While the city Council debates the propriety of the controversial remarks by Mayor Scott Minikus at the last regular meeting, the city is now under a very tight, court ordered deadline to have maps ready for viewing by Feb. 12.
Accordingly, a discussion of the matter was halted Monday as the city went ahead with a public hearing on its developing redistricting plan, maps for which need to be ready by February 12
Justin Levitt, Ph.D., Vice President of National Demographics Corporation, explained the process of creating districts.
Levitt, a native of Los Alamitos, has gone through this process with Los Alamitos, La Palma and other cities continuing to transition to districts.
“This is the beginning of a process,” Levitt told the Council and attending public. In addition to the Federal Voting Rights Act and the state Voting Rights Act, the Assembly has just passed the Fair Maps Act which went into effect Jan. 1.
“So we’re working with a new set of rules,” he said, giving residents a glimpse of how the districts will be created and the guidelines they must use to create them so that they will meet court approval.
“We have to comply with the Federal Voting Rights Act,” said Levitt.
“While race and ethnicity cannot be the primary, or only factor considered in the creation of a district, it is one of many factors that have to be considered,” he added.
Ultimately, Levitt said each of the city’s five districts will be composed of approximately 10,000 residents that will be governed by the lines.
“Voters will only get to vote on one representation (Council member),” said Levitt, “the one that represents the district in which they live.”
“This is actually a system that is fairly familiar to all of us,” he said, because it is the way we currently elected our Members of Congress, the state legislature, the county board of supervisors, school boards, etc.
“The California Voting Rights Act has had an immense impact on local elections,” said Levitt.
He said the new Fair Maps Act creates a series of rank order criteria, he said. This includes:
• All of the districts must be contiguous, meaning that all districts have an outside boundary. “No little islands,” he said.
• Neighborhoods and communities of interest for the purpose of fair and effective representation must be kept together to the extent practical.
• To the extent possible, the district must have easily identifiable boundaries.
• Compactness, not bypassing one group of people to get to a more distant group of people.
“As part of our discussion of communities of interest, and particularly the needs of protected class communities, groups that have historically faced discrimination or barriers to registration and voting have their rights protected,” he said.
Levitt said all of the criteria, in general, ‘is really aimed at making sure that whatever districts we can get, at the end of the day, they do the best job possible of serving this community.”
“And so this goes both ways,” he said, noting that “part of our discussion, how it affects or how it impacts the current council or political partisanship or who wins which district is not to be a part of our factors of consideration for a map, or, against a map,” said Levitt.
“It’s going to be interesting to see how this plays out,” he added. “It’s in the new law.”
In addition to the new rules, Levitt said “traditional districting principles” will apply. He said courts have allowed some flexibility in district sizes to plan for future growth or where new housing is under construction “and take that under consideration with everything else we’re considering.”
Levitt, said his firm has background knowledge of Cypress, having worked with the Cypress School District to create districts in 2018.
He explained the criteria and rules for making the districts, even explaining that every
citizen has the right to create their own maps and turn them in for review. He said there is a “MapCypress” link on the city’s website (cypressca.org) where the easy to use drawing tools are available.
“We want citizens to submit even single district maps or neighborhood community maps, showing just their area and neighborhoods,” said Levitt, letting citizens know that every bit of intel they can glean from maps will help them better identify the city’s communities of interest and other factors.
If citizens need help, there will be email assistance available at the link. “Everything we receive gets posted somewhere, whether its compliant or not,” the demographer said.
City officials held a second public hearing this past Monday. Now, Levitt is asking for all maps by Feb. 1.
Email: mapcypress@cypressca.org