Redistricting Board Meeting April 5, 2022 - Program Notes Of What's Happening And Why [UPDATED 4/6/22]

[UPDATED Wednesday April 6, 2022 2pm:  Lots of activity in today's Board meeting but in the end only a couple lasting substantive changes:

• Cantwell cutout fix approved by the board
• Randy Ruedrich introduced an amended version of Option 3 that keeps more of the original Proclamation Plan Senate pairings intact (ostensibly to avoid problems from the Court over changes not required by making the ordered changes to Senate seat K)
• Borromeo proposes and Board approves eliminating Option 1 (Bahnke Plan), presumably for the same reasons- minimize the number of changes not required by changing Senate seat K

Meanwhile you can get more of a blow by blow account from Matt Buxton's Twitter feed.)

There was lots of Sturm and Drang, discussion on next meetings, but the above two changes were the key substantive actions.  I'll adjust my section on the Map Options below]

This isn't the post I started to write, but seemed necessary for folks to make sense of things.  I try to identify the players, the goals, and the options for reaching the goals.  

The Board began its meeting at 10am and ended just around 1pm.  Without a break.  (I learned teaching grad students that 90 minutes is a good time for a break.  Two hours maximum.)  A number of issues came up with different speakers, which is, in part, how things should be.  

The Issues to be Resolved

From the Remand from the Superior Court:

1. To correct the Constitutional errors identified by this Court and the Supreme court in Senate District K:
2. To redraw House District 36 to remove the 'Cantwell Appendage'; and 
3. To make other revisions to the proclamation plan resulting or related to these changes.

Put Cantwell back into Denali Borough  - I'm starting with this one because it's the easy one  The Board was asked by Ahtna to reach into the Denali Borough and pull Cantwell into District 36 so all their shareholders would be in one district and the Board complied.  The Board knew it was making the district less compact, but it only affected about 200 people.  The Supreme Court said they couldn't pull Cantwell out of the Denali Borough and put it into District 36. 

This isn't hard.  They just have to put it back and make sure the new map gets the Mat-Su borough pieces back together and the Denali borough pieces back together.  Member Borromeo (I think) made a map to do this.  Member Marcum did as well and today they reported that both maps have the same numbers and details.  Tanner Amdur-Clark, the Doyon attorney who had pushed for this Cantwell cutout testified today he's disappointed, but ok with this.  So it would seem that as early as tomorrow the Board can approve this change which will give the staff time to do the metes and bounds (a verbal description of the boundaries of all three affected districts.

Fix Senate District K which unconstitutionally pairs South Eagle River with South Muldoon.  

This is where all the fireworks are.  Splitting the Eagle River districts into two Senate seats, as Marcum said, would give Eagle River more representation.  And the problem for the Court was that it would give South Muldoon - an ethnically diverse and much poorer district that Eagle River - less representation.  

So what everyone agrees is that 

• the two House districts (22 and 20) have to be split apart; and
• South Muldoon should be paired with North Muldoon.

The fight is over what happens to the now unattached Eagle River district.  

The Board Factions

There are two factions on the Board since November when members Bahnke and Borromeo loudly protested the majority's decision to pair South Muldoon with Eagle River.  I'm dubbing this Bahnke/Borromeo faction of the Board, The B Team.   Both are officially non-partisan and appointed by the officially non-partisan Speaker of the House Bruce Edgmon and by the then Alaska Supreme Court chief justice (Joel Bolger)

The other faction I call the R Team.  All three were selected by Republicans and are officially Republicans.  Simpson and Marcum were appointed by Governor Dunleavy and Binkley was appointed by then Senate President Giessel.  

The Map Options (so far)   [UPDATED Wednesday April 6, 2022 2pm -  The approval of new Cantwell map and changes in map options are the two key changes from today's meeting.   

For reference the  Redistricting Board now has two map options  

• Anchorage Option 2: (The East Anchorage Plaintiffs maps)
• Anchorage Option 3a: (The Randy Ruedrich Map - amended April 6, 2022)

Don't know if they changed the numbers.  Probably.  

The B Team wants to use the Anchorage map that is being called the Bahnke map (though Bahnke says that Simpson helped her with it).  It was presented to the Board around November 8 and has the two Eagle River districts together and North and South Muldoon together in respective Senate seats. But it also differs from the proclamation plan map in other Anchorage Senate pairings no one challenged and the Court didn't object to.  See Anchorage Option 1 - the Bahnke Map.

The R Team is the team that powered the unconstitutional map into being with a 3-2 vote and an unwillingness to discuss it or come up with any alternative or even justification.  (Part of why the Court deemed it illegal political gerrymandering.)  Now, they still want Eagle River to have two seats.  They want to keep North Eagle River/Chugiak paired with JBER, and they've picked the only other district they could find that is contiguous - South Anchorage including the Hillside and going all the way to Girdwood.  See Anchorage Option 2 - the Ruedrich Map.  

