That's what the initial California redistricting maps showed, placing the uber-blue City of Davis (as in UC Davis) in the same district as the would-be State of Jefferson, meaning far northern California. Here are the comments of Nicole Nixon of Capital Public Radio on that clustering, quoting Paul Mitchell, a redistricting consultant.
Perhaps the biggest head-scratcher according to Mitchell is the state’s northeastern-most district, currently represented by Republican Rep. Doug LaMalfa. Under the commission’s visualization, the district remains a sprawling mass covering Redding, Chico and other rural inland areas, but it also includes a piece that reaches down to encompass Yolo County’s Clarksburg wine region and liberal college city Davis.
“There's going to be a lot of lefty vegetarian, latte-drinking Davisites calling into the commission, I think, to tell them that they do not want to be put into that district,” Mitchell said.
Indeed, several Davis residents called into the commission’s public comment period Thursday evening and asked to be grouped with communities in Yolo and surrounding counties, citing shared transportation, water sources and interests with those areas.
Some commission members also questioned why Butte County was separated from neighboring Yuba and Sutter counties, which also have shared interests.
Ultimately, Mitchell predicts the proposed district will change significantly before final drafts are released later this year.
By Tuesday, November 2, the situation had shifted:
New “visualization” drafts released late Monday show slight changes in the Sacramento region’s potential congressional maps.
Davis has been moved out of a district encompassing rural northeastern California and into a district that includes parts of Yolo, Solano and Contra Costa counties.
West Sacramento is also in that district, now separated from the city of Sacramento. San Joaquin County is split between two congressional districts, rather than three.
And while the maps still contain a district that combines northeast Sacramento County communities with cities in western Placer County, the city of Folsom has been moved to a district that includes most of the Sierra and the far eastern reaches of the state.
Stay tuned for more details. In the interest of full disclosure, I applied two years ago to be on California's Redistricting Commission, but I was disqualified in the first round, almost certainly because of my record of contributions to Democratic Party candidates.
No comments:
Post a Comment