Read the September 6 meeting.

Yeah, okay, so I'm going to go ahead and reintroduce myself. My name is Yolanda Summerhill. My office serves as Special Counselor to the City of Santa Ana. I have as well as Lee Paul Mitchell, the two district's partners. He's the demographer that's going to show you some of the value process. And then we're going to have with us in just a few, Rio Lizar, who's the Clerk of the Council. The reason that we're here tonight is on the ballot in November, there is a proposed charter amendment. The charter is the city's constitution and you're going to be deciding a couple things.

One is electing your council members with the registered voters that live within that same district. The second thing that's going to be decided as part of that charter amendment on the ballot is how redistricting, how future district maps are going to be formed. And essentially that's going to be that they're going to be formed in compliance with state and federal laws. So the important part tonight though is that you are going to be part of participating in the process of deciding how these maps are formed.

We have Paul again with District Partners who is going to go ahead and kind of guide you into the process on some of the factors that you look at as part of districting, communities and mentors. But I won't steal his thunder here. I'll go ahead and let him run with this show. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Like I was mentioned, I'm with redistricting partners. I've been doing redistricting around the state for agencies like Santa Ana that are in what are considered an at-large election system, in which the elections are held where everybody in the city votes for representatives, and they're converting to a five-district system where each district will only have voters vote for one individual member.

Are we okay? I think I'm going to make it here.

You can just talk to them if you want.

I won't be distracted if you want to just talk.

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Okay. I'm going to go through a presentation that's going to talk about some of the things that I've already mentioned.

First off, when we talk about the CVRA, the two components that we talk about are racially polarized voting and at-large election systems and essentially if you have one you are not allowed to have the other.

Well federal law uses the idea of majority minority that if you have an area that can be majority one ethnicity that's an underrepresented minority that you have to convert the districts. Under state law we're simply looking for the ability to influence elections. In addition, the CVRA makes it easier for plaintiffs to come forward and sue and guarantees them damages, meaning that they get paid no matter what happens.

The redistricting process is traditionally, I use these words interchangeably, the redistricting process is every 10 years we come and redraw these boundaries and what we're doing here is converting them not only to new boundaries, but also a system where they're electing one person per city council member area.

We're always concerned that redistricting is going to be done in a way that isn't fair, that is trying to seek advantage unfairly for certain groups or individuals. So the way that we do it follows some set redistricting criteria, traditional redistricting criteria, that's either in statute, meaning it's actual law, or it has come down as case law, like the Supreme Court has decided on it, and so we follow Supreme Court precedents. Some of these are as recent as last year. One of them is that districts will be equal size in terms of population.

This doesn't mean citizens, it doesn't mean adults, it doesn't mean registered voters, it means total population. and that was one of the issues that came before the Supreme Court last year. Based on the 2010 population, the U.S. Census, the number we're going to use, is that the city is approximately 325,000 people. That means the average district size will be around 54,000 people, with the largest district probably being around 55.5 and the smallest being maybe 52.5. The operative thing is that when we draw these lines, the biggest district and the smallest district are not going to be separated by more than 5%.

When we talk about the ethnicity of the district, we use a slightly different number, a slightly different data set. For ethnicity of the district, we're looking at people who are eligible voters, essentially, over 18 years old and citizens. And so when I say this little pocket is 32% Asian or this little pocket is 78% Latino, I mean if you were to take out all the kids and take out all the non-citizens, what would be the ethnic makeup of that area? So we're really specifically talking about that. And the reason we're talking about that is because we're going

to draw these districts with the idea that we are trying to maximize the voting strength. And so the fact that a district has 100,000 under 16 year old, you know, doesn't matter. what matters is who's eligible to vote essentially and that would be citizens over 18.

