Sonoma County supervisors pass new and final redistricting map to widespread opposition

The final map passed by the board Dec. 7.
photo credit: Sonoma County

If there was one thing members of the Sonoma County board of supervisors got right about their redistricting efforts, it was the repeated assertion the results wouldn't please everyone. That certainly played out Tuesday among members of the public addressing the board.

"This process feels completely unethical. It feels like you, an all-white board refusing to listen to community members who are not white, a committee that you appointed, and now you won't listen to it."

"It doesn't make sense that Rohnert Park is attached to [the Santa Rosa neighborhoods of] Moorland and Roseland and not to have Moorland and Roseland attached to the areas of financial success within Santa Rosa--that's unconscionable."

"We've heard you talk about just how this is 'good enough' and how you had to do [the redistricting process] this way, because X, Y, and Z, we know that who draws the maps matters in the end and what effect we're going to get. And when you put garbage in, you get garbage out."

"Today's meeting you come forward with a bunch of faux outrage, emotionalism, lack of facts, what-about-ism--like your jobs are too hard or something. Truly you could have been involved and should have been involved at an earlier stage. And now we're here in a quagmire."

"The map that you've presented is wild. I saw that meeting last week and what you did was amateurish and what you've come up with doesn't make any sense at all."

Those were the voices of Jenny Levine-Smith, a caller who identified himself as Thomas, Kelsey Barrow, Eric Fraser, and Allegra Wilson.

Many speakers referred to the ARC, the 19-member advisory redistricting committee created by the board, and the unanimous map ARC submitted after an exhaustive process of drawing district lines that would satisfy a myriad of voting laws. Like the new-to-the-process FAIR MAPS Act.

But the key word in regard to the ARC is advisory; in the end, the board voted to go with an entirely different map.

That new and final map, called the Proposed-Revised-Sonoma-County-District-Boundaries RP Split, is up on the county's redistricting website, and will be voted into reality next Tuesday, just one day before the legal deadline.