The East Anchorage Plaintiffs - the folks who sued the Board over Senate District K - have offered their own map.  This map is the same as Anchorage Option 1 (Bahnke) in terms of splitting Senate seat K and refitting them - North and South Muldoon together, both Eagle River districts together, and JBER and downtown Anchorage together.  But the rest of Anchorage Senate pairings are the same as the ones Marcum drew up and were not rejected by the Courts.  They argue that since the Court said to fix Senate District K AND "make other revisions to the proclamation plan resulting or related to these changes,"  that changing other districts in Anchorage goes beyond what the Court said to do and opens such a new map up to future court challenges or even rejection by the Court without a challenge.  

I asked member Borromeo about this argument.  She disagreed and explained that since the Marcum Map (It's not one of the map options, but all three the Anchorage option maps show the Marcum map pairings)  started with the unconstitutional pairing and then had a domino effect throughout Anchorage.  She's an attorney and I'm not.  But Holly Wells (the East Anchorage attorney) is also an attorney.  Wells' clients don't want to jeopardize their victory and are playing it cautiously.  There are obviously some political consequences in the maps, but I honestly couldn't tell you what they are in any detail.  The ADN article today by James Brooks says the Option 3  (Ruedrich) map pairs Democratic Senators Begich and Gray-Jackson for example.  

The so-called Bahnke plan (both Bahnke and Marcum asked that maps not be called by their names today and Chair Binkley agreed the maps should have people or organization's names on them.  I'll write more about this below, but I think they should continue to have organization's names (Board's v10, AFFER v 4, etc.) so the public knows where the map comes from.   OK let me start that sentence again.  The so-called Bahnke map is the map she proposed last November before the so-called Marcum map was approved.  It has different Senate pairings in the rest of Anchorage than the Proclamation Plan.  So, adopting the Bahnke map would change Senate districts that are not immediately affected by changing Senate district K.  

This was not what I planned on today.  But as I wrote this I realized that there are a lot of people who probably don't yet understand what I've laid out here.  That is the game.  Gaining a seat or two for Republicans is the likely aim of Team R.  While Team B is not partisan, both are Alaska Native women who are professionally involved in Alaska Native organizations and I would assume they are thinking about legislators who support Alaska Native issues.  Or maybe, as Borromeo's comments to me might suggest, they feel that they were scammed by Team R and they just want the playing field evened out to where it was before the Marcum Map appeared in November and was approved.  But that's pure speculation.

That sort of covers the major players and pieces of this game.  

I wanted to talk about other issues brought up today and yesterday - issues that are part of the strategy for each team to get what they want.  Some of these are minor issues.  Distractions.  Some are more serious.  Some are genuine concerns, some seem like they're disingenuous.  I'll mention a few of them briefly.  I hope to do them more justice in another post.  But new stuff happens daily and I can't promise I'll get there.    

Some of the key topics brought up by the public (some of which echoed by the Board)

Speed of decision - 

• Board should take plenty of time to give public time to understand the maps versus 
• Board needs to move quickly because candidates need to declare their candidacy by June 1 and they need to know their districts.  
• There's also a point here that I haven't heard raised at the meetings - if no new map is approved in time, the unconstitutional map would be used for the November elections.  There may be some other options, but that's what happened last time.  Those slowing down the process would strenuously deny this, but it would give them the Senate they voted for back in November.

Board members treatment of people testifying:

1. Board should just let people speak without arguing with them, intimidating them, asking them questions
2. Board needs to ask people for clarification so they understand the person's reasoning, evidence

Politicizing the process/gerrymandering - accusations from both sides, but mainly from the proponents of the Ruedrich map 

Names of Board Maps - Chair Binkley decided today, after both Bahnke and Marcum asked that their names not be attached to the maps, that all maps would not have names or organizations attached to the maps.  Just numbers.   I think that was not a well thought out solution. (Or maybe it was for the wrong reasons.)

Previously the maps were identified by the organization proposing them and if necessary by version numbers.  Board Map v3, v4, AFFR Map, AFFER Map, Senate Minority Map, Doyon Map.  That made it easy for the public to understand who drew the map and determine if there was some bias they should be aware of.  And the names were easier to remember and to distinguish the maps than numbers are.  Ideally, the public, without names on the maps, would look at the maps without being biased by the map maker.  But unfortunately, the details of maps are much too complicated for most people to do that.

The Board has the maps up now as Anchorage Options 1-3.  That's all.  

Some other issues for me:

• People saying things that aren't so
• The Board being really unable to simply and quickly make routine procedural decisions
• Intentional misinformation 

OK.  I think that is enough for today.  Tomorrow the Board meets at 10am and should approve the Cantwell map.  Then back to Senate District K