Another criteria is that districts will be contiguous, meaning whole parts. We're not going to have a district start in one part of the city, disappear, start up somewhere else. They're going to be whole parts. And it sounds funny, but in LA County I saw a waterboard that created districts that weren't even contiguous. We're going to maintain communities of interest. and communities of interest is essentially there's two different types one type of community of interest is the federally protected you know minorities religious minorities ethnic minorities

and in that list we look at Latinos Asians African Americans if we were doing this redistricting in El Centro, in San Diego County, we would be mapping the Chaldean population, which is Iraqi Catholics. If we were doing this redistricting in Glendale, we'd be mapping Amunian populations. If we were doing this redistricting in Bakersfield, we'd be mapping Basque populations. So whenever we're doing redistricting, we're looking at the communities, and the first kind of highest tier of these communities of interest are those that have protection under federal and state law as minority

populations. When we look at these minority populations we can see we can see that there are two main populations that rise to the level of being dense enough within the city of Santa Ana to be able to influence the outcome of an election through kind of block voting and that would be Asian population Latino population. Asian population we show as being 17%, but it is not equally dispersed throughout the city. And Latino population is 60%, and again, it's not equally dispersed. There are some places

that are very, very high Latino and some places that are less so. When we look at the city, we essentially create these heat maps to show where the density is of the ethnicity. We can see the Latino population and there are certain pockets and the presentation is pretty you can see a little more clear there's certain pockets here where it's very dark blue meaning that those areas are 70 80 90 percent Latino we also have an Asian population and as you can see it's even more dramatically kind of located in certain parts of the city and when we look at some of the densest portions

both on the eastern and southeastern portions of the city we see areas with 50 60 30 20 percent Asian depending on where you're looking a second tier of community of interest would be the communities within the city and how they identify how they communicate with each other how they know whether kids go to school together or where they go to the same parks or where they say that share the same concerns about transportation or maybe they share the same concerns about workforce or maybe in some parts of the city the big issue is parking and

another part of the city the big issue is those people using ways to get through the neighborhoods or Uber drivers or whatever. Communities of interest means things that bring people together and the idea in districting is is to try to draw people together in a way that that voice can be as strong as possible and that their interests can be essentially magnified through the districting process.

Another thing that we do in order to try to make sure that we're drawing districts in a way that is fair and consistent with state and federal law is to try wherever we can to follow existing boundaries of governmental agencies, things that exist out there where people could be using that as a kind of a proxy for community of interest. So, a real great example is, you know, I jokingly say that people's identity is, you know, what city they grew up in, what high school they went to, right? And that those are really preeminent in people's minds when they're thinking about their community of interest.

So you could think of overlapping boundaries as being something that we can use as building blocks for the district in the process. And to note, these are different depending on what kind of agency you're drawing districts for. So last night, I was drawing districts for a harbor district in San Mateo County, where they literally were drawing districts and they were looking at the two harbors and trying to draw districts that represented the views of people who were using the harbor. I don't think anybody in Santa Ana cares about a harbor as their driving force of what they view as their community.

But in Santa Ana, there might be different things.

Keeping districts compact. And compact doesn't mean small. I've drawn districts that are 100 miles across. But what compact means is it's more of a mathematical equation. The most compact shape in science is a sphere or a square or a triangle. We're looking at things that are rather consistent in their shape, not just a bunch of squiggly lines. If you look at congressional districts in some parts of the country, you'll see things that look worse than that gerrymander cartoon. You'll see things that look like Swiss cheese. And we're going to draw districts that look like areas that make sense.

And if there is an aberration from that, if we have a redistricting plan where a district takes on a strange shape, we're gonna have a justification of it from these other criteria. We're gonna say that district might look like it's squiggly line but it's actually just the exterior boundary of the city. Or that district might look like it has an elongated shape but that's actually the shape of the neighborhood that that district was based on. So we're gonna be justifying any kind of squiggly shapes or lines. When we look at the current districts the one thing that jumps out

at people when they look at this, given this far in the presentation, is the fact that I pointed out that there's an Asian population on the eastern side of the map. And look at what the current districts have done. The current districts have it so that there's three council districts that all touch that very heavy Asian population. Now there could have been a justification for that at the time. Somebody could have said this plan has six districts and three of the districts all have aviation populations so these three council members are going to have to have an extra sensitivity to the needs of the Asian community.

However redistricting law has gone the other direction. It is not said give every council member one little piece of that community so that they're all paying attention to it. It has said give one council member enough of that population that population can have the effectiveness be able to draw to be able to elect a candidate of their choice. So essentially two ends of the spectrum. Do we take a community that's a community of interest and divide it up so five percent of it's in every council district or we date a community that's a community of interest and draw it into one council district so it can have a stronger voice.

redistricting law has favored that second option.

