There's so much to write about following the Redistricting Boards 3-2 vote to approve Option 3B, the plan written by Randy Ruedrich and approved by the three Republican appointed Board members against the vehement objections of the two Board members who were appointed by people not affiliated with a political party in Alaska.
In this post I'm going to go through Board Member Budd Simpson's reasons for supporting Option 3B. His explanation was by far the best of the three explanations by the majority. But first, let me give a little bit of background of the districts in question.
[Let me first note and apologize. I'm going to use the House numbers and Senate letters used in the November proclamation plan map. Some of these got changed yesterday, but I think it would be more confusing if I used the new numbers. For the points I'm making here, it doesn't matter.]
Both Options 2 and 3B paired north and south Muldoon districts. That was what the Court pretty much told them to do.
But that left D22 (Eagle River) orphaned. Option 2, as I see it, had the most obvious pairings. It joined districts that had been split apart right through neighborhoods. Let me show you what I mean:
District 9 is a huge district that runs down Turnagain Arm to Girdwood and then on down to Whittier. But in town, it connects to D10 via the Seward Highway and neighborhoods east of the highway. Neighborhoods along the coast line. You can see that clearly in this map.
These two districts were paired in the original map approved in November and in the Option 2 map.
The two Eagle River districts are also large and cover lots of unpopulated land in Chugach State Park. But the two districts 22 and 24 have closely joined populations near ER Valley and along the Glenn Highway. They fit like puzzle pieces. Neighbors nearby.
Option 2 put them together in one Senate seat.
And D24 (this map just shows part of the off-base portion, which is attached to the JBER portion. You can see Fourth Avenue is split in half. The olive part is in D23, the purple in D17. D23 also includes parts of Mountain View and goes east to Bartlett High School. Again, people across the street from each other are in different districts. Reconnecting them in a Senate seat makes perfect sense to me. That's what Option 2 did.
But when you pair them the way Option 3B does, you're connecting not the communities that have been split, but wilderness. Below is a larger view of part of D9 and D10. Option 3B splits them and pairs D9 with D22. Across the uninhabited (by people) Chugach State Park. To get from a populated area in D9 crossing the "contiguous" border" to a populated area in D22, you have to walk across mountain ranges and river drainages - probably about 10-15 miles. Eagle River Valley is not on this map, it's further north in the yellow part. To get to the people in D10, many people in D9 could just walk down the street. Just the same as between the two ER districts and downtown and Government Hill/JBER.
But not between D9 and D22.
As many people testified, people in D9 would have to drive through four or more other house districts to get to the district they're paired with. The same is true for people in districts 23 and 24.
I'm putting these maps here so it's clear that Option 3B is not the most obvious, the most natural pairing of house seats. It would seem that the burden should be on the proponents to demonstrate why 3B is the better choice.
At Wednesday's meeting each member of the majority did lay out their reasons in quite bit of detail. The court had faulted them for not doing that last time. Will the judge accept member Simpson's definition of 'reasonable'? In his deposition he was asked for a definition and he said it meant you had a reason. Does it have to be a good reason? Apparently not.
I was at the Legislative Information Office and took notes on my laptop. (Only members Bahnke and Borromeo were also in the LIO. The others were there by Zoom.) Budd Simpson doesn't speak a lot and when he does, he speaks fairly slowly. I mention that because that makes it easier for me to keep up with him. Simpson's arguments were also the best of the three. So, below are his words in black (as close as I could catch them) and then I comment in red.
Budd Simpson's explanation of why he voted for Option 3B
Simpson: Interesting to me between option 2 and 3B, there are a number of things in common. Both options only change four districts. A reasonable number. Both independently came up with solution that only changes four districts. Gives credibility to both.
They didn’t “both independently come up with a four district solution.” First, there was only the Bahnke plan - Option 1. Option 1 was the alternative plan that was proposed last November that had different Senate pairings throughout Anchorage from the pairings that were in the adopted plan, which was later ruled unconstitutional.
Then the East Anchorage plaintiffs submitted a proposal to adopt another plan. This would become Option 2.
