Read the August 30 meeting.

Let me begin by using myself. My name is Kimberly Malharla, I'm a partner with John's and Mayor. I'm a municipal law firm and I've been retained by the city of Washington. and the lawsuit

versus City of Connecticut

Yes, it's Lee versus City of Connecticut Next to that

As a result of the command is made up of the CBRA, that's the California Voting Rights Act, and I think Mr. Mitchell will be giving you some more information about that. Basically it's a law that requires cities to be divided into voting districts in order to allow various ethnic groups and minority voters a fair opportunity to participate and elect local officials. So the claim was that the city was in violation of the California Voting Rights Act

because even though the city has wards, people are elected from wards, but they are selected by the voters at large. That is all city voters get to vote for each ward candidate. What a by district or by ward system does instead is that candidates come from a particular district and they are only selected by the voters in that particular district. So two things have resulted from litigation. One is that the council has put a ballot measure on the ballot to amend the charter. And that amendment would do two things.

One, it would change from ward at large elections to by ward or by district elections. And two, is it would slightly change the criteria for redistricting. The redistricting language that's in there now says you can only do it for basically for population change. That is one of the criteria and very important one that Mr. Mitchell will be talking to you about when we look at what district or ward boundary lines should be. The wards or districts are supposed to be substantially equal in population, and that's one of the main criteria.

But also, there are a number of statutory criteria in California state law that are supposed to be taken into account, and that's what this process is all about, and that is the the other proposed amendment to the charter, which would basically have those district boundaries redrawn after the census every 10 years, based upon these criteria, population changes, demographics, communities of interest, et cetera. So I won't bore you with all that fun stuff. But what I will tell you is that the ballot measure will be on the November ballot.

It is important for people to understand what the measure is about and to vote on it. There is a tentative settlement agreement in place. It hasn't been finalized with the plaintiffs. And that involves a bunch of other things that aren't really relevant to our process here today. But one of the requests from them and the requirements, in fact, with something that we've done in lots of different cities that have gone to districts is is this process this community meeting process where you get to give input to the demographer and to city staff about what you think the

important boundary lines are for your neighborhood what should the districts look like how should they be configured what are the important things that make one community or one neighborhood, an important part of a community over here as opposed to over there. And so we have different kinds of maps up on the walls for you that Mr. Mitchell will explain. But the process is to give you information and to get feedback from you before maps are actually drawn and presented to the council and to the public. So what will happen is there will be two public hearings and two community meetings first.

The community meeting here and then the next one is scheduled for? The public community meeting? Yeah. Monday, September 10th. Monday, September 10th. The first public hearing is scheduled for next Tuesday, September the 4th. That will be held in the council chambers and they'll be taking public testimony there as well. These little community meetings are a little less formal because we really want to hear a lot of feedback from folks and give you an opportunity to weigh in on what the factors are that Mr. Mitchell will tell you about. So unless there are any other questions, I'm going to turn it over to Mr. Mitchell.

Alright, thank you very much. I'm going to go through a presentation. We don't have a clicker, so I'm going to be doing a little bit of this as we go through it to advance the slides. Again, my name is Paul Mitchell. The volume is something we can adjust or... Should I just make the microphone a little bit? My name is Paul Mitchell. I'm the owner of Redistricting Partners. And we do redistricting work around the state and do some consulting nationally on redistricting. And what we're going to be going through here is a little bit of explanation about what redistricting is,

the CVRA, the communities and how we might be wanting to look at those.

The data that we use in drawing maps and then some draft plans that are up on the wall that I'll explain briefly essentially how we came to draw them and a way for you to critically analyze them. What numbers you should be looking at and what those mean. So if we go to the first slide. So first off, the California Voting Rights Act is a statewide law. It was actually passed in 2001. It's taken a long time for it to be fully implemented around the state. And what it essentially does is takes federal law that says that you can't have election structures that disenfranchise protected classes.

So if you have an election structure like in the African-American community, the precinct is, you know, 15 miles away. Or if you have an election structure where the ballot is misleading in certain parts of an area or a county in a way that seems to disenfranchise people. or if you had a poll tax. Those kind of things that are seen to disenfranchise, those mechanical pieces of elections. Under federal law, if you have those mechanical pieces, you could be sued, and you could be forced to remedy them. The state law focuses entirely on this idea of at-large

elections. And what's an interesting piece of the history is that at-large elections themselves were a reform back in the progressive era when these cities were formed. Essentially, it was believed that having an at-large election system would eliminate the ward-boss kind of politics, the patronage, when somebody can control like a small part of town and control the voters, hand out jobs and money, and corrupt elections. So instead of having wards, the state decided they were going to try to push agencies, whether it's water boards, school boards, city councils,

to go at large. The negative consequence of that we found was that as you did see communities building with strong ethnic populations in different parts of a city or school board, you started to see that those communities were not able to elect candidates to office. That the at large election system itself was much a mechanical barrier to that right as as a distant polling place or a misprinted ballot. So the two terms that I'll throw around here is, at large, it's an at large election system defined by the state of California for the purposes of the CVRA,

is any election system where you're not in single member districts, where each district elects one person. That's the state's definition of at large for under CVRA. Racially polarized voting, it simply means that there are different voting patterns based on ethnicity, nationality, religion, other factors, and that it can be proven mathematically. In the federal law, you have to be able to prove that the racially polarized voting is actually changing the outcomes of elections, meaning it's not electing people that are the voter's choice in certain communities.

But under state law, the way that this law has been interpreted by the courts, you simply have to have differences in election in voting patterns. Go to the next slide. So the CBRA takes what's federal law and essentially liberalizes it. It lowers the bar for determining whether or not you have to convert to districts. It also allows, if we do the next slide, you can see.