One of the things that we looked at immediately was underlying governmental boundaries. And one underlying boundary that isn't necessarily governmental, but does have interactions with the city, and does have boundaries that were essentially drawn through a back and forth with the city. These are not willy-nilly lines. the neighborhoods and the maps do show how the current districts are drawn based on using the neighborhoods as a starting point. When we look at these neighborhoods the handouts has a real handy little chart to show to show the different neighborhoods and some different ways of looking at them. First

off we can see the population of each of these neighborhoods. We can also see what part of that population is citizens over the age of 18, meaning people who could be eligible voters. Then it looks at the Latino and Asian breakdown of these neighborhoods so you can see that Artesia Pillar is it or Bella Vista Bella Vista is an example is 79% Latino but only 6% Asian. Now as we went further

another layer that we started to look at and I want you to bookmark this in your mind is the school district boundaries and the reason I wanted you to bookmark this is because look at Garden Grove Unified School District. Garden Grove Unified School District almost looks as if it was attached to the city and it goes on the east side of the Santa Ana River there's one little pocket but mostly it's right there and it's very clearly you know a boundary that we could potentially use in drawing district lines we have state legislative

districts state legislative districts might not have been drawn perfectly listening to the city of Santa Ana but I know that they have community meetings in Santa Ana and then around here to get input from the local residents about how to draw the lines. Congressional districts, same thing. Essentially the congressional districts we can look at, we can say there's a little aha moment. It looks as though the 46th congressional district was drawn to maximize the Latino population and it looks as though the 48th congressional district was drawn to maximize the Asian population. So I don't, there might be,

have been community input on this but I see this and looking at the prior boundaries I think to myself that there is a very clear you know distinction there between these two areas the green and the pink in this map and then finally we also have precincts precincts are a rather small geography but they are precincts actually are drawn to make some sense if you're drawn in the same precinct with 1,500 people, then by definition, all 1,500 of you can get to the same polling place. They've determined that you guys are all walking distance from the library.

They're not going to take a precinct and put half of a precinct on one side of the river and half of a precinct on the other, or the other side of a freeway. They're not going to put precincts together in a way that doesn't make sense. So precincts are there, and we might fall back on precincts at one time or another in order to determine how to draw district boundaries. So I have to date drawn four plans and the first plan is a plan that looks at the that essentially draws most from the existing city boundaries. it still has a little bit of a split in that Asian Asian community and if we

would take the Garden Road in the White School District as an example you can see as a product of that having been drawn somewhat based on the existing boundaries we gave a lot more of the heavily Asian population in District A but still have the Garden Road in the White School District portion in three different council districts so if you were to say my ethnicity is Asian I am Vietnamese identify with the Garden Grove Unified School District you might think that this plan does a little bit of kind of chopping that up however what it does do at the same time is it

increases the ethnic population it grows the Asian population in that one district that I was voting to 43% Asian. That's significantly higher than any of the members of the existing plans. Just to walk through this for a second, we've already talked about population, 2010 census. We've talked about citizen voting age population, meaning a proxy for eligible voters, Latino and Asian citizen voting age population. We also have African American citizen voting age and white citizen voting age population.

for our purposes we really want to look most heavily at Asians and see if we can draw districts where the Asian community can best it and see how the little action and then also Latino and what districts are essentially the majority Latino

yeah we have a power cord for this we need a power cord because it just said low power there we go I'm sorry the question was yeah so as I've been going through this these numbers I've been introducing different ways it's actually different ways of camp population we're counting every person man woman child citizen non citizen living in a house apartment under a bridge every human being that was in this city April 2010 based on the USS

citizen voting makes population this number is not everybody it's everybody who it is a citizen and over the age of 18 this actually comes from a newer data set from the American community survey which is a part of the U.S. So if you think of this as the big population number, we're going to make these districts equal based on population. This number, we're going to use this number to determine how ethnic each district is. And when we look at this number, we see these numbers derived from citizens voting against population. Latino, white, African-American, and Asian.

But can you go over that and put a dash? is you're saying the Vietnamese population? What did you say on that? I said Asian population. Oh, you said Asian and Vietnamese. So the Asian population on that chart is 43% of the Asians. And then we're going to draw a history for...

The computer? Okay.

So, what I was saying there is that the Asian 43% means that 43% of that District A that is thrown on is Asian. And when I say 43% of the district is Asian, I don't literally mean 43% of the people in that whole district are Asian. I mean 43% of the citizens who are all great team are Asian. and some of them are going to be taken place, some of the Chinese, Korean, you know, different nationalities, but they're all considered by the statistics to be Asian.

