Redistricting Board Showing Their Agendas As Decision About Final Map Nears (Completed Now)

 You could watch the Alaska Redistricting Board yesterday via Zoom and you can again today starting at 9am.  It's a much better view than I expected.  And the public has had significantly more distance access to the Board meetings this year than ten years ago.

Join Zoom Meeting https://zoom.us/j/9074062894?pwd=VWxjem42YUloTnBFcTlpVWZVS0wwZz09

Meeting ID: 907 406 2894;  Passcode: MoreMaps

For the most part yesterday, I only saw about 37 participants on the Zoom.  Alaskans should just leave it on the background and then listen in when they start debating. 

I'll post this much now so people can link and watch.  Then I'll repost this when I've added a bit more about yesterday.  

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OK, this shouldn't be too long.  For the most part, I had the zoom on while I did other things.  Part of the meeting was quiet as people worked on their maps.  

Then there were parts that were loud and clear and somewhat contentious.  I'm going to address two parts: 

1.  Melanie Bahnke's ardent fight to not have Interior villages in the same district as Coastal Naive communities.  At one point she said she was taking off her Board hat and putting on her Native Leader hat as she cited "Socio-economic integration" over and over again.  There's no SEI between Coastal Native peoples and Interior people. was her mantra.  It got a little tense.  Chair John Binkley was a voice of calm trying to find a way to make everyone happy.  I had to run some errands so I didn't hear how it worked out.  When I got back they were working on Fairbanks.  

2.  This second point I only know second hand.  Apparently Board member Bethany Marcum drafted a new Anchorage map that pairs East Anchorage with Eagle River.  There's been plenty of testimony from both East Anchorage AND Eagle River not to do this.  But the Board's attorney has been pushing hard on the Supreme Court past rulings that said all of Anchorage is Socio-Economically Integrated.  Others have argued strongly Eagle River is seriously working on seceeding from Anchorage and should be in its own districts.  And there are maps that do this.  Note, Bill Wielechowski is the Democratic Senator from East Anchorage.  In the last round of redistricting, an East Anchorage house district was paired with an Eagle River house district to form Sen. Bettye Davis' new Senate district.  And at the next election, the more conservative Eagle River voters voted the only African-American Senator out of office.  I have a post from 2013 titled The Alaska Senator The Oil Companies Most Hate.  They'd love to get rid of him.

This proposed map seriously diminishes the voices of East Anchorage. Virtually everyone has testified against pairing East Anchorage with Eagle River including the Northeast Community Council, which overwhelmingly opposed it. Still time to fix it. https://t.co/h1sm43di3h

— Bill Wielechowski (@wielechowski) November 4, 2021

Let's remember that as open and relatively transparent the Board has been, and as hospitable the chair John Binkley has been, redistricting is essentially a political process to influence who gets into the legislature for the next ten years.  With Republicans doing all they can to make voting more difficult for POC voters all across the country, we shouldn't assume sweetness and light at the Alaska Redistricting Board.  

In the last round of redistricting there were four Republicans and one Alaska Native of uncertain party who was appointed by the Supreme Court Chief Justice.  This time Governor Dunleavy, who has been pushing far right issues from so called "federal overreach" to "severe budget cutting" to "anti-masking" and on and on, appointed Bethany Marcum and Budd Simpson.  Marcum is the executive director of the Alaska Policy Forum.  It's part of a nationwide franchise funded in part by the Koch network.  It's mission and goals push a hard libertarian, personal freedom line.  She's the one, if I recall right, who proposed the Board's rule of not protecting incumbents.  The Board has not made a rule to not target incumbents.  She also made the first Anchorage maps that paired lots of Democrats into the same districts.  She is just doing what she's paid to do by the Alaska Policy Forum and what Dunleavy chose her to do - get more Republican elected and weaken Democrats.  If the rest of the Board can't fix her partisan mapping, then it's up to the public to help those organizations that will sue the Board and urge the courts to correct the maps.  Here's a post that tells you about the 3rd Party groups that have submitted maps and you can contact the one(s) that most match your values and ask how you can support them with your time or your money.

9:56am  They were just about to vote to include Valdez with the Matsu Borough.  Marcum objected saying she wants to wait until they deal with Fairbanks because Valdez could go in that direction too.  She also raised the issue that Matsu is the fastest growing area.  Well, John Binkley, the other day pointed out that the Board cannot consider such issues.  They can only consider the official census numbers.  

And my Zoom connection just crashed.  OK, back on.  

The Fairbanks map is now up and John Binkley is recounting how the original maps overpopulated Fairbanks (all districts had more than the 18,335 per district target) and how the Fairbanks feedback, including the local government were opposed and that the Board should listen.  

Keeping Busy Doing Nothing - AK Press Club, Seedlings, Bike, Cooking, Redistricting, COVID, Spanish, Grandkids. . .