Okay, sorry. It also allows for the plaintiffs to receive damages, and so they can be pretty large damages. The redistricting process, I'll use the terms interchangeably, but redistricting process is generally the every 10-year process.

Now, when we draw districts, we try to follow a set of kind of established redistricting criteria. Some of these are actually in state law when it comes to how the state draws legislative congressional lines. Some of these are simply based on case law, meaning that years and years and years of Supreme Court cases have developed these kind of criteria in order to make sure that we're not gerrymandering districts, that we're actually drawing districts that are fair and balanced. The first one is relatively equal size. Let's see what happens. There we go.

Relatively equal size means that each district would have about the same number of constituents. So each council member would be representing an equal number of people. Now this is not equal numbers of voters, or equal numbers of citizens, or equal numbers of people over the age of 18. It's simply equal numbers of people. and it is not equal numbers of people because I went out and counted everybody in Santa Ana last night. It's equal numbers of people based on the 2010 census based on where people rested their head on April 1st, 2010 period. And the census does have flaws. If somebody were to bring it up later

clearly there was even documentation and research done in the city of Santa Ana in particular there's been a severe undercount of certain populations in the census. However, we treat this number as the fixed number. We don't mess with it.

The total population based on the 2010 census is around 325,000. If we're to try to make districts equal size, you can see that the median district size would be right around 54,000. So if we were to try to create districts of relatively equal size, let's throw out there like a standard 5% deviation. meaning no district's going to be the largest district isn't going to be more than five percent larger than the smallest district so this is buffer essentially if you're to treat it just kind of as a general rule like two and a half percent above two and a half below the median you're looking at districts

where they're going to be around fifty three to fifty five thousand people based on the 2010 census while we're talking about these counts of people One of the things that gets really confusing about redistricting is that you'll talk about this number of people, and then all of a sudden I start talking about another way of calculating people, like I'll talk about how we're counting Latinos, and you say, well, wait, the numbers here don't add up to the numbers there.

Maybe it makes it slightly easier to see.

This is fun.

The fact is that while we use the whole population from the 2010 census to make sure the districts are of equal size, when you come to me and say how many Latinos are in a district, what is the density of Asians in another district, what we're actually going to use for that is a newer data set. It's a data set that's provided by the American Community Survey, which is a product of the U.S. Census. This is the long form of the census that goes to one out of every six people that complete the short form. So essentially you have a small percentage of recipients taking this every year.

They do an average and they calculate, as an example, how long is the average drive time for this census block? What is the average income for this census block? What is the average home price for this census block? And we take that data and we can look at what is the average per census block, all the way down to that very small level, of citizens of voting age and then Latino, or citizens of voting age and then Asian. And use that as our calculation as to how strong an ethnicity is in a population. So if I say that there's 55,000 people in this council district, that means that it's people.

If I say this is 27% Latino, that means that 27% of the voting age, meaning over 18, citizens are Latino. Does that make sense? Kind of a little bit different, using a little different tools for depending on what we're talking about.

Contiguous. This seems obvious. Districts should be whole. It seems obvious, but about 15 miles away from here, I did a consulting for a water board, where they literally had a district that would start in one part and then just kind of disappear and pop up somewhere else. So districts need to be contiguous. The only justification for having districts not be contiguous would be like, you're drawing Catalina Island in to the county of LA, or you're drawing congressional districts in Hawaii. So the districts should be contiguous, whole parts. There's also this term called functionally contiguous. Functionally contiguous

means that if I'm drawing a district in, let's say, the San Gabriel Valley, drawing a district from Monrovia to Lancaster, I can draw that contiguous, right, like going straight over the Angeles Crest, but I can't draw it functionally contiguous. That means that to get from one end of the district to the other, you'd need like a hiking map and a canteen, and, you know, getting there wouldn't be necessarily functionally together. So there's contiguous and functionally contiguous. Maintaining communities of interest, and when we talk about communities of interest, we're first gonna look at these protected classes.

These would be Latinos, Asians, African Americans, religious communities, and other nationalities or ethnic communities. And this is really, really specific to the place in which we're doing redistricting. As an example, doing redistricting in Escondido or in El Centro, you look at things like the Chaldean population. Chaldeans are Catholic Iraqis, which can be a really large voting block in that area. If I'm doing redistricting where I grew up in Glendale, we talk a lot about the Armenian population. I don't think we're going to have community testimony from Chaldeans or Armenians in this redistricting,

but we're likely going to have a lot of testimony from Latinos and Asians, and then within the population in certain subgroups. The ethnic populations in, as I said earlier, the ethnic populations we're going to be using, the calculation is going to be of citizens voting age population. You can think of that as being of eligible voters. And the district, the city overall shows 17% Asian and 60% Latino by that citizen voting age population. However, these are not evenly distributed throughout the city. If we're to look at these, I've got two different

sets of maps I'm going to show you. We'll start off with the Latino population. The darker shading means the higher density of Latinos. And if we go to the next slide, as you can see, there's certain census block groups. That's what each little shade area is, the census block group, with considerably higher Latino population. We go to the next slide, this is an Asian population and again the darker shaded means higher concentration and in the next slide you can see certain areas with considerably high Asian population. If I said the city is 17% Asian, that's one lens to look through. If I was to tell you

there are parts of the city that are 50% Asian or 43% Asian, that's a different lens. And that's a lens you can look through when you see this, especially on the eastern side of the city where you can see very high Asian population. There are other communities of interest. In fact, if we walked out of this process and the only thing we were looking at is ethnicity, that probably wouldn't be right. There are other communities of interest that we can be thinking about when we're drawing lines. And again, these are specific to the place that we're drawing lines. So we might look at people who live near a certain industry. We might

