First Draft Of Suggestions For Next Alaska Redistricting Board

 

Lessons

Starting from scratch every ten years is hard Need way to maintain institutional memory Start much earlier  Get professional help Don't require local areas to make 40 district maps Do map making sessions with public at public hearings Enforce:  board members not selected based on party affiliation Guidance to Board on Alaska constitution, laws, and court decisions regarding redistricting should be public Better rules about incumbents:  Not protecting incumbents should be paired with not target incumbents

I think it might be helpful for everyone involved in this process to think about what happened and write up some lessons learned for the next Board.  People playing different roles will see different things.  

So I'm starting my list now before I forget things.  This won't be the 'final report' but at least I'm doing a first draft

What have I learned from this round of redistricting?

Maybe I should start with lessons learned from the 2010 round of redistricting:  

1.  We aren't done yet.  If the courts agree with any of the lawsuits, the Board will be reconvened and begin mapping again. It will be easy if just Skagway or East Anchorage needs to be changed.  Calista has the potential to have wide ranging statewide impacts if Tyonek is pushed back into the Kenai Peninsula Borough.  The Valdez-Mat-Su complaints will require significant remapping and strong opposition from Doyon which worked hard to get all its communities and Ahtna communities into one giant (physically) district.  

2.  The 2021 Proclamation Plan will probably be the plan for the 2022 election.  June 1 is the deadline for state candidates to file for office.  I wasn't exactly sure the timeline so I checked with Board executive director.  His response was: 

"We expect a decision on Feb 15. The timeline is that appeals have to be filed in 2 business days. So if the decision comes Tuesday the 15th, appeals are due by Thursday the 17th. The court will convene a status hearing, likely by Monday, Feb 21.  Appeal briefs are due 10 days later, or about March 2. Appellee’s response is due 5 days after that, and then the court will likely hold an oral argument the week of the 14th or 21st of March. If the court sticks to the appellate rule, it will decide the appeal by April 1.

I think the idea here is that an April 1ish decision would give the Board some time to potentially resolve a remand order (make a change) with enough time for Div Elections to still do their job properly leading up to June 1.  But of course, if it's a complicated remand (like start over), that could be very difficult."

And I would add, if the revision is challenged, there probably won't be time and the new Proclamation Plan districts (the ones being challenged) would be used.   

3.  The Board might want to start mapping new options right now.  Let me rephrase that because the Board does NOT want to do that.  Why do possibly unnecessary work?  But they could get started before the final court verdicts are in.  At the very least they will know what the Superior Court decision is by Wednesday.  And they have a meeting already set for Wednesday at 11am.  The hardest adjustment will be, as I said above, if the Mat-Su/Valdez and Calista cases win.  The other two they should be able to fix easily.  But to the extent that Board members have vested interests in the existing maps, that's another reason to delay so that the current Proclamation Plan goes into effect for the 2022 election.  

Suggestions For The Next Board (The Legislature May Have To Help With This)

1.  Starting from scratch every ten years is difficult -  To rev up a brand new organization every ten years has some advantages but also some real problems.  The Board members don't get appointed until the decennial census year.  That was 2020 this round.  They then have to find office space, get equipment, hire administrative staff, hire legal counsel, learn all the rules, learn the mapping technology, figure out how to do the public participation road show (I really don't like that term, it makes it sound like it's superficial and it emphasizes the "show" part and not the listen part.  

On the plus side, you get fresh perspectives and new ideas.  But there has to be better continuity and some sort of institutional memory established.  

2. There should be a way to maintain some institutional memory - Perhaps having a state agency that's responsible for keeping up the Board's website, and ideally an employee who was involved with the Board who can help get basic things done for the Board.  \

The last Board's website disappeared.   And even it it had been kept alive, much of the material would have disappeared because it was on various State websites which got cleared when new governors got elected.  The best available record for the public of what happened in the 2010 cycle is my redistricting page with an annotated index of all my posts.  And a lot of my links are bad because the Board's documents are gone.   That isn't how it should be for an important government agency.  

Peter Torkelson tells me he's doing what he can to make sure the current Board's website is preserved. But that responsibility should be institutionalized, not just depend on a former Board employee. 

3.  Start much earlier - This current Board should leave a todo list and a time schedule for the next Board and even meet with them early on.  Steve Colligan, Mat-Su's redistricting/mapping consultant said that they began planning for redistricting five years ago.  They were keeping up with changes in the Census Bureau's advances in technology and data.  They started mapping ideal districts early.  Sure, you're working in a  bit of a vacuum because you don't know the ideal size of a district.  But by the time you get that information, you've spent a lot of time working the mapping software and overcoming technical obstacles.  He also said he has highly skilled GIS people to do much of the work.  This Board got appointed in the second half of 2020.  They didn't start playing with the software until July 2021.  They may have learned some basics quickly, but they are still amateurs. 

4.  Get professional help - Even if the software gets much easier to use in the next ten years, Board members learning it on-the-job is not a good model.  I know the Board members believe they got proficient and did a good job, and that's probably true.  But a trained, skilled GIS person knows a lot of tricks hidden in the software and lots of shortcuts.  I suspect Board member Simpson had the right approach - he says he didn't actually.  I've taken a couple of semester long university level classes in Photoshop and I can do a number of things, but the software has capabilities way beyond my level.  

5.   Don't require local areas to make 40 district maps - This Board's attorney explained in court that they required local governments to do whole 40 district maps, not just do maps of their area.  The justification was that it's easy to just do your area, but that you have to the whole state to see how your boundaries affect other districts.  That's logical, but it's also an easy excuse to not pay attention to what local people do.  It's the Board's job to listen to what local areas want and to try to incorporate them into a whole state map, not local communities.  

6.  Do map making sessions with public at public hearings where the Board techs work with local residents to try to fix boundaries that work with other areas' concerns.

7.  Enforce:  board members not selected based on party affiliation

8.  Guidance to Board on Alaska constitution, laws, and court decisions regarding redistricting should be public

9.  Better rules about incumbents:  This round's Board made a rule not to protect incumbents.  That's fine, but only if they also have a rule not to target incumbents.  

My granddaughter has a serious sibling rivalry with my laptops.  So this is going to have to do for now. This is just a first draft.  I'll also try to make a list of things the Board did well later.  And I'd encourage Board members, staff, the public, and others to make suggestions too.