Option 2 followed the rules of the Court to the T. It only changed four districts and left the other four as member Marcum had paired them in the Proclamation Plan. Meanwhile, the Ruedrich Plan was submitted. It changed more than just the minimum number of districts affected by making the court corrections.
Then Borromeo and Bahnke moved to withdraw Option 1 and just go with Option 2. They did this because they recognized Option 2 more closely followed the Court’s orders which were to make other changes only if necessary because of taking apart D22 and D21. (ER and Muldoon)
It was only then that Ruedrich submitted an amended plan which also limited the changes in Anchorage.
So, this wasn’t independent. The Republicans saw that their plan would be less likely to meet the Court’s approval if it had more changes than Option 2, so they then changed their map and Option 3B was born.
Both dealt with Senate D to join 20 and 21 - best solution probably. Also leave in place the pairings districts 11 and 12 and 15 and 16.
The Court specifically said to fix D 21 and talked about keeping the Muldoon community whole. The most obvious way was to connect it to 20.
Left with ER Chugiak, S Anchorage Hillside, JBER Military, and Downtown.
Bear with me as I . . . Whether we pair 17 and [this must be 23, but my notes had something else] or 23 and 24 - Military and Chugiak. How you decide those two options, drives what happens with ER 22 and south side of Chugiak.
He sets this up with a false starting point.
Why is the choice 17 and 24 or 23 and 24? We should start with the new orphan district 22, that is left over after putting 21 with 20. And the most obvious pairing is with the other half of ER - the two districts are a unit. The house districts split them neighbor from neighbor, the Senate district can repair that split.
How does Hillside come into the picture? The first question is after separating 22 from 21, what do we do with 22? The most obvious pairing is with 24. Lots and lots of evidence for this. But the Republicans on the Board want to keep Chugiak/Eagle River (24) paired with JBER/Government Hill (23) because that will pick up an extra Republican Senator. So they make keeping 23/24 together the only option.
When you make a decision you have fewer other options to choose from as you go forward.
As to motion for Option 2 - I find the pairing of 23 and 24 ER and Chugiak the more compelling solution. Pairing JBER with downtown overlooks a conflict of interest and opens us to a challenge to that constituency. Chugiak has developed as a bedroom community for the military families. They send their kids to middle school and high school there. That testimony was compelling to that pairing.
Lots of false assumptions here. What conflict of interest is there with pairing JBER with Downtown? And why do you refer to D23 as JBER. Yes, 2/3 of the population lives on JBER. But 1/3 lives in downtown adjacent areas. The Board already paired JBER with downtown in the House district. To say pairing JBER and downtown is a problem now, overlooks the fact that the Board already paired them.
In fact, the Board split downtown along 4th Avenue when they created D23. Right in the middle of downtown Anchorage. And although the downtown parts of 23 only have 1/3 the voters of the JBER section, more downtown people actually vote than JBER people in that district. I haven’t gotten all the details (and nor has the Board), but a significant percent of the population of JBER are actually residents of other states, only in Anchorage for their rotation.
A former East Anchorage Rep testified that ER high school wouldn’t exist without JBER. But another person testified with data that showed ASD students who had JBER addresses actually came out this way: [UPDATE April 16 - I realized I described these numbers incorrectly. Here's the description from Denny Wells:
"JBER High School boundaries are not included in maps from the Anchorage School District, but if you look up JBER addresses via the Anchorage School District School finder, you will see that addresses in the Richardson portion of the base, accessed via the Richardson gate, are zoned to Eagle River, while the
addresses in the Elmendorf portion of JBER accessed via Government Hill, Boniface, and Muldoon gates are zoned to Bartlett. The Downtown and Government Hill portions of District 23 are zoned to West High School. In total, in district 23, the populations in the various High School boundaries are these:"]
Bartlett High School (inside District 23) – 8733 people
West High School (inside District 17) – 4802 people
Eagle River High School (inside District 22) – 4488 people
More JBER students go to West High School - in District 17 “the Downtown District” according to Simpson, than to Eagle River. And twice as many go to Bartlett which is in D23! So this argument is bogus. The data was actually in the testimony but Simpson either decided to ignore it or didn't read it. We don't have this data. It's something the Board should have looked up before jumping to their conclusions. (And I should have been more careful when I put the numbers up.]
