As Santa Barbara County gets set to tackle the Herculean task of supervisorial redistricting, a series of poorly attended workshops has county officials and others bemoaning a lack of public interest in the issue.
Fifth District Supervisor Steve Lavagnino said supervisors had hoped to see more citizen input in the process, but thought the subject matter might be “too dry” for the average person.
“We just haven’t had the turnouts I thought we would,” Lavagnino said. “People talk a lot about redistricting, but when it really gets down to it, they don’t want to go to a meeting. What I’m taking from this is people are saying, ‘You know what? You’re the elected officials; just do it the way it’s supposed to be done.’”
Supervisors had originally planned to hold just two public workshops, but they eventually decided on six to give locals throughout the county an equal opportunity to weigh in on the changes. Only a handful of residents turned out for redistricting meetings in Santa Barbara, Lompoc, and Guadalupe; attendance was up, however, for the Santa Maria workshop on May 25.
Several of the roughly 20 attendees expressed concern about how the district changes would affect the Latino population of Santa Maria and whether the new lines would divide the city’s Spanish-speaking population. Others expressed hopes the county’s political power balance would shift, in line with population, from Santa Barbara to Santa Maria.
The 5th District gained 16,752 people from 2000 to 2010, according to the U.S. Census, while the other four districts saw marginal—or even negative—growth.
Workshop attendee Kenneth Wolf, of Orcutt, said he thought Guadalupe should share a district with Santa Maria, because of the natural link between the two cities.
“When there’s an emergency, Santa Maria responds to Guadalupe, not Lompoc,” he said. “People in Guadalupe need those resources. They need an input and say in that.”
Wolf called the public workshops “very important” and said he was disappointed more people hadn’t attended.
“Here you have people who have an exact say, an input, in how these supervisorial districts are going to be,” Wolf said. “More people sit home and complain, rather than becoming involved in something like this. The real question is: Why weren’t they here?”
On the other hand, assistant to the county CEO Dennis Bozanich, who mediated the workshop series, said he was pleased with the turnout in Santa Maria. When it comes to actively choosing elected representatives, he said, the redistricting process is just as significant as voting and should be considered as such.
“If we’re a representative democracy, then it’s about the representation we have that gets really critical,” he said. “It’s the redistricting, then, [besides voting] that’s the other process of really helping to determine who represents us.”
In Santa Barbara County, each new district must closely match a target number of 84,779 residents. Drawing up a valid map seems easy on the surface, but with major population centers on opposite sides of the county, there’s a lot for supervisors to consider. They also have to keep communities together while conforming to regulations of the Voting Rights Act, especially where it concerns minority voters.
To complicate matters, the Brown Act allows supervisors to speak with only one other board member about preferences. Supervisors had planned on drawing their own maps and having the public comment on them, but thought it would give the impression they had already decided on an option.
As the process moves along, each supervisor will still draw a map, but will rely heavily on members of the public, who can submit their own maps with the help of powerful Geographic Information System (GIS) software, which the county is making available for use by appointment.
“That’s the exciting part, in terms of getting information to the board that they can then evaluate and make some decisions about,” Bozanich said. “It’s about what we talk about here, but the rubber hits the road when they actually sit down with these guys in the GIS sessions and begin to create that map themselves.”
During the workshop series, residents have supplied the county with a wide range of suggestions, and Bozanich said there have been some commonalities in the comments.
“One thread we hear throughout most of the sessions is some level of continuity with their representation they’ve had in the past,” he said. “Generally, they like who represents them, and they would like to maintain their representation.”
Though county officials said they’d prefer to keep cities intact to avoid confusion, with Santa Maria’s population near 100,000, the city will have to be represented by two districts. Supervisor Lavagnino said he wants to keep Santa Maria and Orcutt together and somehow split them so he and 4th District Supervisor Joni Gray can both represent parts of each community.
“You just don’t cut 15,000 people off Santa Maria and put them in the 4th district,” he said. “I’m not sure that’s going to look really good, and I don’t think that’s going to be fair to those people. They’re going to be a little bit disenfranchised.”
Lavagnino called redistricting “the fundamental problem with the state of California” and reinforced the importance of the process.
“If you have that third vote, you do change policy, which could change the budget and the economic outlook,” Lavagnino said. “It’s a very important issue, but to most people, it’s something that’s going on in the political world that they don’t really want to pay attention to, but it really affects their daily life.”
One of the attentive locals is Joyce Howerton, advocacy director of the Santa Barbara County Action Network, who spoke at a
May 23 workshop of her desire to see the city of Lompoc split into two districts.
“For the community, it would be a good thing, because we are off the beaten path over here and oftentimes forgotten,” she said. “With two supervisors representing our area, that’s going to give us a stronger voice, and it’s going to give us more attention.”
Howerton added that she’s surprised by the low turnout for the recent meetings and the general lack of interest in redistricting among the voting public.
“This is going to affect not only our community, whichever community you live in, but it’s going to affect the whole entire county for 10 years,” she said. “This is a major, major issue.”
On July 12, Bozanich will present the results of the public meetings to the board for consideration. Subsequent hearings will take place Aug. 2 and Aug. 9, when supervisors will hear map proposals and try to reach a consensus. The board has a state-imposed deadline of Oct. 31 to have the districts in place, but county officials have expressed desires to wrap up the process well before that date.
Contact Staff Writer Jeremy Thomas at jthomas@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jun 2-9, 2011.