look at people who live in a downtown versus a suburb. We might look at places that have a high senior citizen community. If we were growing deserts down near Seal Beach, we'd be looking very heavily at where the senior citizen population is. There could also be environmental interests, like if they're, you know, where I grew up in Glendale, there's the hillsides and the fire protection issues. And there's issues literally of how deer are going to be traveling through the area and then there's also issues obviously of things like homeowners renters areas where you have people who are living you know moving every 18

months and areas where people live for 18 years and these again are very specific to the place that we're drawing districts I did a redistricting recently in Solano County where literally we were mapping walnut trees and almond trees because that was a community of interest for an irrigation district. I'm doing the redistricting in San Mateo right now where I'm literally mapping harbors because for a harbor district access to the ports is actually a community of interest. So for us when we're drawing districts what we want to think about is what is a community interest and then how does that

community of interest relate to the city and to city services and to how the city is interacting with those populations.

The next one is essentially following existing city, local, county government lines. This could mean following some of the existing boundaries that are in the current district for the city council, because arguably those were created with some forethought. But it also could include looking at other lines. I'll stand that for another second. One of the things that you can see when you look at the maps is that I lean very heavily based on the community input that we received at the time on the neighborhoods. And this is very, very common in local redistricting of cities.

Because many cities, whether it's LA City or where I've done redistricting consulting or Escondido or almost anywhere else, neighborhoods actually mean something. Somebody says they're from a neighborhood and that is in of itself a community of interest. And neighborhoods are also fought over. there are very few areas where the neighborhood lines haven't been a point of contention. And so where you have these points of contention, you have people deciding, yes, the neighborhood on this side of Main Street versus that side of Main Street, but there's a difference. That's something that we can kind of lean into and say, okay, well,

if for 40 years these communities have seen themselves as being different and they've named themselves differently, they have a different structure, maybe they testify before the city council differently, maybe they have some other organizational principle behind them, then is that something that we could rely on as an existing boundary? The final one in this set is keeping districts compact. And what that means, it doesn't mean small. When I do redistricting in San Bernardino County, I've got some districts that are 100 miles around. But it does mean keeping districts more circle and square-like and less serpentine and weird.

And so you can think of the most, the smallest shape in science would be a sphere. So anything that's more circle, square, triangle-like is going to be more compact than something that looks like a snake going around a district line. And there are examples in the state redistricting and even in some local redistrictings have some pretty weird shapes.

and then for the last point weird shape doesn't mean that I want to be clear about that sometimes weird shape means that a neighborhood has formed itself and it is said that this is how the neighborhood exists so we might see some shapes that aren't necessarily circles or squares but what we do want to do is as much as possible within the other criteria try to minimize the squiggly lines and make districts more clean. So the current districts as you can see we we have seven current districts, I'm sorry six current districts, and as you can see there is some kind of north-south relationship to them but obviously these

can be used as maybe something to build off of but they aren't necessarily it suggested to be like the starting point for us. If we go to the next.

So, in this, this is a blown up version of the current plan. When we looked at the redistricting, one of the things we did look at was neighborhoods, and you can see this next slide has a little bit blow up of the neighborhoods. And on those maps, we do have the neighborhoods listed so that you can see how the districts would lay out with the neighborhoods. And in these neighborhoods, you can see a couple things that are interesting. One is you can see the actual size of the neighborhoods in this spreadsheet. I think this is in your packets. You can also see the voting age population and then the

percentage of Latino and Asian voting age population. I think on the next slide I might highlight these different elements that you can look at. That's the Latino population and the Asian population. We, in the principle of like following existing governmental boundaries, school districts can be very important. I think for a lot of us the school that we went to means something. Even 30 years later I still identify with where I went to school and then the people that when I went to school with were in a community of interest. And as you can see we have an interesting school

boundary on the overlap of the city and the Garden Grove Unified School District. That might come up in further and future conversations as a justification for potentially some of the lines and one of the plans I think plan D draws heavily from some of the underlying architecture that school district

the legislative lines again the legislative lines don't come down from heaven they're drawn for whatever reasons they were decided to draw legislative lines but arguably maybe some people in this very room were at the hearings that they had that for the State Redistrient Commission where they went around the state and took public input and that public input helped draw these boundaries and so insofar as these boundaries weren't just done willy-nilly that these boundaries were done with input there might be things that we could potentially glean from them

same thing with congressional district lines

And then finally, I just put this in here, is another kind of small geography, is precincts. Precincts are interesting because not only do they have a geographic component, but the county registrar has put a ton of energy into making sure that when they're putting a polling place out, that it is among people who, you know, basically not only live together, but also can all get to a central location. So when I talk about functionally contiguous, you're not going to see polling precincts that are split by a freeway you can't get around or a

hillside or a lake. You're going to see precincts respecting that contiguous nature, and if something is in a precinct together, it is essentially saying all these people can make it to this particular church, or all these people can make it to this person's, you know, a garage where they have the polling set up. So essentially in of itself precincts have a little bit of a community to them.