And then, let’s check on how many students from the Hillside go to ER high school or vice versa. Probably close to zero. But no one mentioned those numbers. Why are these issues relevant to one pairing but not the other.
Further, if you look at the demographic data of people living on base and the downtown off base parts of District 23, they are quite different from D24 - income level, types of homes, ethnicity. But Simpson doesn’t pay attention to any of that. Just like they ignored those difference between D22 and D21 in the original plan.
Heard the argument repeatedly that under the court ruling that ER should be with Chugiak. Not what the court said. ER was done at the expense of Muldoon. Order told us to reconfigure District K, but didn’t say anything about L. The plaintiffs asked that as part of their relief. But the court didn’t grant that. Court told us to repair the problematic part of DK and both options made that repair. That should be sufficient to meet the intent of the court.
The court rulings didn't say anything about District 9 or 10 either. The court also was concerned about political gerrymandering. And the only explanation that make sense out of these pairings is that it gives ER and the Alaska Senate one more Republican Senator.
If ER paired together or split, either way does not happen at the expense of Muldoon, because Muldoon is taken care of in both versions.
As far as the pairings, there’s no real advantage either splitting or dividing them. The house districts were approved. They are all in the MOA and all contain the same people. There will be 37,000 in it and all get a vote and have a Senator and representative.
Districts 23 and 24 is a pairing already in place. Under option 3b, that isn’t changed. If there are folks who have thought about running or not running, that stays in place and there is less to change.
But Districts 9 and 10 were also already paired and neither of them have populated areas that are anywhere near the populated areas of D22. But D10 has an adjoining neighborhood to 9 and the Seward Highway runs through them. Just as the Glenn Highway runs through D22 and D24. People in one district live across the street from people in the other district. But pairing 22 rips them asunder and has the same detrimental effects Simpson ascribes to splitting 23 and 24. Only in the case of 9 and 10, the effects are real.
The most obvious pairing is the two house districts that are in Eagle River. There was testimony by at least two people that identified all the organizations that call themselves “Chugiak Eagle River”. Nobody talks about the Eagle River Glen Alps community. Both districts 22 and 24 are part of the EagleExit movement. If you put ER back together with ER as Option 2 does, then you can also repair the splitting of downtown along 4th Avenue.
That leaves us to pairing of 22 and 9 and there has been a lot of testimony and discussion on that on both sides. When making the pairing described for JBER and ER, that leaves us with 22 with no place to go except 9. That just flows naturally from the 23/24 decision
Slick. The only reason that leaves us 22 and 9 is that you magically decided that the JBER/Government Hill district had to be paired with 24. You never give us a direct comparison between 22/24 Senate seat versus 22/9 or versus a 9/10 Senate seat. The far more natural pairing was ER with ER/Chugiak. And then the logic would be the only “natural pairing” would be JBER/Government hill together with downtown, which then matches the puzzle pieces of Fourth Avenue.
. Most discussion about contiguity and the concept of ‘nearly as practicable’ has been discussed. The concept has been misconstrued a lot of the mite in those discussion. Practicable means possible or able to be done. The way used in constitution it doesn’t mean you have to have the best pairing, but rather as an exception, when you have two districts that aren’t touching. Intended as an exception of the contiguity rule. Not the best, most compact whatever. The pairing of house districts is not the same rule as for house districts. While we have fought to find pairings to have reasonable rational standard, there is nothing wrong with the pairing of 9 and 22. They are contiguous. They have a 35 mile border. Two districts SEI and demographically similar in many ways. And of course are included in MOA and therefore are legally SEI base on precedent. People mentioned you had to drive out of the district. The concept of transportation contiguity debunked as constitutional requirement. Contiguity question is a visual, binary question. Look at map, these are contiguous, they touch. We heard the concept of false contiguity brought up and my name was invoked. What I brought up was what community of Skagway Borough, they used water where nobody was and went around the main part of Juneau. It was not compact. And that ended up prevailing and the false contiguity rejected. 9 and 22 have 35 miles of real contiguity.
