the basis for getting to the final district boundaries, which must be completed in December, as they will be used for the June primaries.
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California Citizens Redistricting Commission begins refining scenarios for new maps
- Elizabeth Larson
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