When we drew lines taking in public input, taking in each of these principles, these were the, we essentially created these four plans as starting points. And the idea is to have these out there so that the community can do one of two things. The community can either engage in an abstract sense and say here's a community of interest that I think you should pay attention to. All the people in this area go to this one particular church. All these people in this area work in this particular industry or all these people in this area you know are of this other nationality that you haven't talked about. So the second way to have input is

to look at the actual lines and say I like the district you've drawn for district 3 in plan A but I wish that it had this neighborhood in it or this is my neighborhood and why did you draw my neighborhood with this other neighborhood we don't get along you should have driven drawn our neighborhood with another neighborhood on the other side so giving input that's actual you know based on drafts is a little different than just kind of the abstract what our community of interest in. Go to the next slide we can look at these numbers and how to essentially

read these. So first off deviation means how far away from that median value are these districts and what we're looking for is that the total deviation from the largest district to the smallest district isn't more than five percent and as you can see here we have each of these districts and the numbers in parentheses means that it's a negative number so C is underpopulated by 347 while B is overpopulated by 300 people. Essentially those two districts have a deviation of you know just doing the math 648 people which is essentially a two percent deviation that one and

then the negative one the difference is only two percent so we're well within that five percent. If you look at the citizen population, you can see there are significant differences. If you look at District A with 27,000 over 18-year-old citizens, that's pretty large, especially compared to a district that's almost exactly the same population in terms of raw population. It's 500 smaller, but it is 17,000 over 18 citizen population. Now, we're drawing the districts to be equal based on the real population.

One of the Supreme Court cases last year was that in Texas, they drew state senate districts. They wanted to draw state senate districts based on that 18-plus citizen population or an eligible voter population. And as you can see, in that population calculation, these districts are very skewed in terms of their total. The Latino citizen voting age population, as you can see, also varies significantly by district, where we have districts that are 82 and 74 percent Latino and others that are as low as the mid to high 40s. The white citizen voting age population is also listed. However, they're not a protected class necessarily.

We're not drawing districts that are going to get sued based on the disenfranchisement of white voters, because white voters are seen as the not protected class. African Americans are a protected class, however, we see the population as being so small that under state law, it doesn't seem as though drawing districts for the African American population would be able to get you to a percentage of African Americans in any district where they would have, and the state law is, the ability to influence the election.

Meaning that if all the African Americans in the city were drawn into the same district example, would they be able to have enough oomph with block voting to actually drive who's going to get elected? These population numbers under redistricting law essentially would say that they can be treated as a community of interest, absolutely. You can draw districts to make sure that you're not splitting communities that have high-value African American population, but it's also suggesting that the numbers aren't so great that they should be given the same weight as African American and Latinos,

who could have the ability to influence the outcome of the election if they were 50 or 80% of the population that's eligible voters. That last one is the Asian population and as you can see in this plan A, in this plan A, district A is 43% Latino or 43% Asian. That is what would be called an influence district, meaning that Asians would have the ability to influence the outcome of an election given that high concentration of Asian population. So

So in terms of when we talk about this, it's a weird thing to talk about. It is also almost, we're used to talking about race really delicately, but when I get up here, I just start talking about it very openly. When we talk about a district that's going to be 70 or 80% Latino, we're going to call that a majority-minority district, meaning a majority of the population is one single minority group. When we talk about the Asian district, we're going to call that an influence-Asian district, meaning that 43% Asian population is significant enough for them to be able to influence the outcome of an election.

We could also look at something like, say, the District D here. District D, let's look at District C. District C is not a majority-minority Latino population. Latinos are only 48% of that district. However, Asians are 10% of that district. If there was data suggesting that Asians and Latinos in that particular district were voting in unison, that could be considered what's called a coalition district, meaning that Asians and Latinos could form a coalition in voting.

And this might not be the case in Santa Ana, but like as in Glendale, the Armenians and Latinos generally vote against each other. However, when there's only one Latino or one Armenian on the ballot, they will vote in coalition with each other. And so there are instances where we see coalition voting patterns and it helps to justify something as being a coalition district. But those are just terminologies. I'm not declaring any of these anything. I'm just talking about the terms that will be used.

So let's go to the next district plan. This district plan again, you know, to the, when you first glimpse at it, it's hard to see the distinct differences. But when you look at the populations in these, I'm sorry, plant B. When you look at the populations in these, you'll start to see some of these numbers. And you can see again that now we have the highest CVAP Asian population, again being District Day at 45% Asian. And we again have Latino populations that are strong, but we don't have any that are in that 70-80% in terms of Latino population.

And again, the deviations are very small in this plan. It looks like, again, a 2% total deviation.

Plan C. You can see in Plan C we've done a little bit of elongating, particularly that District A. And if you look at the population numbers, you can see that that had not a lot of impact in terms of the actual Asian population. There is some Asian population in that lower portion. However, to get there, you have to go through a lot of communities that don't have a lot of heavy Asian population.

Essentially, as you look at the maps on the wall, it's really better than seeing in the presentation. you'll start to see that a lot of these cases where we draw the boundaries are at the boundaries of the neighborhood associations as much as possible. And the final map, the map that I believe the plaintiffs have wanted us to spend a little bit more time paying attention to is Plan D. And this final plan, the one thing that I want to jump out, that really jumps out at it for me, we do have, again, the Asian population right at about 44%. We also have several districts that are heavily Latino,

but only one, I'm sorry, we have some of the other Latino and then again 78% Latino being the highest percentage Latino voters in District C. But if we go to the next slide, the thing that I think makes this plan stand out the most to me is the way that we've drawn District And remember when I was looking at the school district map? I said look at that Garden Grove Unified School District because that's going to come back. And that's essentially how we drew District A in this plan. District A has essentially two parts. It almost looks like they're barely contiguous. It looks like they're barely touching.

