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After hundreds of hours of fierce debate and controversy, Santa Clara County is very close in finalizing its political boundaries.
On Tuesday, the Board of Supervisors voted 3-2 to advance a variation of the yellow map, known as draft 90195, introduced by Supervisor Cindy Chavez.
The yellow map, which has been considered a controversial option by conservatives, was advanced by a coalition of local civil rights and labor groups.
The yellow map, previously known as the Unity Map, went through several variations. At the Tuesday board meeting, supervisors had nine different maps to consider.
Supervisors Otto Lee, Susan Ellenberg and Chavez voted in favor of the 90195 map. Supervisors Joe Simitian and Mike Wassermann voted against it.
The 90195 map, like the yellow map, creates a “majority-minority” Asian-Pacific Islander district in District 3 and maintains a high Latino influence district in District 2.
It also has a deviation of 4.1% which means it has relatively the same amount of people living in each of the county’s five districts.
Like all maps before the board, it splits San Jose into each of the five districts because of its high population and large city limits.
However, it removes Los Gatos and Almaden Valley from District 1 and places them in District 5 — which has been highly contested by conservative voices in the county — who accused the map of gerrymandering. They argued it would dilute conservative power in District 1 by removing those areas that tend to vote conservative.
The map has also prompted legal questions from opponents because it would exclude two District 1 candidates from running for that district — former San Jose City Council member Johnny Khamis, who represented the Almaden area, and Los Gatos Vice Mayor Rob Rennie.
They argued that Chavez should’ve been barred from voting on the maps because of alleged conflicts of interest since she participated in a fundraiser for District 1 supervisor candidate Morgan Hill Mayor Rich Constantine. They also pointed to her previous employment with the South Bay Labor Council and Working Partnerships USA, which both participated in creating the yellow map.
However, Chavez said the 90195 map was an improvement of the yellow map because it reduces population imbalance in districts, provides better representation to historically marginalized communities in county politics and keeps district boarders compact and clear.
The map unites the Evergreen area in southeast San Jose, doesn’t split the Willow Glen neighborhood and uses Capitol Expressway and the Guadalupe as natural district boundaries.
Wasserman instead advocated for the EE 2.0 Map which was discarded at a meeting last month. However, he said it was worthy of consideration because it had the lowest deviation of any of the maps at 1.2%. The state guideline is 10%.
The county will post the final map by Friday to give the public three days to review the map before it is formally adopted on Dec. 14.
Supervisors directed county surveyors to prepare a description of the revised supervisorial boundaries and asked county counsel to report back with a resolution on Dec. 14 regarding redistricting plans.
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Given this article is posted for the Mountain View Voice, too bad its focus is really on just San Jose. For our city, there is an important point that the map draws a line between Mountain View and Sunnyvale. Local readers should be made aware of this through the Voice.
Whenever in a districting map you see long, skinny districts, like the brown one, or districts with very weird shapes that resemble a salamander, like the red one, you can be sure that gerrymandering is going on.
I think ALL the coverage of this issue lacks reasonable perspective. The truth that’s especially relevant to us is that our District 5 rep Simitian has become the one with the LARGEST population. We have GROWN the most in population of all the districts. That’s an important local perspective!!! According to the county’s web site, here’s the data for when the county was at 1.8 million a couple years ago, reflecting the growth during the first 2/3 of the 10 year period the lines were in effect. District 5 is then 32,000 and 34,000 residents larger than the smallest 2 districts. The average then is 360,000, so that means we have about 10% less representation than we should, allowing for continued imbalance in growth since that point. We have to alter the boundaries of District 5 somehow to reduce the population and increase it in the other districts.
Sunnyvale has been SPLIT between 2 districts. District 5 only has PART of Sunnyvale which now totals over 150,000 residents. An important goal is to unite both pieces of Sunnyvale under one district. Doing that reduces District 5 too much so some other smaller cities needed to be tacked on to it. It all makes sense, and it’s not gerrymandering by any stretch.
San Jose now has population equal to about what should form 2.5 districts. Previously it was closer to 3 full districts….
Ah yes, and it is worth noting that the part of Sunnyvale that is NOT in our supervisorial district is the MAIN part of Sunnyvale–all of downtown Sunnyvale and most of the industrial park area. Very little of Sunnyvale is under Simitian now, mainly the part that lies south of El Camino Real but also a small portion below Central Expressway but above ECR. For all practical purposes Sunnyvale has been in a different district all along!