The visualizations can be found here.
Last month, the supervisors approved a resolution to the redistricting commission calling for all of Lake County to be kept in a single congressional district that included both Napa and Sonoma counties. The city of Clearlake submitted a similar resolution to the commission.
However, the initial visualizations show Lake County being grouped with Mendocino, Humboldt, Del Norte, Trinity, and portions of Siskiyou and Sonoma counties for its congressional and State Assembly seats, and with Napa and Solano counties for the State Senate.
Based on that initial scenario, Lake County could see all of its representation completely change.
Pedro Toledo, one of the 14 members of the California Citizens Redistricting Commission and a Sonoma County resident, said he can understand why local leaders would be upset.
“These maps are not the final maps. They're not even the draft maps. They are to start conversation,” he said.
Toledo said there will be a lot of changes and refinements before maps are drawn and finalized, noting he has a lot of comments and directions to give those drawing the lines himself.
He said the proposed districts will probably shift, “and they may shift a lot,” and once they get into the actual map drawing phase in a few weeks, more changes can be expected.
The California Citizens Redistricting Commission is due to discuss the latest developments in the process at its visualizations meeting, which takes place from Wednesday through Friday in Los Angeles.
The meeting agenda is here.
It can be viewed via livestream at https://WeDrawTheLinesCA.org/meetings.
The meeting on Wednesday begins at 1 p.m.
To submit your comments, visit the commission website and scroll down to “Visualizations Feedback Form,” which is in the section providing information on the commission’s Oct. 27 meeting, below the welcome text and four action buttons (“Sign Up,” “Participate,” “Request Presentation” and “Visualizations”).
Toledo told Lake County News in a Tuesday night phone interview that the commission is expected to discuss the Northern California visualizations first once it emerges from a planned closed session on Wednesday afternoon.
He said the meeting will be the first opportunity for the commission to sit down and look at the state completely drawn out.
“We’ll be tackling the whole state at that point, starting with the north,” Toledo said.
Toledo said it’s the perfect time for local officials and community members to weigh in on the work so far. “We need community feedback to be able to draw these lines correctly.”
Board voices disapproval for visualizations
A link to the visualizations was released by the commission in an email shortly after 4:30 p.m. Tuesday.
About a half-hour later, the Board of Supervisors emerged from a closed session for department head evaluations and voted to add an extra item to the agenda in order to discuss the visualizations, with Board Chair Bruno Sabatier noting that the matter had come up unexpectedly.
After a short discussion, the board voted unanimously to send a letter to the commission voicing its concerns in response to the initial visualizations.
County Administrative Officer Carol Huchingson said her staff, including Deputy Administrative Officer Matthew Rothstein, had worked quickly to draft the letter, which can be seen below.
Supervisor Jessica Pyska read a line from the commission’s email announcing the visualizations, which said, “You told us which communities you wanted to be grouped together with, and which you did not want to be grouped with, and we listened. This week's new set of visualizations is based upon feedback given to the line drawing team by the commissioners during the last round of deliberations.”
She and other board members said they didn’t feel like the commission had listened to them based on what was presented on Tuesday.
“If they are saying they listened, they went exactly opposite of what we asked them to do,” said Sabatier.
Clearlake City Manager Alan Flora, who joined the meeting via Zoom, said the city also is “extremely concerned” and plans to submit a letter similar to the board’s.
“It’s very troubling that all of our state and federal representation would change,” Flora said.
That’s a concern that Sabatier said flustered him, and board members felt the result of the redistricting process so far appears detrimental for the county.
The final version of the letter notes that the total loss of alignments in the county’s State Assembly, State Senate and congressional districts, “would be a great disservice to Lake County at what is a critical time.”
Lake County’s unique concerns
Toledo told Lake County News in a September interview that the commission’s goal, based on requests from local officials and residents, was to keep Lake County and its cities together as much as possible, and that the census data would tell the commission if it could do that.
So far, Lake County is being kept together as a whole in the visualizations. However, Toledo said there are still multiple scenarios for how it could ultimately be settled in a new district.
While the visualizations have Lake County either wrapped into a larger North Coast district or put with Napa and Solano counties, Toledo said there are other options as well.
“There is quite a bit of discussion on the commission on where Lake County should land,” Toledo said.
Over the last couple of weeks, based on community input, Toledo said some commissioners are seeing Lake County more closely connected to Mendocino and the far north.
“We also see the connection that Lake County has with Napa and Sonoma,” Toledo said, explaining that those are the areas Lake County has been connected to in public input.
Ultimately, he said it really will come down to the input from Lake County residents, governments and businesses, as well as the surrounding communities.
He said the commission has not received any input from nearby communities that don’t want to be with Lake County — which they have had happen for some other counties.
“Everyone is very receptive to having Lake in their area,” he said.
He said the commission will take input from Lake County and do all it can to make sure it’s in the district where its residents and leaders want it to be.
The process so far and what’s to come
The commission has been at work since last year preparing to begin drawing the new boundaries, a job that happens every 10 years, with the release of the new census data.
In late September, the commission received data it needed from the US Census Bureau, which was itself delayed in its work by the pandemic.
The University of California, Berkeley, made additional adjustments to the data to account for state requirements to count prison inmates in their home counties in order for the commission to start its process.
The state redistricting commission had an initial deadline to complete its work by Dec. 15. Toledo said they asked the California Supreme Court to have the deadline moved back to Jan. 14 to make sure county elections offices would have time to implement the final maps, which will be used for the June primaries.
Instead, the Supreme Court gave the commission until Dec. 27, which he said is challenging due to being in the middle of the holidays.
Even so, he thinks the commission is on schedule to get its work done, and in the process offer more public opportunity for input than was done 10 years ago through the visualization process, which is new.
Challenges this year include accounting for the loss of one congressional seat in California, bringing the total to 52. Toledo said each district must have 750,000 residents in it. The State Assembly districts have more discretion.
There are other criteria as well, including voting rights rules. “It's like putting a jigsaw puzzle together,” he said.
Once the commission received the census data, it started the process of visualizing, which is where it is now. That step has involved working to align communities of interest data with the data from the Census Bureau, Toledo explained.
Toledo said the commission has gone through many iterations of the visualizations over the last couple of weeks.
He said over the next two weeks the commission will finalize the visualizations before moving into the draft maps. “We’ve been getting so much community feedback and input form across the state of California,” said Toledo, adding that he thinks they have tackled most of the difficult issues.
When the commission gets to the map drawing, it will use a live drawing process that allows them to take more community input. Toledo said those on-the-spot drawings will allow people to see what the commission is thinking.
They’ll start with State Assembly districts, which Toledo said tend to be building blocks of the State Senate districts.
Toledo emphasized that community input is critical at this stage.
For information on how to participate, visit the commission’s website. Members of the public also can sign up for notifications from the commission here.
Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.
102621 Lake County Letter of Opposition by LakeCoNews on Scribd
092821 BOS resolution on redistricting by LakeCoNews on Scribd