City Heights could be hub of new 9th District

By Margie M. Palmer | Reportero SDUN

The Latino Redistricting Committee has proposed that a cluster of mid-city neighborhoods be amalgamated to form San Diego’s new 9th District.

The LGBT Redistricting Task Force supports the proposal, hopeful that District 3 lines will be redrawn to include neighborhoods that show strong support for gay rights.

If approved, the proposed 9th District map would link eastern neighborhoods of District 3, northern neighborhoods of District 8, and southeastern neighborhoods of District 4, including but not limited to Talmadge, Kensington, City Heights, Golden Hill, Fairmont Park, Ridgeview, Mount Hope, Mountain View, and others. It would be approximately 57.8 percent Latino, and it would be the city’s second Latino district.

The proposed map is just one of several San Diego’s Redistricting Commission is considering.

San Diego Latino Redistricting Committee Chair Mario Camirillo said that the proposal for the new 9th District is based on U.S. Census data. That data, he said, shows that the middle of the city has the second highest concentration of Latinos outside of the District 8 neighborhoods of Barrio Logan and San Ysidro.

LGBT Redistricting Task Force representative Linda Perine said the Latino Redistricting Committee drew a map to create a second Latino Empowerment District “based on the population density of Latinos in that area.” Perine said, based on the proposed lines of the Latino Empowerment District, that District 3, typically known as the “gay district,” would “make a couple of concessions in terms of [Eastern neighborhoods such as] City Heights, Kensington and Talmadge. “But we could make them up by including other neighborhoods to the west, such as Banker’s Hill, Mission Hills, Middletown, downtown and Little Italy, which have the strongest commitment to LGBT rights,” she said.

That commitment, she notes, is based on “No on Prop. 8” votes, the number of registered domestic partnerships within those areas, the number of people who support the Human Rights Campaign and density of businesses belonging to the GSDBA.

Perine also believes that the boundaries being proposed by the Latino Redistricting Committee make sense based on the increased size of the Latino community in San Diego.

“They drew their map and [based on the size of the Latino population in that area]; the operating theory is that the [Federal and California] Voting Rights Act requires a second [district] be created,” she said.

Passed in 1965, after voters with limited fluency in English were essentially shut out of elections, the Voting Rights Act guaranteed protections to ethnic and minority groups to ensure they would not be discriminated against at the ballot box. The California Voting Rights Act, passed in 2001, expands the rights conferred by the Voting Rights Act by making it easier for minority groups to prove that their votes are being diluted.

UCSD associate political science professor Thad Kousser, however, said that fine-tuning [and/or creating] districts has pros and cons.

“Any minority group living in one area does much better under districts, which is why this is a huge part of both the Federal and California Voting Rights Act, both of which protect minority voters from being discriminated against and protect minority rights,” Kousser said in an interview last October.

Protecting the rights of minority groups isn’t the only consideration the Redistricting Commission needs to make, however. A second issue is evaluating population density, as each of the soon-to-be-formed districts will need to be comprised of approximately 140,000 residents.

Political consultant John Dadian said he disagrees with the idea of redrawing district lines to create “minority empowerment districts” because it “gerrymanders” (divides geographic areas into election districts to concentrate the voting strength of one particular group or political party) the process.

“Creating minority empowerment districts could therefore be seen as manipulating geographic boundaries to create partisan, incumbent-protected districts,” he said. “I have no problem when the bulk of [a district] contains a certain community, as long as it’s not gerrymandered and follows other criteria. [But] the problem you get is when they follow the formula and say ‘We want to make this a little bit more of a Latino district’ or ‘We want to make this a little bit more of a gay district,’ and I disagree with that.”

Dadian feels that redistricting based on data indicating how a population might vote on a specific ballot initiative is “just wrong.

“It’s not how redistricting should occur. Setting up a district so a specific point of view can get across on future ballot issues, I think, is improper,” he said.

Camarillo, however, asserts that the Redistricting Committee drew the proposed district lines in accordance
with the Voting Rights Act. “As long as the law is complied with and its requirements are followed, the results will take care of themselves,” he said. “The Voting Rights Act was followed and communities of interest were preserved.

“There are going to be winners and losers in this thing, but what you’re hearing [are] code words that indicate that certain people don’t think other people should have representation to the degree they are represented in the country.”

The Redistricting Commission will make a final decision as to how redraw district maps in mid September.