The San Diego Redistricting Commission is homing in on two new maps of City Council districts as they race to meet a mid-December deadline, while also satisfying a host of sometimes competing priorities.
One map under consideration, drawn by the commission chair Tom Hebrank, would make relatively minor changes to the existing council districts. The borders of District 2 would expand further east into Clairemont, but that neighborhood would remain split between Districts 2 and 6. District 9, which includes SDSU, would also be expanded to include the university's future satellite campus in Mission Valley.
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The other map, drawn by activists and supported by more than 30 community organizations, seeks to create an Asian American and Pacific Islander empowerment district with voters from those groups making up more than 40% of the district.
It would do so by grouping UC San Diego and its diverse student population with northern University City, Sorrento Valley, Mira Mesa and western Kearny Mesa in District 6. Students have been showing up in large numbers at commission meetings asking to be drawn into a separate district from La Jolla, whose residents are often at odds with the university's interests around affordable housing.
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Commissioners voted unanimously Tuesday night to seek demographic data on the two maps, plus a third map supported by some Clairemont residents. They hope to strike a compromise in their next meeting on Saturday, after which they must file a preliminary map with the City Clerk's Office.
The commission must then hold at least five additional public meetings to gather more input and further refine the map before finalizing it by Dec. 15.
Jen LaBarbera, education and advocacy manager at San Diego Pride and one of the activists promoting the "San Diego Communities Collaboration" map, which would shift UCSD, said the map does the best job of respecting the Voting Rights Act. That law bars governments from intentionally or unintentionally diluting the voting power of racial, ethnic, or language minorities when they draw new districts.
"Four of our nine districts are majority people of color if you combine Black, Asian and Latinx voters, with one of our districts being about 50/50," LaBarbera said. "So as our region continues to grow more and more diverse, we expect that that district would actually go up over the 50% mark, which would give us five different majority-minority districts."
LaBarbera added that the community-drawn map reunites Clairemont into a single district — something residents have been asking for after years of being divided into two or more districts.
"The communities of color, the usually lower-income communities around the rest of the city, have always been disenfranchised every single redistricting process."Jen LaBarbera, activist promoting the "San Diego Communities Collaboration" map
However, the map is creating controversy over its decision to group most of the city's coastal neighborhoods into a new District 1 stretching from La Jolla to Point Loma. That would have the effect of shrinking the number of districts with large coastal populations from two to one.
Commissioner Fred Kosmo of Point Loma said he saw that as a fatal flaw.
"I continue to believe that the collaboration map disenfranchises hundreds of thousands of people from districts 1 and 2 and 7 and 5 and north communities of interest," Kosmo said. "But I'll look at all the maps in a fair light."
LaBarbera disagreed with Kosmo's assessment and said the city's two coastal districts have remained relatively unchanged for decades.
"The communities of color, the usually lower-income communities around the rest of the city, have always been disenfranchised every single redistricting process," LaBarbera said. "Maybe it's time for those white affluent voters on the coast to also share that burden a little bit more fairly of all of the changes that come about in redistricting."