And that is the case. However, that barely touching aspect is very much reinforced by the fact that this is the actual Garn Grove Unified School District overlap to the city almost perfectly. And so if we're looking for criteria upon which to draw a district that not only keeps the Asian community whole, but also keeps it together in kind of an organic way that is a reflection of where their kids go to school, you know, what PTA meetings they go to, how they engage with their government, then this could be a very justifiable way to draw that district. The remainder of the districts

again we draw you know you were leaning heavily on this north-south relationship to the district lines for you know everything but the one on top there and we are following a lot of the neighborhoods so like if I could get ideal input it would be somebody saying this neighborhood that's in district 2 and this district, you know, C and this neighborhood that's in district D should be, you know, swapped. Things like that are helpful for us in determining kind of maybe how changes can be made. And then one final point about this, I've had

somebody ask me, why are these letters? And the reason that they're letters is because I don't want to presuppose what the final number ordering of these districts is going to be. The numbers aren't just numbers. The numbers also mean when these seats will come up for election. And a part of the process will be for the council to adopt one of these plans and then adopt at the same time essentially a little piece of paper that says District A is District 4 and District B is District 1 and District C is District 3. And that is going to determine when each of these seats come up, whether they come up, you know, in

the next election that's coming up or one that's coming up in the future. The other thing that I want to be clear about with this is that when we do implement this plan, these districts are going to take effect in kind of a staggered sense. The first districts that come effect when those incumbents are up for office. Those seats will have their election, and then two years later there will be another election for the remainder of the seats. And that way, these district lines are essentially going to take effect over the course of two election cycles.

And that's it. I really encourage, as the kind of final piece of this process, for you to look at the physical maps. Because my eyesight's not great, but I can't read what neighborhood's in what district from here. But when you go up and look at the maps, you can see that. and then we do have speaker cards I believe we have more to I think we have a couple more we do have some speaker cards and and then you know obviously we're going to be having more of these community meetings we're going to be having council meetings and this is all opportunity for you to have input on the

process so with that I guess the one part that I have so far is is it an Avery Endress. Endress.

Thank you for your presentation. I just wanted to say that there seems to be a two-pronged problem with meeting the California Florida Rights Act, and one is protecting the protected class. And I see that the Asians have found to claim that they are a protected class. But I think the whites in Santa Ana are a protective class as well, and we'll be clear if they filed a lawsuit. 78.2% according to the demographics listed on the Santa Ana website.

78.2% of Santa Ana are Hispanic, 10.4% are Asian, and 9.2% are white. So I think the whites would qualify as a protected class and should be considered as a protected class when you tune your demographics. And then the second prong is the wards and how they're going to be arranged. I would like to see a map of the boards that exist now with the Democrats listed as you've done on this. Have you done that yet? The current boards with the current demographics within each board. I know it's been done. I don't know if it's in the office.

Well, I looked at that not for this election, but the election before. For instance, in Ward 3, Greg Franklin won the election in Ward 3 for the City Council by over 500 votes. but at large he lost to a vagina and I would like to see a breakdown of if we kept the words the way they are now what would be the demographics would that be possible yeah I think that if it hasn't been pretty sure it's been done but it's easy to do thank you very much

on the issue of the white population being a protected class is actually lost in Glenvale when there was no there was a lot of one down where the college professor at Gwendolyn College to saying that the white population was disenfranchised by the latter at large election system because too many Armenians are getting elected that was thrown out based on the argument that you know in that circumstance the need for redistricting in Glendale was being born on the population Latino population not a white population so but I did put the date up there for people to look at it

okay another card is from Helen but I think we have two more cards

that was it okay thank you

I strenuously object to holding this meeting for two days advance notice during the working hours on Thursday, right before Labor Day. And I communicated that to the city and have to send that. I do appreciate your being here. I would appreciate a clarification sticking back it's up to the voters of Santa Ana first of all to decide whether or not the election is going to go from election at large to board the district Is that correct? Should I have the attorney answer for you? Sure.

So that's the first thing. That's up to the voters. And I understand that as part of the settlement, these community meetings are being held, and that is on redistricting, and giving us the opportunity to comment on redistricting. But that's not yet a paid accommodation. Is that correct? That's correct. The ballot measure is for the voters. And what does that ballot measure say?

The ballot measure, as I explained, has two proposed changes. The first being that instead of having council members elected from Ward, they will be elected by Ward. And the second is that any future redistricting is based upon criteria of state and federal law. Now, my understanding is that the California Voting Rights Act is only triggered if there's a demonstration of voter dilution. Eurasian polarized voter. That's correct. When I read the brief submitted, there's reference to dilution.

And help me understand, the only evidence in the brief regarding voter pollution is Mr. Solario's statement or admission that this exists in reference to the economic disparity currently between the Caucasian-American residents of Santa Ana and the Asian-American residents of Santa Ana. Is that, so I have to clear my question, what is the problem that is being addressed? Is it the disparity between Caucasian Americans economically in San Diego? No.

Okay, then what is it? It's racially polarized voting is the criteria that the CDRA requires districting if you have racially polarized voting. So that could mean, for example, that the Latino population and the Asian population are voting differently from one another. And as a result, Asians are not able to place or get somebody else. I understand hypothetically. My question to you is what was the factual basis for deciding to settle this matter? Well, I can't really disclose that because that's conversations that have been held in closed session.

but I can tell you that typically when we do an analysis of these cases and frankly there aren't very many cases under the CVRI that have not one. So you can't tell us what the basis for determining that we should go to the What I can tell you is that there obviously a significant concern about liability exposure and the very very large cost of litigation of these issues. And I absolutely appreciate that. My question to you again is, what is the problem? Is it the disparity between Caucasian Americans and Asian Americans? Or when we talk about racial people, it's Americans.

It's Latinos and Asians. That's the disparity, not Caucasians.

And explain to me the disparity. that Latinos are not voting for the same candidates as Asian residents are. As a result of the at-large system, Asians are not able to have enough whammy, whatever you want to call it, to elect a candidate of their choice. Thank you.

