Keep the promise - Will Legislature's Democratic leaders pass a redistricting plan?

Keep the promise - Will Legislature's Democratic leaders pass a redistricting plan?

Fresno Bee, The (CA)

March 3, 2006

California 's system for drawing political districts is dominated by a guy named Gerry Mander, who controls the mapping. Largely because of his artful cartography prior to the last election, not a single legislative seat of 153 changed party affiliation in 2004.

No surprise there. The party bosses designed it that way.

Last year Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger tried to sell voters on Proposition 77, a plan to sideline Mr. Mander and set up an independent commission to draw new political boundaries for Congress, the Legislature and the state Board of Equalization.

Schwarzenegger failed, partly because entrenched Republicans in Congress opposed the plan but also because Democrats such as Don Perata, the Senate president pro tem, and Assembly Speaker Fabian N??ez wanted to trounce all of his initiatives. Perata and N??ez, however, said they would help enact their own plan to reform redistricting .

We keep waiting for that plan.

According to lawmakers, the major sticking point is how to create a commission that is both independent and reflective of California 's diversity. Sen. Alan Lowenthal, D-Long Beach , has proposed a five-member commission, made up of two Democrats and two Republicans, plus an independent member who presumably would cast the deciding vote.

Arizona has such a commission, and for the most part, it has worked well. Some critics, however, say California 's commission should be larger, more reflective of the state's ethnicity and have members selected by lot, not hand-picked by legislators.

That's fine, but California shouldn't go the direction of Missouri , which has 28 commissioners deciding its electoral maps. California already has one governing board with 29 members -- the $3 billion stem cell institute -- and we know how that has worked.

Redistricting is an important part of political reform in California , but expectations must be kept within reason.

A paper last year by the California Policy Institute, affiliated with the University of Southern California , found that few of the 15 state redistricting commissions nationwide were truly independent. Clearly, there isn't a way to completely divorce politics from the process of drawing political districts.

That would be true even if California created a secret redistricting commission and hid it in a bunker somewhere.

Lowenthal's plan may need some modifications, but it doesn't need years of work. N??ez and Perata should bang some heads together, get all the interested parties in the room, and keep their promise to produce a bipartisan redistricting plan in this legislative session.

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Author: THE FRESNO BEE

Section: LOCAL NEWS

Page: B8