Well, what's convenient is that...

if for some reason the power is not working on the monitor okay

everybody

the

the plans are all on the wall and if I can just show you most people have the packets as well Oh, yes, we have that. That's just going to pass up. Find a .

Each of these plans on the wall have the breakdown of the map and the data table, and you should have those as well. And then these maps, these will get individually. These maps will only work on the screen details, and they also have the neighborhood here. You can see the neighborhood.

When we did the alternate versions of these plans, Plan B, C, and D, we were trying to incorporate different concepts.

Plan B was the first one where we said to try to make more of the Garden Grove District and capture some of the people on the other side of the center of the river.

Go back here. Thank you.

Perfect. Thank you, guys.

So this was plan A.

District A and plan A, 43% addition.

And that is, given that there were plaintiffs, that's an important thing to look at. But this plan A draws more from the existing boundaries.

Plan B starts to incorporate more of this area north, and on the same side as the Santa Ana River and tries to maximize the Asian population in that district and it gets to 45% citizen voting age population Asian the number the lower left-hand corner is the Asian population plan C again that lower left hand corner numbers 44% this tries a different concept this plan really

looks at the Asian population that we saw very heavy Asian population in the southeast portion of the city and it says can we take this Asian population in the southeast portion of the city and merge it with the other Asian population up here essentially saying is the Asian population in this area more cohesive, more community of interest than if we drew it going this way. And that's something for the community to tell us. You know, it could be that the Asian population up here spends more time in this part of the city and the Asian population here spends more time in this part of the city.

And it's a question as to what is the better representation of the communities of interest.

Plan D is again 44% citizen voting age population Asian, but taking you back to what I asked you to bookmark when we were looking at the initial overview of Girl Men Aligns, this This plan A is essentially the Garth-Rogan-Hex solution.

So the overlap here allows the Asian community, if this is the way that it perceives itself, to be in this district. And then another portion of the Asian community down here would be in this district F. By the way, in the last hearing, in the first hearing, somebody asked me why these all that was. and the reason these have letters is that the council seats have numbers and it's something they're going to have to number this man and the numbering of the map is going to matter about what seats come up when so I didn't want to say that this is district one or just two or whatever it might predispose people to

thinking that this election this issue could come up in a given year or this issue might come up in another year so letters helps us keep that a little bit more out of track. And that is the presentation. We have a number of additional meetings that are all posted on the website. We also have maps on the wall. The idea with these hearings as community meetings is to get two types of input. one type of input is this is my community of interest we are people who work in a certain workforce we are people who go to a certain church we are

people who have our kids in the same daycare or whatever it's going to be I didn't see somebody came to one of these meeting with a Boy Scouts of America map and said look our Boy Scout troop is this area and this area over here is the other Boy Scout troop so communities of interest information just in the abstract is one. The second type of input which is very valuable is people looking at the maps and people look at the maps and they say these two neighborhoods shouldn't be in different districts these two neighborhoods should be together or they say our community is stronger in the northern part than the southern parts of the

district should go to the north whatever but it's about relating your concepts about the needs of interest to the actual lines that are available.

And I think with that, that's the presentation. The process is for the public to have any input. The tools are primarily on the website. But if people have comments or questions, I think there's a three-minute, three minutes per speaker, and you can come up and ask a question or make a statement.

yes

that's a super question That's an extremely important question too, because we're here because of the California Voting Rights Act. We're here because of a civil rights claim. And so we have to be cognizant of the ethnic populations when we are talking about it. However, when we draw districts, we can't make that the only criteria upon which we're drawing districts. And if you were to ask me what is the driving criteria of each of these boundaries, you to look at the maps, it's the neighborhoods. I think the primary criteria we were using was

trying to draw districts that made sense and at the same time would allow for a maximization or at least a good representation of the Asian community given that they were the plaintiffs and also the Latino community given that there's a large population of Latinos in the district. So So we draw districts cognizant of and we review districts very strongly based on making sure that they don't deprive an ethnic population of their rights. But when we're drawing boundaries, a lot of the driving factors have to do with those governmental boundaries. So the school district boundaries and neighborhoods.