Continuity works for him when he wants it to but not if it isn’t in his favor. Am I stretching it? Possibly, but surely not as much as he's been stretching things. The courts have clearly said contiguity over water works and compactness IS NOT a criterion for Senate districts. Contiguity has been a key issue in the 3B map because it is the only Constitutional requirement for Senate districts.
There’s no question that the two districts (9 and 22) are geographically contiguous. But by using that boundary, the 3B map is breaking apart two districts that connect neatly through streets and neighborhoods for two districts that are, as people testified, 15 to 87 miles (I think) apart by road.
It’s been interesting how the advocates for this map have talked about all the similarities between the populations of these two districts. Simpson even does it with D23 and D24 even though at other times they turn around and tell us that all of Anchorage is socio-economically integrated, so none of that really matters. Nor does the alleged military connections between JBER and Chugiak/Eagle River matter. Again, he’s using one line of logic when it suits him and saying it doesn’t matter when it doesn’t suit him. Swapping out criteria for convenience or merely changing their weight, has been something the Board - particularly the majority - has done since they started making maps.
A key question here is whether the Courts will accept the 35 miles of cross roadless state park to connect two distant neighborhoods in the state’s most populated borough. Even when there are much more obvious options where pairing is like putting together two matching puzzle pieces that neatly connect neighborhoods, connect neighbors who live across the street from each other.
The courts use different deviation standards for cities and rural areas and they stretch socio-economic matches more in rural areas, and compactness in rural areas has a different standard too. The nature of Alaska’s geography makes those compromises necessary. But it’s not necessary to do that in rural areas. The courts could take the easy path and say, yes they are contiguous, end of story. Or they could ask why the three most obvious pairings - obvious because neighborhoods are split into two house districts - are abandoned for this technically complying, but really meaningless pairing. Will they ask if there were better options? If they do, these pairings will be thrown out. If they say, as they did in the Skagway case, it’s constitutional and we won’t substitute a ‘more constitutional’ pairing, they’ll leave it be.
But there are other considerations which Simpson brings up next.
Finally I want to address the charge of partisan gerrymandering. Two Republican senators and a member from Gov. Dunleavy’s admin spoke out against Option 3B. I’m an appointee of the Governor and I’m lined up with Option 3B. If Option 3B is a naked partisan attempt, then why did Reinhold and Holland argue against it. They think something in Option 3B harms them. That goes against the argument that it attempts to protect or enhance Republican attempts.
This was a clever ploy, I admit. If two Republicans disagree, then ipso facto, it’s not partisan. Unless logic matters.
Partisan gerrymandering would be the other reason for the courts to overrule Option 3B. On its face, if you knew nothing else, the idea that several prominent Republicans objected to this map proves it’s not partisan might make sense. But let’s also remember that this is the map drawn by Randy Ruedrich, Alaska’s most practiced Republican strategist and mapper for the last 30+ years. He’s a former head of the Republican Party. Nobody is even hiding this.
Let’s also remember that political parties have competing factions as well. Lora Reinbold, the Senator from ER opposed this pairing because, presumably, it pits her against the Republican Senator on the Hillside. But Reinbold is one of the wild Republicans who thumbs her nose at the governor. She’s someone that would be nice for the Governor to get rid of and replace with a more controllable Republican. And ER will elect a Republican, there’s no doubt. Sen Holland doesn’t always follow the governor’s orders either, but again, Hillside is a reliably Republican area. Pitting these two together doesn’t risk losing a Republican seat. It simply might replace an unreliable Republican with a more pliable one. But pairing Chugiak/ER with JBER/Government Hill, insures an extra Republican seat. But is Reinbold really just protecting her seat? Is it possible she knows that Eagle River just naturally belongs as one community? After all, if 22 and 24 were joined, then she'd get another fiery Republican opponent. I'm not sure whether Jamie Allard lives in 22 or 24, but she worked hard for Option 3B. Maybe she doesn't want to run against Reinbold.
