Politics & Government
Sparks Fly Over Redistricting Proposals
Supporters of rival redistricting proposals clashed at Tuesday night's council meeting.
Two groups presented the City Council with conflicting visions of what revamped council districts could look like at the Tuesday council meeting. The city redraws district lines every decade after the census, so that each council person represents roughly equal numbers of constituents.
One group wants to radically redraw council boundaries to concentrate students, now divided among four districts, into one district. This group further argues that redrawing boundaries in this way will coincidentally create a district where Asians, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders — half the UC student body, they say — are concentrated, thus giving this population’s interests a greater voice in government.
On Tuesday, Councilmember Gordon Wozniak asked the council, on behalf of this group to delay redistricting deadlines to November, giving organizers time to write their proposal and rally students behind it. This timeline would have drawn new district lines for the 2014 election. The council, however, approved a compromise proposed by Councilmember Kriss Worthington, to move the submittal date from Sept. 16 to Sept. 30, putting new boundaries in place for the November 2012 election.
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The second group presenting its redistricting plan comprises high school, community college and UC Berkeley students, who wrote a straightforward redistricting proposal dubbed Maximum Participation/ Minimum Deviation. Its aim is technical rather than political: to move council district boundaries minimally in order to equalize the number of residents in each, while sticking as close to the 1986 boundaries as possible, as required by the city charter. This group supported the Sept. 16 proposal deadline.
Adding to the conundrum is support for the different proposals by rival councilmembers, each of whose districts represent a sizable number of students: Wozniak, District 8, and Worthington, District 7. Wozniak and Worthington often clash over issues and have supported each other’s opponents at election time since 2002.
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Kristin Hunziker is among the leaders of the group supporting a student/Asian district. She works for a San Francisco political consulting firm and managed the 2010 council campaigns for Wozniak and George Beier; Beier ran unsuccessfully against Worthington three times. A UC Berkeley graduate, Hunziker said she’s working with the group pro bono. “George [Wozniak] and I started talking [about a student district] shortly after the election,” Hunziker told Patch.
Of note, as well, is that Worthington’s office is involved with the group that wrote the Maximum Participation/Minimum Deviation proposal; a number of participants are students interning in his office. Worthington’s aide, Alejandro Soto-Vigil, in his private capacity, is also supporting this group’s efforts.
Hunziker addressed the council, urging the November deadline for redistricting proposals. “We think that the September deadline does not give students enough time to be involved,” she said. “Most students are gone from Berkeley — they’re at home; they’re working.”
Shahryar Abbasi, senator-elect for the Associated Students of the University of California (ASUC), spoke in favor of a student-dominated district. Students “are gerrymandered and split among four different districts,” he said. “This has negatively affected the student voice and has silenced over 36,000 students, rather than giving us one comprehensive, total voice. It is unjust; it is unequal.”
The question of creating a student/Asian district was raised by Michael Wagaman, redistricting consultant with Golden Gate Consulting, working pro bono with two ASUC officers. He said that under the Voting Rights Act, the city should create a district to enfranchise Asian residents, now scattered among various districts.
Wagaman was among the students in 2001 that proposed a student district, a concept rejected by the city attorney, who said the plan violated the city charter’s mandate to keep district boundaries close to those established in 1986. Wagaman is now arguing that the city charter might be obstructing the rights of people of Asian origin to have their interests expressed in a unique council district.
“What federal law says,” Wagaman said, “is that if you can draw a majority minority district — which means half of the district is made up of a particular population — and you can demonstrate other things like that district is compact, that the people who live there are politically cohesive, that they tend to get outvoted by the other people if they’re broken up, then under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, a jurisdiction may be compelled to draw that particular district.”
Worthington aide Soto-Vigil, however, argued before the council that the Voting Rights Act was written so that people in the south would not be disenfranchised by measures such as poll taxes. “That’s why that statute was put in,” he said, “not to deal with Berkeley’s 1986 boundaries.”
Ché Sanders who helped write the Maximum Participation plan chided the student/Asian district group for asking to extend the submission deadline. “We came up with the first redistricting proposal in less than one week,” he said.
The redistricting packet is available on the City of Berkeley's website. There is a $35 fee for submitting a complete packet proposal (including maps and digital files on a CD), a $20 fee for maps only, and a $5 fee for digital versions on CD.