I spoke about how the northern coastal counties are not happy being linked in with Marin County and even the more urban areas of Sonoma county. The advice I received was to get as many people as possible writing/emailing the commission to remove Marin (and southern Sonoma) from the Congressional and State Senate districts.
Remember Assembly districts are 465,674 people, the new map includes downtown Santa Rosa eliminating Eureka as the largest city of the district. Congressional districts are 702,905 people, the new map goes all the way to Golden Gate Bridge and eliminates Santa Rosa from the majority of Sonoma. The Senate district is 931,349 people, the map goes to SF and includes Santa Rosa.
We know Marin is the bedroom of SF but they have been successful working together, and the commissioners are listening, to link with rural northern calif/somona but not urban SF. Unless we flood the commissioners with comments to remove Marin the maps may not change.
I just wanted to give you feedback that more action than just your letter is needed. Your voices urging the public to make comments will help in the paper, radio and TV. Networking with the boards of Del Norte and Mendocino will also help. The reality of the situation is the that mandatory population of each district requires us to adjoin with counties to our east so we need to identify those counties. Siskiyou, Lake, Glenn and/or Tehama come to mind.
If we want to better control our destiny, and water, we have got to remove Marin from our districts. IN TEN DAYS THE LAST MAPS COME OUT, WE MUST COMMENT NOW. Listed below is the latest press release listing how to respond and the time table.
Thank you for "listening"!
Karen Brooks◼ We Draw The Lines, press statement - Sacramento, CA (July 12, 2011)
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The California Citizens Redistricting Commission is calling on the public to participate in its next steps in drawing final
Congressional, Legislative and Board of Equalization Districts.
The Commission will be meeting this week, July 13-15, to give instructions to its technical line drawers for district maps. The
meetings will be streamed live online and the public will be able to access visualizations on the proposed districts that the Commission will be discussing. Next week the Commission will post updated visualizations and continue the line drawing process in their meetings.
The public will be able to view, beginning Wednesday, July 13th, the latest visualizations of proposed districts that the Commission will be considering in its meetings through an interactive site hosted on the California Statewide Database website. The visualizations will be posted in phases beginning with statewide Board of Equalization and Northern California Legislative and Congressional districts on July 13th. In addition the Commission will be providing the following ways for the public to view visualizations:
◼ Equivalency file (.dbf) - DBFAll of the above can be accessed by visiting the Commission's website at ◼ http://www.wedrawthelines.ca.gov.
◼ Maptitude map layer in a .zip archive (.zip) - CDF
◼ ESRI Shapefile map layer in a .zip archive (.zip) SHP
◼ Google map layer for viewing in Google Earth (.kmz) KMZ
The district visualizations, as well as the livestream of the meetings, can be viewed at ◼ http://www.wedrawthelines.ca.gov. The public is encouraged to view the visualizations and to send comment to the Commissioners at --- Email: votersfirstact@crc.ca.gov or by fax at 916-651-5711.
The Commission is scheduled to release final district maps on July 28th and will vote on adopting those maps on August 15th.