The judge said they couldn't have the 22 and 21 pairing. But they are going to cling to the 23/24 pairing. That is political gerrymandering. And again, what the three Republicans on the Board call the “JBER district” is actually one third downtown-ish Anchorage - and that southern edge of the district fits neatly with the rest of downtown where it was split right along Fourth Avenue. So, this is an empty argument about partisanship. Ruedrich doesn’t draw maps that don’t give Republicans an edge. He plays to win. They weren’t even subtle about this.
I’d also note that the majority here ignored the testimony of the two sitting Senators from the districts they are pairing - people who in other situations they would give great deference to - and they are also ignoring two other past Senators, all of whom say Eagle River should be paired as one Senate seat. It’s a neat trick to turn around and say this proves they are not partisan. The fact that they are ignoring the testimony of four Senators who have represented this area shows how much they need to keep the 24/23 pairing.
The most partisan is the proposed pairing of JBER and downtown. This would diminish the voice of our valued military personal. I can’t accept that. I will vote for 3B.
Oh please. First, as I’ve said above, this is a seat whose population is 2/3 on JBER and 1/3 urban neighborhoods directly attached to downtown. One side of Fourth Avenue has been put in one district and the other half in another district. Joining them in a Senate seat makes perfect sense. Meanwhile the JBER part of the district has no neighborhoods that connect it with D24 - just woods.
Then Simpson plays on patriotism and our natural admiration for the military. Let’s get the statistics - how many of the military living on JBER are even Alaska voters? How many vote in other states? The 1980 Redistricting Board spent a lot of time deciding whether they should even count the Military personnel who were actually residents of other states. In the end, they included them because they couldn’t figure out how to accurately count them. That’s all described in detail in the Hickel decision.
And, as pointed out earlier, more JBER students go to D17’s West High School than go to ER High School. And twice as many go to Bartlett which is D23. Because as people have testified, people on JBER are connected to the neighborhoods near the Muldoon and Government Hill exits.
I’d also point out here that the military is one of the best represented groups in our State legislature and they receive more special benefits than probably any other group of people. I’ve spelled this out here. There’s no chance that the military personnel will be diminished in Juneau no matter what district JBER is paired with. This is a very red herring.
As the judge weighs political gerrymandering in this case, I'd point out that the Board had no problem dispatching the Cantwell issues. They all worked easily on it and agreed quickly. No one had a stake it the outcome and the Court's directions were clear. They also complied with half of the judge's instructions for fixing Senate seat K - pairing north and south Muldoon. But like with the original pairings of D22 and D21 there was no compromise. There was acrimony. No one said anything like, "You guys are really upset. Let's see if we can work something out."
Instead, it was basically, we have three votes and you have two votes. You don't act that way unless you have a very specific objective you need to achieve. There was nothing in what Simpson said that would justify the callousness of the final vote. There was a mission on the part of the Board majority. And as one testifier pointed out, there is nothing to lose. They were able to power this past a very adamant minority and it either gets accepted by the Superior Court or not. If not, they will appeal it. They don't have to pay for the attorney. And if they lose at the Supreme Court level, they have no personal liability. They will be patted on the back and rewarded by their party colleagues. But probably not in ways that the public will see.
Simpson spoke at other times at the meeting, but this was the argument he laid you for voting for 3B. The judge said the Board members' personal preference should not trump overwhelming public opinion. While this was an organized narration of reasons, most were assertions that were not backed up by facts and are more about giving the Judge reasons - even if their shaky at best - for choosing Option 3B. The reasons of Marcum and Binkley are much looser than Simpson's. Marcum is the Chief Executive Officer of the Koch affiliated Alaska Policy Forum whose goals are to pass legislation that favors a libertarian view point. She truly believes that getting more Republicans in the Senate is one of her missions.
I'll try to put up the Marcum and Binkley testimony, but no promises.