And this is a question I don't mean to be rude, but I'd like to speak to people rather than about people to be direct. And when I reviewed the information concerning our demographic consultants, Mr. Mitchell and his firm, I went across some information pro publica, and I was hoping, given the lack what I see is openness in this process. And Mr. Mitchell will address the articles in Pro Publica,

which are generally very admiring, but talk about how Democrats fooled California's district information and also what they describe as disingenuous tactics, the formulation of interest groups. and rather than be straightforward

never met you mr. Mitchell and I had heard of me before well have been a part of the record

thank you very much

now the work that my firm does redistricting partners has reached from working for agencies like we're working right now for the city of Santa Ana We're working right now for Harvard District, Water District, Health Care Districts and so on, working for agencies themselves. And then in other cases, working on advocacy outside of the agency. So as an example, for the city of Escondido, I was actually the demographer on the plaintiff's side, where we were doing the drawing, we were doing the advocacy for them to convert. Whereas in another city, you know, 20 miles away, I might be actually working for the city itself.

So in redistricting you have this process that actually really needs both sides, like a judicial process. And so in some cases I'll be working for the plaintiff, in some cases I'll be working for the agency, which is essentially the defendant. And I hope that in this process, we will have organized groups coming forward with testimony to help influence the line drawing by exposing essentially for us what the communities of interest are and providing to us the data and tools. So as an example, one of my largest clients in the state redistricting was the LGBT community.

The LGBT community has never in this country been seen as a community of interest for the purposes of redistricting. However, we know living in Southern California that there are definitely very dense populations around the region with dense LGBT populations that have significant concerns around health care or around schools or around all other issues. And my firm was able to, and there was quite a bit of press of this in the statewide redistricting process, get California to be the first state to recognize LGBT as a redistricting criteria as a community of interest. We're able to do that at C-level

and other local governmental levels. And so, clearly, newspapers like to run headlines and sell papers but the reality is that community organizing around redistricting creating the you know coalition for districting or whatever you're gonna call it is a part of the process and it's a healthy and part of the process that I hope that we'll see a lot of in these meetings I think we have other questions unless we've got another blue card back there I think too can we thank fine thank you thank you very much thanks for your questions let me just get your card so I

can get these people first Peter cats thank you very much I think you've been to a couple of meetings yes good morning I'm Peter cats I'm president of the common language over she's all 64 neighbors woods with the city of Santa Ana great my concern is that as a voter I I vote in one district, that only allows me to vote on what happens in my district. By voting citywide, I have a say in what happens in the entire city. And this is the reason cities went to citywide elections, so you have a voice of what happens in the entire city.

Going back to award elections, you're going to go back to what you had in Chicago, what you had in New York, with Tammany Hall, what you had in Los Angeles. This is the reason why you have gold sidewalks in Beverly Hills and Rodeo Drive and those sidewalks in East Los Angeles, Watts and Compton. These district elections trade boats to kill opposition candidates in those districts. They shovel their money over to the other districts, the richer districts, in exchange for killing off opposition in the elections. It's going to happen again in the city.

And so this is my major concern. And the other thing I want to raise is we spent $56,000, I believe, on a study to see if our hybrid system was a violation of the California Roting Rights Act. yet city attorney has stated a client privileged not releasing that information as a taxpayer and that's a resident of the city I paid for that study I am entitled to that answer that answer influences the way I vote on this ballot if that study shows that it is a violation of the state law then I might

vote for this system to change if it's not I'm not going to vote that way so So you're affecting the way I decide how I vote. So that's my position. Thank you. And thank you, Peter. And also thank you. Both your questions, unfortunately, are not in a position to answer. The first question is a macro question. Is the drawing of districts a better governance structure than having at-large elections? And I think that was talked about. This is something that will go to the voters. And it is something that is not black and white. I can't tell you right now that one election structure is better than another.

I've seen dysfunctional governments in both election systems. But on the second point, with regard to a study that was done before I was hired, I have never seen nor have any ability to influence whether that study is something that is made public. So sorry about that.

Let's try Dale. Oh Dale, you've got to move to the top. Probably at the very bottom tip. One thing I don't understand is if we make the assumption that this work election issue does not get passed in November, is redistricting still a necessary thing? Because the way I look at it, the whole purpose of it is to provide more influence for one voting bloc and reduce the influence of the Latino voting bloc.

And so if I was a Latino, I would say, no, I don't want to go to award elections because I lose my clout in all of the awards together. So there's a strong possibility that this could fail, but yet we're still pursuing the redistricting aspect of it. And what is it really going to accomplish if it does fail? Well, I will tell you, if it fails, then the city is going to have to decide what to do next I don't advise the city on those legal issues and and I can't speak to any conversation that they've had about like a contingency plan if it

fails I will tell you anecdotally the city of West Covina had a valve measure

in around 2002 or 2004 or something like that it failed and they just converted to district lines based on a lawsuit and the fact that they had had a lawsuit that had a local ballot measure that failed didn't you know resolve that issue for them that was not the end of it so i think if maybe members of the council should be asked that question and maybe after the election cycle they'll know more about what they're going to do next and we might have a better answer Well, I'll speak to you quickly.

Mr. Mitchell is correct. You have a definite contingency plan in place. What the council has done is try to give the voters the opportunity to choose.

Unfortunately, plaintiffs believe that if the ballot measure fails, that they would fail in court, that there would be millions of dollars spent on litigation, and frankly, I concur. And so the settlement agreement likely will contain a provision that even if the ballot measure fails, that we'll have to go, the court will order us to go to districts. And that is, you know, the biggest concern that most citizens have in these cases is that they want to be part of and to control the mapping process. If the court orders the districts, the court can also choose the boundary line.