But I can also ask, did you look at education, like all other demographics of the military? so in different redistricting will look at different things and oftentimes it is is the community comes forward and says we really want to look at educational attainment as an example and oftentimes like in a community college redistricting you'll look at high school graduation rates college going rates and all that data is data that we have when you do redistricting sometimes you look at high versus low-income areas you definitely can do that oftentimes though the

neighborhoods themselves have essentially done some of that work for you and essentially that the neighborhoods oftentimes you know encapsulate different socioeconomic demographics to put it another way very few neighborhoods are bridging together you know a very poor community a very wealthy community oftentimes they serve as a proxy so when we do overlay something like income oftentimes we see oh these neighborhoods have already been

divided based on income and so wouldn't expect it to change a lot yeah thank you for that question She just emphasized the reason for my question earlier, because she did mention that you were looking at a Vietnamese district, although you might have spent the time or said the wrong thing, etc. But rather than an indication of a district for an Indian population.

The point you just made was that because of the legal action of the lawsuit we're playing, that they're looking at drawing an Asian district and while at the same time not deflating the numbers for the Latino community. My question is, if the lawsuit was brought by a Latino group, would you be saying that you were looking to do a Latino district while at the same time not deflating the numbers for an Asian population?

yeah I think that you know when you're drawing districts what you mainly want to do is make sure that you're not disenfranchising voter communities and if I were to take the existing plans and lay it over the maps that we show one thing that's very distinctive is that the Asian population has been divided into three council districts there are multiple it's very clear that looking at existing council district lines that the Asian community is divided into three council districts. And there are council districts also that are majority and super majority Latino. And

under each of the plans we would definitely look if there was a version of a plan that we saw was dividing the Latino community and weakening their voting power as a result of it, we would definitely look at that however in the city of Santa Ana if you take a council district from being 83% Latino to 74% Latino you're not having a difference in the effective majority minority status of that council district so no matter who brought forward the claim in the city of Santa Ana we'd be looking to make sure we're not dividing communities

What are the commonalities of the Asian community, the commonalities of the Japanese, Korean, Cambodians, Chinese,

Angolians, you know, what are the commonalities of those communities, of the Asian American communities, of those different? that is something that we really are looking for community input for and to hear from the community about communities of interest because it could be arguable that the Asian community here and the Asian community here are more cohesive than they are with other parts of the district

So, we don't attempt to say we know which parts of the city have different Asian populations that feel cohesive and that are communities of interest. What we're here to is listen for that information. So we're here, we're kind of trying to be receptacle for exactly what you're talking about. Because if the census says these people are X, that can't be the only thing that drives redistricting. If that were true, we could just write a program to redistrict everything. The fact is that redistricting requires trade-offs, and oftentimes those trade-offs can be within an ethnic community

in order to determine how best to draw districts that reflect the needs of the voters and the population. So when we look at communities of interest, we're not looking at communities of interest of your citizen voting age population. You're looking at the general larger community, but you don't have the numbers showing the population of the larger community. Why are you not voting these in the service-yard communities that you are not providing the data of the total population? Yeah. So when we're looking at the citizen voting age population for Asian, that's because the law demands. I'm saying overall population.

So when we're talking about how many Asians are in a district, the law demands that we look at citizen voting age population. When we make trade-offs... But you're not providing data on total population. We definitely have the data on total population. It's just not operative. What do you mean it's not about that? It doesn't make a difference in how we draw the district. I realize that you're not providing the data. We do definitely have it. There's rings of data that we provide. You're not providing the data.

So, to back up, what's operative in drawing districts and redistricting is that when you're drawing districts, they'll have to be total population equal. Period. When you're drawing districts and you're trying to determine their ethnicity, then you're using citizen voting age population. That's what you're using. We have reams of data. I probably have thousands of different data points on over 18 non-citizens, over 18 citizens, people who are under 18, people by different age groups, people how long their commutes are to work, people who income level, education level, all those things.

but really trying to distill the presentation down to the things that are going to be operative, that are going to judge if this went into a courtroom, whether this plan is fair. We are required to use this as a vote. I understand that, but aren't you shortchanging the community by not providing the additional information that you do have and you can't provide, although you're not using it to grow your mind? Yeah, there is... You are shortchanging our community then? Oh, absolutely not. That data, the public did come forward and like she mentioned, could we see education or housing data? Absolutely.

