The LA City Council body is swapping the Advisory Board’s card with its own “hybrid” version – Daily News
A seven-member Los Angeles city council committee on Friday, November 5th, endorsed a new “hybrid” map that significantly revised the redistribution commission’s recommended lines for drawing new city council districts.
The committee voted 6-1 to send the card, created by the Chief Legislative Analyst using suggestions from around 20 different council proposals, to the entire city council.
The cards will then be presented in two public hearings on November 10th. and provisionally on 23.11. listened to before then on 1.12. A regulation will be voted on by December 31st
Councilor Nithya Raman cast the dissenting vote. Raman stated that their 4th district will lose 40% of their current voters.
“I think if we had had more time and a little more thought we could have come up with a card that respected everyone’s wishes,” she said.
The ad hoc committee also unanimously voted for a draft map that will re-outline the boundaries of the Unified School District of Los Angeles.
The major revisions to the map of the City Council’s Redistribution Commission came after Council President Nury Martinez, who also chaired the ad hoc committee, expressed deep dissatisfaction with it.
On Friday, Martinez walked through the ad hoc session relatively quickly, arguing that the city council has a shortened timeframe for adopting a card as the U.S. census is late in releasing its data due to the pandemic and the requirement to complete the process at the end of the year.
The hybrid card approved by the committee would put the Sepulveda Basin and Van Nuys Airport in the 6th it.
The basin and the airport had been removed by the redistribution commission and moved to other districts.
The commission’s map also met with heavy criticism from several San Fernando Valley groups and neighborhood councils for preventing communities like Canoga Park, Winnetka, and Reseda from moving from the 3rd. They would have to wait until 2024 to elect a new councilor.
In the committee’s approved map, Canoga Park and Winnetka would be returned to the 3rd district, while Reseda would be split between the 3rd district, represented by Alderman Bob Blumenfield, and the 4th district, represented by Raman.
Blumenfield moved to keep parts of Reseda, where he had ongoing projects such as a public ice rink and the “revitalization” of the Reseda Theater.
Under the committee’s approved hybrid map, some of the pillars of the commission’s map were retained, including the priority to reduce the “bridge” district after calling for Valley communities to be represented by Valley-based councilors.
Raman’s 4th District would now be the only “bridge” district stretching from the San Fernando Valley to other communities in the rest of Los Angeles. This would reduce the number of such “bridge” districts from the two present-day ones, whereby the 5th district, which now contains Encino, no longer extends into the valley and Encino would instead be classified in the 4th district of the Raman.
The Chief Legislative Analyst’s map also includes the commission recommended lines for the 1st, 13th, and 14th Districts.
Some public commentators argued Friday that Reseda should not have been split into two districts, suggesting that councilors could have completed their fellowship by moving other communities to a different district.
Finally, some cards to visualize many of the 38 redistribution requests that City Council members have submitted in response to the card recommended by their Citizens Commission.
🧐The CLA has just published its report: https://t.co/qfEUdhdzUo
– Elizabeth Chou 🌊 🏖️ ☀️ 🌆 ⛰️ (@reporterliz) November 5, 2021
Others were also reluctant to have Encino again relocated to a different district than the Sepulveda Basin. The neighborhood council for the area had argued that it would be more equitable to split the regional park between two councilors.
The city council’s changes to the map stem from a call by many – including the Los Angeles City Council’s Civil Redistribution Commission – to change the city’s policy in the future so that a fully independent body takes over the redistribution process.
In the recommendations of the commission to the city council, she called on an independent body to redraw the borders in 2031.
“This commission last year has confirmed that the quasi-independent nature of the advisory commission is simply not working,” Commission chairman Fred Ali told council members on Tuesday. “It is time for an independent, rather than advisory, commission to take responsibility for redistribution for the good of our city.”
The Redistricting Commission uses US census data to update the city’s counties, with each council member representing approximately 260,000 people.
Ali told councilors Tuesday that 15,000 people had made comments during the process, but he noted challenges during the process, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the five-month delay in census data and a “historical undercounting of certain communities” within it Data.
Martinez began the meeting on Tuesday by saying that the commission’s card reflected an undercount it attributed to the Trump administration’s failed attempt to add a citizenship issue to the census and the confusing message from the former president on the census cut-off date .
“The Los Angeles numbers are just not accurate. Look around, we didn’t get whiter and we didn’t get richer. This is not the Los Angeles that I see around me, ”Martinez said.
Given the “massive losses” in population in Districts 1 and 13, Martinez said, “If you walk down Figueroa in Highland Park or Sunset in Echo Park, there is a clear boom in those districts, but the census would Believe there is a population loss and that is an outnumbered. “
She said she was confident that the city council will “come up with a map powered by the needs of the hardworking Angelenos we all represent”.
The city intelligence service contributed to this report
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