Most citizens don't want to give that write up to someone else, the plaintiffs or the court. So the purpose of the process is to have a map do all of the evaluation, get all the input, look at all the different alternative maps with their demographic information, and to allow the council to select a map that can be put into place. If the ballot passes or if it doesn't pass and they're ordered to districts, then we would use that ballot. Yes, ma'am. Can you ask the current board to consider making good work? We don't know because we don't have the values that's called current.

We'll be providing that, but I can tell you that based on the current board lines, I don't believe that it will be.

the way that that community is divided currently.

Yes? My first job is to decide whether or not the right thing to do is to go to the board or the right thing to do. Yes. Can you tell me you can't say why you were included? Well, I can tell you what the allegations are, and that is that because the current board lines divide the Asian community and and because the Asian community represents what 15% 17% of the city whenever you have an at-large system

where 300,000 voters plus or residents are voting and only 17% of them are in in one category, they're not gonna be able to have any real influence on that election. And I just suggest an allocation to my question, to use what does the council determine about the facts which cause them to improve that they were public members? That's my question. We can ask her, hear her question. Please speak the mic. I'll give you a good question. Yeah, her question is, what are the facts?

And again, I can't, I'm not at liberty to share with you confidential discussions, but I had only info sessions. It's just not something I'm allowed to do under the law. But I'm sure that as we go through the public hearings, additional information about that issue will come out. Can I just ask a follow-up question there? So it really doesn't matter how the election turns out on this because it sounds like we're going to get it no matter what to avoid a lawsuit. Is that a fair summation? we're getting it's just a matter of whether we voluntarily say we want it or it's forced on us

by the courts and it's the sap sounds like the city and it won't be the courts the city will settle and force it on us I can tell you that that is like it happened yet I'm sorry? Let's do Zeke. We have a card in for Zeke.

Hello, my name is Zeke Fernandez. I'm president of Santa Ana Lulac. And through Lulac we have worked on redistricting and by district elections in various cities.

I can say that a couple of years ago we did meet with Shankman and we discussed looking at cities throughout the state in terms of working towards five district elections from that meeting I left and others left thinking that we would not be able to work with the treatment attorney because of reasons that he's an attorney the private attorney

looking at it from that perspective

we we've also had worked with not if in terms of other traditional cities and school districts

the question was always posed to me as I live in Santa Ana why not have the city of Santa Ana go to by district elections as well as the Santa Ana unified school district Why not it go to my district elections? I felt that first of all, let me preface this with, I have been involved with my district election efforts since the 80s for the measure C, which we wanted to award elections at that time, and we lost it in terms of the ballot by small number of votes. I did send a letter to the city

within the last year about a year ago

favorite the the exploration of by district elections but if we look at the city of Santa Ana you you are challenged with the changing demographics the ability the the the the wanting of constituents electors if you will to elect a body that would be that that would respond to their concerns whether

it's a city at large or neighborhood so I we have pretty much as Lula we had pretty much left state of the conversation as far as by district elections as it is now we are confronted in the November elections as far as voting for a map if you will the the the City Council has not well let me ask you in this way has the City Council made a decision but it favors by district

elections and as it is right there if you look at the elections we will have a change on the City Council elections so perhaps that didn't use it console should also take a look at it we also have the coming up is the 20 he senses the 2020 census which will have an impact in terms of all all districts or words are planned up are mapped out we looked at we looked at center and in

terms of communities and the Vietnamese community or the Asian community if you will

has been I believe within the history of City Council elections there has been one Asian American

that has been a candidate for city council years past and it didn't work out but what I am challenged with is that how do we go about recognizing the changing demographics and allowing the constituents if you will the the the communities whether it's Asian Latino non-Asian and non-Asian

and non-Asian etc how do we allow how do we have a former government where each of those communities as well as other communities ethnic communities be a part of it participatory democracy if you will and so so I believe the best thing to do is to have the electorate make that decision also in conjunction with the elected body in terms of the elected body providing a guidance in terms of leadership in terms of where we're going to go much my questions are too

specific when you speak of communities of interest what can you you define more what what those communities of interest are because it's not just ethnic communities is more than that and also can you can you describe more in terms the use of boundaries whether you whether you're going to be using arterial streets etc or other forms of boundary lines that you're able to use and then the other the other question is when do we make the decision when we make the

decision of which maps are preferred by the public the City Council also has the final say-so in terms of selecting a an overall map that they would decide on not so much that was approved by the public so can you explain more of that process in terms of the ability to change things that the public may want yet the City Council has finalization let me address first the two that are in one of my area of work.

The first is your question about communities of interest and how do we define them. There are certain communities of interest that are easily defined in the datasets that we get from the U.S. Census. So when I talk about citizen voting age population, the ethnic population, that's very clear. Beyond that, it really takes input from the community. So if there is a community of interest around people who live near Main Street, if there's a community of interest around people who go to community college, if there's a community of interest around people who have issues with the freeway and traffic,

if there are communities of interest around different things, then that is something that these forums provide an opportunity for and something that we want to have kind of work through as we're drawing these boundaries. It bleeds right into your second thing about the boundaries themselves. What do we use? Do we use artillery roads? Do we use other things? And the reason I'm suggesting that those two things bleed into each other is that often times when you do have a major road or a freeway or some kind of physical dividing line in a city, that also comes over decades with a community of interest.