 Time seems to whiz by.  Suddenly it's Wednesday and I have to take out the garbage again.  How can it be 10pm, it's still light out?  I just paid that bill.  Making it worse, it seems like I haven't gotten anything done.  

But when I try to track what I'm doing, it turns out I'm really doing a lot.  I'm tracking and posting  the Alaska COVID numbers every day.  I'm doing 20-40 minutes into DuoLingo Spanish.

I try to do the Cryptoquote and the Sudoku in the paper every day.

My Seattle granddaughter FaceTimes with us for an hour or three several times a week.  And I've been volunteering in her class, via zoom, listening to kids read books of their choice.  The SF grandkids have a regular two or three hours every Wednesday afternoon.  

This month, the Alaska Press Club has been having Monday, Wednesday, and Friday 8am workshops in lieu of a three day in person conference.  Despite the horrible hour, all the ones I've listened in on (all of them so far) have been excellent.  Yesterday was one on covering Corrections and included a reporter who does cover corrections, an ACLU employee who works on corrections issues and used to work for the Dept of Corrections under Walker, and a woman who started a non-profit called Supporting Our Loved Ones Group - people who have friends and relatives in prison.  One part of the discussion focused on the words that journalists use to describe people in prison. I guess I've had a soft spot for the plight of prisoners ever since I visited a former 6th grade student (he was then probably in the 9th grade) at a juvenile detention center outside of Los Angeles maybe 50 years ago.  Other sessions have been on Climate Change and How to Choose And Write Stories. They also did one on setting up an elections debate commission for Alaska that was very compelling.  You can see the commission proposal here.   I've got notes for blog posts on all of these, but the Anchorage Municipal Election and the Redistricting Board have distracted me.  

I haven't seen much coverage at all in other media about the Alaska Redistricting Board and since I covered it intensely in 2011-13, I realize I know a lot about what it is, what the issues are, and what was done last time.  So it seems I'm stuck doing it again.  Right now not much is happening - setting things up procedurally and getting staff - they've hired a law firm to advise them and they are getting an RFI ready to hire a Voting Rights Act consultant.  They are behind the pace of ten years ago because the Pandemic and Trump policies slowed down the Census Count and the State redistricting numbers won't come out until maybe August this year.  Last time they got the numbers in March.

I've started my summer biking in earnest yesterday, keeping to the trails along streets while the trails through the greenbelts still have snow on them.  I did a seven mile test run south on Lake Otis, east on Dowling, north on Elmore, then wandering through neighborhoods back home.

Here's Campbell Creek from Lake Otis

An aside about snow this year.  I'd asked Weather Service guy Brian Brettschneider, via DM on Twitter, if we'd had more snow days this year, because it seemed like I was shoveling snow all the time.  He responded: 

"Anchorage will finish with about 5" less snowfall than normal. But our snow depth was one of the greatest on record. We basically had 0 melting events throughout the season."

Riding along Dowling, the ice and snow were gone from the trail the whole ride.  

And then Campbell Creek again, this time looking back from Elmore.

My knees have been showing signs of being past their warranty.  Running is out.  Biking was ok last summer.  I'm hoping I can do another 600 km or more this summer, but it will depend on how my knees react.  

We've been zooming in to the Alaska Black Caucus' Sunday panels. (Link to this Sunday's forum is on the upper right of their page.) They've been doing a great job covering a lot of topics from candidate forums (School Board and Mayor, and this Sunday they are going to have the mayoral runoff candidates - Dunbar and Bronson) to discussions on things like body cameras for police and the military experience in Alaska for Blacks.  They've been having 50 and 60 attendees every week.  Really well done.  I've never heard candidates talk so candidly.  But then the 

There was also a Citizens Climate lobby meeting and a few other zoom meetings.

One way to get through all the zoom meetings is to do relatively mindless tasks that allow me to pay attention, but also get something done.  Eating is the most obvious, but I also prepared and baked a bread through one meeting.  

And used the left over dough to make a veggie pizza.  

And I've been planting seeds now that I can see patches of ground through the snow outside.  Trying Arctic Tomatoes this year.  But I've also got arugula, stock, snapdragons, pansies, sweet peas, flax, and a few other seeds growing.  

I suspect that feeling like I haven't gotten anything done comes partially through the fact that zoom meetings let you stay home and so you don't get out that much.  When you physically go to a meeting, it (probably, it's hard to remember) feels more like you've actually done something.  So I have to write things down to remind myself that I've actually been busy and doing worthwhile things.  

Oh, and watching some of the video of each of the UAA Chancellor candidates.  A really diverse selection.  Not a good time to be a white male in this crowd I'm guessing.  Most looked reasonable, some very good, and our Superintendent of Schools must have been unwell, because she couldn't be still or say more than platitudes.  You can watch them yourselves.  I'd recommend about ten minutes of each to get a sense of them.  Really, these tell us mostly how well they speak in public.  To some extent how much the know about higher education.  But not too much about how well they can run a university.