On Tuesday morning, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors will take up the process of redrawing the lines dividing nearly 10 million residents into five districts. It's gonna be a showdown, with Latino political power at issue.
Why should you care?
In a Q&A below, Jessica Levinson -- a Loyola Law School professor and moderator of a recent Zócalo Public Square panel on redistricting -- makes the case for why this really matters.
Q: What's at stake in the Los Angeles County redistricting process -- for the supervisors and for county residents?
The composition of the little-known, but nonetheless uber-powerful, Board of Supervisors will be determined in the Los Angeles County redistricting process. This mighty group is limited to three consecutive four-year terms. The group is so powerful that it has been nicknamed the "five kings."Every 10 years we count how many people live in legislative districts throughout the country, including the five supervisorial districts for the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors. Boundary lines are drawn based on the number and local and residents in those districts. This redistrict process occurs to ensure that residents in each district are fairly represented.
Q: Why should your average citizen -- or non-citizen -- care about this fairly obscure process?
The five-member, non-partisan county Board of Supervisors make up the county's governing body. Their decisions can have sweeping, significant repercussions for the residents of the County.With only five members and so many residents in the county, each member represents (almost) 2 million people. About 25 percent of the state's residents live in Los Angels County. Therefore, these five individuals wield enormous influence. Again, the way the boundary lines are drawn will help to determine who can be victorious in each of those five districts.
Q. So why isn't anyone really paying attention to the county's redistricting? Do you expect that to change when board hearings start next week?
First, the independent redistricting, which has just released its final maps for state and congressional legislative districts, sucked up much of the oxygen in the redistricting debate.The Board of Supervisors will hold a public hearing about proposed boundary lines next week, and I expect politicos, policy wonks, and interested persons will then turn part of their attention to the County's redistricting process.Second, who among us can even name all of the members of the Board of Supervisors? If we can't name them, and possibly don't know what they do, we're not going to be particularly enthralled by the process of drawing new boundary lines for them.
What's going on, essentially, is that two factions of the board are at odds over whether to keep things pretty much the same or to radically alter boundaries in order to create a second majority-Latino district.
Last month, a 4-6 vote of the supervisors' appointees on a redistricting committee revealed that split. Representatives of Spervisors Mark Ridley-Thomas and Gloria Molina were in favor of the big change, which would see much of the South Bay moved from Don Knabe's Fourth District into the Third District, now represented by Zev Yaroslavsky with Santa Monica and Malibu and the western San Fernando Valley.
Representatives from Knabe, who could face a serious threat from a variety of Latino Democratic challengers if his district shifted inland, were joined by those representing Yaroslavsky and Michael Antonovich in opposing that plan. They favored a more-or-less status quo "benchmark" plan that was voted 6-4 out of the redistricting committee.
The benchmark plan is before the supervisors Tuesday morning, but other plans -- including the one supported by Molina's and Ridley-Thomas' representative -- are expected to come up.
Here's our map showing the two main competing plans from the story I wrote last week:
When I was reporting that, it seemed like such a fascinating story, and I was surprised it had gotten virtually no attention. Well, the tide has apparently turned now that the statewide redistricting in Sacramento is starting to wrap up.
The Los Angeles Times, which ran its story on the "epic redistricting battle" over the weekend, has a great Google maps tool for you to check out. And D.J. Waldie today has a post on the issue over at KCET. And the Patch sites in the region have posted about this too.
Anyway, I'll be watching tomorrow. I know a number of South Bay elected officials intend to go to the downtown board meeting to ask that their cities remain in Knabe's Fourth District.
If you want to watch (sure to be fun!), the online broadcast is here. The agenda and board report -- with more detailed maps -- are here.
Another board meeting on redistricting is expected Sept. 6.
* edited post
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