where you find that families and communities and networks and people who work together and industries will develop on one side of the freeway and a little differently than somewhere else in the city. So, and then on top of that, the governmental agencies seem to almost codify that. I don't believe that the Garden Grove Unified School District came into Santa Ana and took up that portion of the city by accident. it seems as though there was probably years and years and years ago a rational basis for performing governmental agencies that overlap the city boundaries and insofar as they either at the

time had some kind of a organizational theory around that or that communities have been built up around those since then it could be some things it could have been that the boundaries were created to codify something that existed or that those creation of boundaries over time created communities that saw themselves being differently either way using those boundaries as one of the ways we're going to draw districts has the added benefit of also likely being a reflection of communities of interest these communities of interest that aren't just about ethnicity or

nationality or religion or race these are communities of interest that might have to do with how people get services and where they go shopping and who their kids are friends with and you know what little league team that they're on and so on. So the neighborhood associations are an even smaller level of that, a little bit more granularity to look at the city based on these neighborhoods because again these neighborhood lines have oftentimes been argued about for decades. I know when the LA Times did their big mapping project of mapping all the neighborhoods in Los Angeles, they got flooded by people that said no no no

Spar Heights doesn't start here, Spar Heights starts there. And, you know, arguing about the community of Los Feliz and arguing about Miracle Mile. You know, is Miracle Mile actually a mile? You know, the discussions that happen when the city says these are the neighborhoods, it's not just some flippant decision by some administrator to draw those lines. Those involve real kind of tension between different parts of the city to say who we are. And so if we can draw lines that respect that boundary, we are in of itself drawing lines that are seeking to make sure communities of interest are protected.

So it's a kind of a, in a way, we have a little bit of cheat sheet already because of these governmental boundaries and because of the neighborhood boundaries. So when we get to the drawing of lines, we can think in concert with both ethnicity race and census data and then these building blocks that have been given to us for decades of the city organizing that make sense

Clark is that what it says clerk Carl yeah right

when people see my name and they think I read Dave whenever you have to start I just enjoy being called Peter all the time. That's funny. First of all, thanks for the opportunity to do this. Thank you for taking neighborhood associations as far as dividing line. I've got to have a variety of questions, some that have already been answered. And this one is for Maria. Maria, if boards are turned down, can the council make that change up on themselves? Can the council decide to go from at large to board elections?

If you can repeat that again. Okay, if this gets turned down, can the consulist contingency be the state set up into more elections?

They probably could, and that is because there might be two different ways to do that. One would be that they would adopt an ordinance expressly declaring that it was necessary to you hear a violation of the CBRA. And what we always try to avoid is any conflict between the charter and other local law. We don't want that. The alternative, of course, is that a court will order the city to go to fight district voting, notwithstanding the language in the charter. And that has happened in several cities already

across Southern California well across California period so we are I don't know the state is so I'm asking this question back whatever when you look at how long we've had six cops of people in the city San Hano you look back in 1960 and their represent their roughly 20,000 people each house up to 54 would there be any discussion of saying with an eight councils or nine possible under state law Well, the most you can have is nine, so if you maintain directly elected Mary, yes, you theoretically could have eight words, but that hasn't been proposed by anyone.

I think that's a fairly radical change to make, but certainly one that could be considered in the future. Where do we stand in the state right now? Are we average, above, low? In terms of? In terms of number? Oh, large. That means we said large city. yeah you're it's quite a large city it's one of the largest cities you know in the state outside of San Francisco but so 54,000 is probably high as compared to let's say a lot of other Orange County cities for example they have five

council members and in Fullerton and that's 130,000 roughly I think Costa Mesa has just gone to six and that is about 120,000 or so any other kind of thing yet Anaheim has six and it's a comparable size to send it in the church population I cannot emphasize the computer we have a tax curve dollars spent to look at our Democrats what we presently have we

really need to get that out to voters how can I do any point of saying I need to change but I don't know what I have so there's any way of getting that document city attorney I was wrong and grieve ease that information so our citizens can end up taking a look and see what we have

we will convey that message

I think the last one I have here is Eric

thank you for having this presentation and you know a lot of us is a little hair care of a bad you with an organization I'm sorry are you with an organization I notice you have a bad yeah I'm speaking as an individual okay Morrison Park neighborhood and you know a lot of us spent a lot of hours working in neighborhood work And I heard you say that yes You have tried to take into consideration the neighborhood boundaries. I would emphasize that that's critically important. I Think that you would do all of us in this room and

the city a lot of good if you can elevate that criteria to be on that screen when you talk about the six or seven whatever constituencies that impact how the wards are drawn I think that you know there's really nothing more important to an awful lot of people than where they live and the environment that's around them and neighbors that live with them and what's going on every time they walk out the front door and I really think that

neighborhood boundaries certainly should never be cut into by boards and it would be a great plus if you could elevate that to be a major consideration in in these criteria that you're talking about thank you I I will tell you that I think we strive to keep neighborhoods whole and we strive to you know not cut those boundaries the only instances in which we would have to really divide a neighborhood would be if we were trying to meet that higher criteria of all districts being equal size you know something like that the neighborhoods

in this community are contiguous so that's a benefit we don't have to worry about neighborhoods but in other parts of the state neighborhoods do pop around a little bit but in this in this case all of your neighborhoods are contiguous and I think the larger question a lot of these instances is you know our two neighborhoods that are adjacent to each other kind of in a sub neighborhood you know are they are they essentially like two sides of one greater neighborhood if they are that we try to draw those together and I can't see that just looking at the data it requires some community input for that so with that I

think we're done with questions I want to thank you all for attending this has been great attendance and great input great conversation and we're gonna have several more meetings that are all publicly available and I believe in the back we have more information about that they're on the website and I expect that I'll be seeing some of you at future meetings so thank you very much we certainly welcome your input specifically about where you think your neighborhood boundaries are we've got maps if you think there's something wrong with the way they're shown we really need

to hear that from the public so these meetings are one opportunity to do that but you can also submit information to the city clerk's office that'll get passed on to mr mitchell so that he can do the best job of creating districts that respect and honor those community life.