So can you provide that data at the next meeting in addition to the public hearing? Sure. And you'll be able to provide that within the next? It would have to be a question as to how much information. I don't know if we could make it up. And you said you said you had the registry in Lexington. you're looking at the total population the over 18 population as well in addition to this

so all you're looking for so you're asking for just to be clear you're asking for the over 18 period population the population is over 18 over a chance of the heavy chifters period that's fine don't stop there no stuff there other information that experiment that will assist the community to assist them in terms of trying to understand okay

okay are there any other questions yeah do you want to see yeah yeah yeah

boundary line is between some high school because you're doing it on the whole district itself yeah but the other section the university divide through high school or divide in between yeah so essentially what is being asked is we have a high school we have a district but in district there are service areas for each campus and so it might be a perfect example of maybe some community of interest testimony it might be that

somebody comes forward and says let's say somebody comes forward and says this portion here all these kids go to high school so it's not really as important but these kids down here are all going to the same church as these kids here and and so the community of interest testimony is what helps make these decisions in terms of those trade-offs so no I don't have the service areas or the campuses which campuses are serving which kids in the Garden Road School District

but if that was something that was felt to be helpful then I'm sure I could contact that and I do have a layer in the database that has every high school here I can put together on that on plan B and C I know they said there is a little hook shake that little hook shape it's not really the existing boundaries of the existing council

district coming to this area essentially just has to come with bouncing population and if you're bouncing population how do you do that in taking into account existing neighborhood lines it's not ideal but if we were to go down here we We have too much, in order to get to the agency to get to this guy, we have to lose something over here. So there's a question of how. And I think that if we were to drive away, they would go a little bit north here, that we're cutting into a dense Asian population. And cutting like this just seemed to do the least harm when you're trying to balance overall population.

So if somebody said, this is the plan we want, but we want to clean this up and see there's a way to reach population quality a different path then we can come up with a couple different alternatives to this little hope clearly that's an individual stand out yes

yeah this is a perfect question and it's a question that comes up in a lot and we have the city of Santa Ana and we're dealing with the population based in the 2010 census you know what doesn't make sense about this from a labor perspective is you could say well there's this huge development that just came in here that's going to throw the districts out of whack like why are we doing that and we need to redraw this district in a way that we're going to under populate this district in the 2010 census numbers to account for the fact that we know that there's a

whole bunch of people here that weren't counted in 2010 but we can't do that the law doesn't the law is 2010 in time and the law says that we would be essentially in violation of traditional redistricting principles if we were to undersize a district because we know for some other data set that there's new population there we have to have justifications if we're going to underside we have to have copy with arguments based on keeping a neighborhood on following

government lines we have to do it on other basis you can't do it on the basis of like we know that there's more people there than the census report because it comes slippery slope okay Santa Ana just to begin if this is adopted this has to be re-drawn in 2020 right? 2012 or 2022. 2022. Yeah but for 2022 the redistricting has to happen and the best thing that we can do is make the districts very very very close to equal size. like you know one percent deviation because that would reduce the likelihood that these districts are not to be significantly redrawn but we can't really

account for like that we know a development here the reason I say it's slippery slope is that if you were to talk to any demographer in California they would tell you that the grossest undercount in the US census was in the city of Santa Ana and so there's a large undercount particularly non-citizen Latino populations in the city of Santa Ana, and particularly non-citizen Latino kids. And if we were to start saying, well, we know the population here is actually higher than the U.S. Census because of the gross undercount, then we start getting into this game.

And so what we choose to do and what we follow is what the law says, which is we use the 2010 Census, flaws and all, like it's, you know, fact. Yeah? If I may, for those that don't know who I am, I'm Maria Luisa, the sleep clerk here in the city. Two things. You have some really good questions. I'd like to encourage you to put your comments, if you are requesting information, to put it in writing and submit it to us so that we have record and that we make sure that we get back to you. And so you can submit that request over to our office, to the city clerk's office, either by emailing me directly.

my email should be on the list or you can submit it to the e-comments at santahanna.org at santahanna.org email account. The other thing is I'd like to plug in the census survey is coming out shortly. I'd like to encourage you and your neighbors all to complete the census information because it's really critical and important for you all to participate and be counted not only for this effort but for grant and for other purposes to really know exactly how many residents we have in the city. So I'd like to just do a plug in for the census survey that's coming up for me. Okay.

