DRAWING LINES

When a powerful politician voluntarily agrees to give up power, watch your back. When a powerful politician voluntarily agrees to give up power immediately after a smashing political victory, watch your back while keeping your hand firmly on your most important possessions (you decide which possessions you consider the most important). While there are rare instances when politicians voluntarily give up power, they are so rare that one has to treat each such occurrence with extreme skepticism.

And, so, I am skeptical when I hear reports that our own State Senator Don Perata, the Senate Democratic leader, has announced that he will work with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to remove the responsibility of legislative redistricting from the state legislature and put it in the hands of something Mr. Perata is calling an "independent commission." (Independent from whom, one asks.) House Speaker Fabian Nuñez has also expressed interest in the idea. My skepticism rises because both Mr. Perata's and Mr. Nuñez' willingness to advance this issue comes immediately after California voters overwhelmingly rejected Proposition 77, the initiative that would have put redistricting in the hands of a panel of three retired judges. Why do California's top Democratic legislative leaders want to even consider taking redistricting out of the legislature's hands, now that the public pressure to do so has eased off?

For most citizens, going through the legislative redistricting process is like taking our car to an auto mechanic. We know we're getting screwed. We're just not sure exactly how.

This is a complicated subject, too much to explain in a short column, so let's just share some preliminary thoughts.

In Oakland, as a good example, there are seven City Councilmembers elected from what is called "single member districts" (that is, one Councilmember is elected for each district). (There's also an 8th Councilmember elected by all of the voters in the city.) By federal and state law and numerous judicial decisions, each one of these Councilmember districts must represent roughly the same number of citizens. Therefore, at its very basic stages, the drawing of district lines is relatively simple. All you have to do is find out the total population of Oakland and divide that number by seven (for the purposes of this discussion, let's say Oakland has a population of 450,000; that means each district must have a little over 64,000 people in it). To draw those seven 64,000-person Council districts from scratch, you would take a map which includes population figures, start somewhere-say, at the Berkeley border-and draw a line around a geographic that includes 64,000 people, and name that Council District 1. Then you'd move to the next portion of the map, draw a line around the next group of 64,000 people, and so on, until you complete the seven districts.

If that was all there was to it, you could get the average high school class to draw Council districts, state legislative districts, and Congressional districts, and be done with it. But drawing representative districts is a poitical process-it is, in fact, the very essence of the political process, since it involves how we are politically represented-so it is impossible to keep politics out of it. Keep that thought in mind, always, or you won't be able to understand any of the things that happen during this excercise.

When Oakland went to a single-member district system in electing seven of its Councilmembers, the people who were drawing the districts made certain political decisions in how those districts were drawn that have an enormous effect on representation on Oakland's City Council that go far beyond the interests of any single City Councilmember.

You can easily see the course of this decision if you look at an Oakland Council district map and concentrate on the last three districts running to the southeast, Districts 5, 6, and 7 (for clarification purposes we'll identify these as the districts currently represented by Councilmembers Ignacio De La Fuente, Desley Brooks, and Larry Reid; the drawing of these districts lines, however, occurred long before any of these people got into office).

These three districts all run roughly east to west (or hills to estuary) as they go from the downtown area to the San Leandro border. That means that each of these districts take in a portion of the hills, the foothills, and the flatlands. Oaklanders have voted in these districts for so long, that many people think this is the natural way for them to be drawn, the only way for them to be drawn, in fact, and cannot imagine them being drawn in any other way.

I wasn't around when these district lines were being drawn, but you can imagine people at the time arguing that drawing these districts in this way would mean that each of the three Councilmembers–Districts 5, 6, and 7–would have to represent a cross-section of racial and economic neighborhoods (the hills tend to be whiter and richer, with neighborhoods getting darker and poorer as you drop down into the flatlands), and that would make for more representative government in the city. In theory, it means that each of these three Councilmembers has to pay at least some attention to each of these three completely different types of neighborhoods.

(There's an argument to be made that under this configuration, the hills actually end up getting better representation in Oakland because of their wealth and racial makeup and better organization, but that's a discussion for another day. For now, let's just stick with the theory.)

It's actually pretty easy to imagine a completely different way of drawing the last three Oakland City Council lines that would end up with a completely different makeup of the City Council. Instead of drawing the lines of the three southeastern districts hills-to-estuary, suppose you decided to draw them east to west, that is, Lake Merritt-to-San Leandro? Drawing the districts that way, you would end up with one long district at the top roughly representing the hills, a second one representing a long foothill area with, say, MacArthur or Foothill boulevards running through its heart, and a third one representing the flatlands with International Boulevard at its core.

Drawing Oakland's City Council district lines in this way would completely change the makeup of the City Council. Would it make it a better Council? I'm not arguing that point one way or the other, right now. But it would make it different type of Council. And that would be the case, regardless of who was elected to represent those newly-drawn City Council districts. In fact, it would determine who could even run for those Council districts, and who could not.

The discussion around the recently-defeated Proposition 77–and the discussion around the infamous mid-census redrawing of the Texas Congressional districts–all focused on the issue of whether district lines benefit Democrats over Republicans, or vice versa.

In fact, the decision on where district lines are drawn is far more important than that-it's a decision on which communities get represented, which economic interests get represented, which races get represented, and which ones do not.

So far, recently, it's conservatives and Republicans in California who have been making the most noise on this issue. It's time for people who call themselves progressives to start paying more attention, particularly with Mr. Perata and Mr. Nuñez on board this train.

More on this subject, later.