A Valley Divided

If you live on West Verano Avenue, Lynn Woolsey represents you in Congress. If you live just across Highway 12, on Verano Avenue, Mike Thompson is your representative.
Welcome to the wild and wooly world of redistricting.
In 2001, the town of Sonoma and about half of the Valley were effectively handed over from Lynn Woolsey to Mike Thompson, resulting in a squiggly line that runs more or less around the city limits and up Highway 12. The situation gets a bit dicey in the Springs.
It wasn’t the only change. At the same time, Woolsey picked up a bit of Santa Rosa and an area around Healdsburg. Thompson, whose district stretches from the Napa area to the Oregon border, acquired a new claw reaching around Davis and bumping up against Sacramento. He lost Vacaville, Fairfield and Suisun City to districts 3 and 7.
The congressional lines weren’t the only ones dramatically redrawn. In 2001, Pat Wiggins of the 7th Assembly district lost the Valley to Joe Nation of the 6th, which is why most Sonoma residents now look to Jared Huffman for representation instead of Noreen Evans.
The districts are redrawn every 10 years on the heels of the census to ensure that each congressperson represents nearly exactly the same number of people.
“Population is a starting point, but there are layers of complexity in drawing district boundaries that make sense, and that aren’t necessarily overtly political,” said Sonoma State University professor David McCuan, who teaches a course on California politics.
The process is guided by six principles that have been laid out by U.S. Supreme Court:
– Population equality
– Compactness and contiguity
– Respecting communities of interest
– Minimizing city splits
– Minimizing county splits
– Protecting precedents established under the Voting Rights Act (1965)
A “community of interest” can include neighborhoods, business districts, and ethnic communities that have traditionally lived in that area and can include recent demographic shifts within a district, such as if a ‘newer’ ethnic group migrates into an area previously dominated by another group.
As an example, he mentioned the city of Anaheim, which is part of six different assembly districts, the argument being that the state can’t carve up or water down communities of interest.
The various principles usually clash and in that case, the voters end up being collateral.
Noreen Evans’ assembly district runs over to Santa Rosa – “over the river and through the woods,” as McCuan puts it – whereas Jared Huffman picks up southern Sonoma and Marin. “(Evans) captures Vallejo to ensure the democratic nature of the district,” he said.
Wait, is the democratic nature of the district one of those guiding principles?
Needless to say, redistricting is a heavily politicized process and most of it goes on behind closed doors.
Anyone can make a proposal for how a district is redrawn based on the state database information. The staff and consultants look at all the input, release a proposal, take public comments, then that is passed on to the Legislature. However, there is inevitably a legal challenge to a final plan, so basically the California Supreme Court ends up making the call.
“It’s this giant game of chicken, and transparency goes a long way here,” said McCuan.
Sonoma County is in battleground territory.
“Sonoma County has a bit of an identity crisis. Is it in the Bay Area or not? And the town of Sonoma itself is really at the frontlines or the crossroads depending on how you look at it,” said McCuan. “Sonoma County is in the buffer zone so it serves as a target for slice and dice, especially among Democratic voters. The same is true with Solano County.”
Sonoma and the Springs lie between the traditional Napa wine country and the newer Sonoma wine country, so shifts among some specific census tracts and voter precincts can affect the line.
“The line has to go somewhere,” pointed out Karin MacDonald, director of the Statewide Database, which was established in the early 1990s when the legislature voted to move it out of Sacramento to a separate non-partisan site. The database is housed at UC Berkeley and funded with taxpayer dollars.
She pointed out that sometimes the line moves around for “weird reasons,” where donors live or even the location of a relative’s house. In other cases, no one cared enough to show up at the hearing, so a staffer just took a pencil to the map, or a mouse to the GIS database as it were.
Even Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger can get confused.
When he was pushing for redistricting reform, he held a press conference in Walnut Creek supposedly right on the line that split the neighborhood. Staff at the State Database, which has the precise maps, checked his location and it turned out he wasn’t actually on the boundary.
MacDonald would like to see all the data go online, including the county registrar of voters’ database. The more people playing with the data, the more bugs that are caught.
On one hand, people in a divided area can bend the ear of two representatives. For instance, people in the Sonoma County wine industry often reach out to Noreen Evans and Mike Thompson as well as Jared Huffman and Lynn Woolsey.
It can be a disadvantage, however. MacDonald used to live on the assembly district boundary in Oakland and her tiny little neighborhood, which comprised less than 1,500 people at the time, was split between two assembly districts.
The area was close to the Port of Oakland and neighbors were looking at filing an environmental justice lawsuit against the port for sending trucks through their neighborhood. Had they been on one side of the line, they might have bent their assembly representative’s ear, but a group of 700 people wasn’t sufficient to get the attention of either of the assembly people who represented the area.
Plenty of people have complaints with the current redistricting process.
One complaint is that the legislature is unrepresentative, with Democrats overly represented in northern California and Republicans in southern California, and no one specifically representing a growing group – voters who decline to state their affiliation. A second problem is the excessive influence of interest groups. Since they know how the rules are made, they can have a bigger influence on the game. Term limits do nothing to ease the hyper-politicization of the process.
The recent budget stalemate can be held up as an example of gerrymandering gone wrong. Say the Democrats control the Legislature and they draw up districts to favor Democrats. As a result, the Democrats that are elected are more Democratic and the Republicans more Republican. However, they need a two-thirds majority to pass the budget and might find fewer middle-of-the-road politicians who might cross party lines.
Another factor is the “DTSers,” voters who decline to state party affiliation. This group now comprises some 20 to 25 percent of voters in California, compared to 15 percent in the past, and they have been the fastest growing contingent since 2000. When cutting the districts, party officials are trying to ensure some measure of partisan balance, but if there is a large number of unpredictable DTSers, they tend to over-represent the majority, further polarizing the districts, as districts are drawn to water down the effect of these Decline-to-State voters.
McCuan said this process leads to frequent ballot initiatives where voters fight as if “California is on steroids.”
Prop 11, which voters passed in November, will effect various changes. It takes the authority to establish boundaries from the hands of elected representative and passes it to a 14-member commission. Government auditors will select 60 registered voters from an applicant pool, then pick members by lottery. The commission must be made up of five Democrats, five Republicans and four people from neither party and for the boundary to hold, there must be three votes from the Democrats, three from the Republicans and three from those who don’t have either party affiliation.
Another factor for California’s future will be the May 19 Statewide Special Election – which is a hodgepodge of various deals that came out of the budget wrangling in the Legislature. McCuan said that election will be a big deal both in terms of restructuring the state’s fiscal problems and in fixing the dysfunctional political structure. Whoever controls the governorship in 2010-2011 will have a huge role in the redistricting process.