I was just going to add, if you have opinions about certain maps and why, let's say you mentioned the hope in that was very acute, If you don't think that that is an act that represents the district that it is going to, then we need to hear that and we need to hear it in writing. So if you have comments about specific maps that are out there, it's really important that you don't just say that's a bad map. It's why it's a bad map. Let's say it's cutting off a school or give us some facts between the literature that we talked about that will factually support and why do you introduce a specific map?

Question? Yeah.

I went to the earlier, the first one that you had, meeting with your dad, and that delay is probably about two hours long. My question is the process. And we have several asks that you are providing the community for your observations and input. I'm not sure if he drew the demographer or the contract for the consortium, drew these maps without input from council members or with input.

So through our organization, we'd like to be involved with several bunch of efforts before various cities here in the county. The other cities allow for input of the public in terms of drawing their own masks and submitting their own masks. We don't have that here in Santa Ana. Is there still an opportunity for community to submit dome maps?

and in terms of the process itself, will the community, by affording the community the opportunity to say this is the map they like, are you looking at adding up the totals, et cetera, and providing to the city council a report? So let me... Yeah. And if... Oh, you're going to have too many. I'm going to go to the strategy. Would the city council be able to change any plan that the community might be advising that they prefer? Okay. I'm going to start with the most recent. Pardon?

I'm going to start with the most recent, the last part of your question, which is the city council will have the ability to amend before they adopt a plan. It is ultimately a choice of the City Councils to which plan gets adopted through this process The community of interests The original drawing of this plan this plan was in these plans were drawn after we've had several meetings And had a website up where people could submit community of interest and draw maps of their own and those were utilized in the creation of these plans and then Maria do you want to speak to it we're

going to have the mapping thing again I didn't think it went anywhere it's still there the Warby District web page where there's a tool there where you can include your community of interest. It does not include the statistics, but it can tell us what your interests are. We can gather that information and be able to produce a map for you. And all input? And does it allow a community group and or individual to do their own maps and do some interest? Right. Yes, they can draw the communities of interest and they can draw them with as much detail as they want. and submit that. And that's the process that we've had for a couple months.

And then the one question you had in the middle there was, is all this input gonna be given to the city council? The answer is yes. Every time somebody writes an email or submit something on the website, that information is gonna be handed to the attorneys, to the demographer, and be provided in a report to the city. Yes?

whatever

yeah that's what this process is for and what what is available on the website is for people to be able to engage in that way. And clearly, you know, if the public is engaged and advocating for a particular plan, you know, that's going to, I would guess, weigh heavily on the process. In my experience, the public input has always been really heavily used in whatever final plan has been adopted in all the redistrictings that I've done. And our firm specifically does not work with cities or local governments who are trying to thwart the interest of the

communities that they're serving or try to do plans that don't follow these criteria. Also, there's a series of public hearings that are taking place. There's a meeting specifically on October 30th that the city council is having. That's actually the meeting where the council will be adopting the map. So that's a super important meeting for you all to come to. It will be on Tuesday, October 30th in the council chamber at 5.45. So I encourage you all to attend that meeting. That will be the meeting where they adopt the map.

If I can just add, there are going to be three additional city council meetings, so the October 30th is going to be the last one. But don't wait until the last minute. If you have comments, you can sit with them in writing so that they have all that information in advance. In my experience, I do a lot of work in different cities, and if it's just jumped on the city council the same day, sometimes they've already thought a lot about this. So the sooner you provide comments, you know, once the map is already narrowed down, the sooner you provide comments, then they'll hear you. And it's also really important to the public hearing.

Sorry. Where are the different ways that you mentioned for community to keep it beside that one side, the electronic link? And there's so many things. You can email us, you can fax us, you can come to our encounter at Rolol, we won't take note. Any way that you wanna communicate in writing is going better, because obviously we have documentation as to what exactly the community are asking for writing as a conflict.

And besides the CIDWAR to say what other promotion are we doing for this, for two women? Because I don't think that's one for the organization, right? But there are other ways

We sent out an alert, I'm not sure if you're receiving the city's alert, but you can sign up to receive all the notices that the city's publishes. And we keep the community informed on that. And if you don't have that information, I can have you to share that with you. So you can receive notices. We also posted this information on the city's Facebook account. And the information was also posted and it's kept on the city's website. Is there any paper, email address or any other stuff?

There's too many residents who have mailed it out, but we didn't notice it in the paper. We had it translated into the multiple languages, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, and English. we noticed it in the register which has a higher circulation than some of those elderly speakers so we did try to reach out to the community that way by posting the notice

yeah so um you may say that the council will adopt the land of october 30th and that plan

We have candidates running right now for certain boards. The candidates are running based on the existing boards. If you can correct me if I'm wrong, because I may have more questions and answers. The candidates, if they're elected, may change where they're at. So right now, for example, if it's a War II candidate that gets elected, it may not necessarily be considered War II. It may change to War IV. And there's a possibility, and I'm just throwing this out, that perhaps after redrawing the boundary,

there may be more than one council member serving and representing that war. But over time, that will get fixed through subsequent elections. So because we have the current map now, and we're going to be changing, hopefully by the time Election Day comes up, you know exactly where your candidate of choice will be based on the map that gets adopted, which is before the Election Day. I hope that makes sense. Yes. And then second question. So if we're having the 2020 Census, this will be redone then as well?

Yes, and like Paul said, hopefully the lines don't change as much because they'll use this as a base and adjust based on the 2020 status. So then the council member might change a little bit after that as well. Yes.

I know she has a question, but it relates to this. Realizing that on October 30th, the city council, the present city council, will adopt this, and it is approved in the November election,

then the city council, the new city council in December may take a second look at it and decide they want to scratch it or decide they want to change it or even decide that they want to change it to the point that they can protect the incumbent because that's allowable in some ways. they may decide that they want to change in best overall the boundaries. I think you have a real good problem with cleanups if a council ends up doing that.

So I think the likelihood of something like that happening is slim. You're right, I've seen this happen in other jurisdictions where existing incumbents are accommodated, but I think the likelihood of that being totally modified in the scenario is slim to them.

Yeah. So I know earlier you were mentioning about the the the the

population that this was that had a plaintiff. What about all the other because most of them are concentrated on the west end of the city. How are all the other districts gone? Also, is it limited to six woods or is there or maybe no possibility of seven or?

To speak to your first question, a lot of the boundary decisions that were made had to do with existing neighborhoods, trying to keep neighborhoods whole, trying to in some ways follow the existing architecture of the existing districts where there was no reason not to. As an example, it won't come up now, but the existing city boundaries have this,

and in other cases what they're trying to do is best fit together the neighborhood so if I was drawing something and I realized moving a line on one end of the district ends up splitting three neighborhoods then I would go back and try not to split those three neighborhoods so those kind of trade-offs remain in order to try to you know kind of make some sense of it there's also within the city some areas that are rather sparsely populated and some areas that are very densely populated so if there's a sparsely populated area in one of the

plans you might see it's always paired with the same neighborhoods it just kind of made sense why would you come around from another area to come grab something that only has 600 people in it you know so there was some of that that just kind of natural and one of the things that's interesting about redistricting is oftentimes when you're looking at something like this in six districts if you took ten different people you know eighty percent of the district boundaries we would draw would be very similar to each other just because of the way that the city lays

itself out I think that's gonna be a vote in public

yeah in your drawing what did you see that necessity of having to do a 7 or 8 board like pull another one no I didn't and in fact it's a really good question because there are agencies that have more fluidity in their ability to add members so like community colleges I worked on a bill in the legislature with the Community College League that allowed community colleges as part of this process to increase the number of trustees. And one of the reasons why was that we would see that with, you know, seven, going from seven to eight to nine trustees,

you could make districts that are small enough to really maximize and create a majority minority Latino district or a majority minority Asian district. I didn't see anything here that spoke to, you know, if only we could make districts 35,000 people, So I could draw an Asian district that's 55% Asian. I didn't see something like that jump out at me. But I have seen that in other jurisdictions, and I've advised other agencies to increase the number of board members where it was something that was within their ability, like the Harbor District that we did redistricting, finalized that last night.

They have five member boards, and one of the members asked about increasing to seven, but it's actually theirs. is in the state code so where there's always rules like that so with that thank you very much for coming and any input you can give this written or online is wonderful and we're gonna have more of these and so I appreciate having you here thank you

special thanks to the kids who sat through this my daughter is nine and she's good with any of you, so.

Good job, Daddy.