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Boonville
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Redistricting Mendocino County

Thursday, June 23, 2011 by William P. Meyers

The Mendocino County Citizens Redistricting Committee was in the tourist mecca of Point Arena on Wednesday to inform and hear from local citizens. The redistricting is the the five County Supervisor districts. Each district must have nearly the same number of voters. Redistricting takes place every ten years, after each census.

The State of California is also being redistricted. This affects the boundaries of seats in the State Assembly, State Senate, and the U.S. Congress. For more information about California redistricting see California Redistricting First Draft Released.

Citizens on the Mendocino Committee are Maribelle Anderson, Eric Crane, Katharine Elliott, Tiffany Gibson, Mark Leroy, Christian Luiz, Jim Mayfield and Mark Scaramella. Attending at Point Arena were Assessor County Clerk-Recorder Sue Ranochak and GIS (Geographic Information Systems) Administrator Leif Fair. About seven south coast area citizens also attended the Wednesday meeting.

The problem for Mendocino County is that it is geographically vast, with a heavy population concentration in or near Ukiah. Fort Bragg and Willits are next up as population centers, but mostly there are unincorporated towns of under 1000 people and many areas with no human population at all. Also the northern half of the county has only about one-fifth of its population. Traditionally Ukiah gets its own County Supervisor seat, but even then parts of its population are needed to fill up other districts.

There are many ways to divide up the population, but at minimum there are going to be two large rural districts, and most proposals include three large districts, one medium district, and of course the Ukiah district.

Currently the 5th district includes the south and south-west rural areas and small towns. The 4th district starts north of the town of Mendocino and runs along the coast to the north border, but also runs inland along Highway 20. The 3rd district includes Willits and the north east. Ukiah is district 2. The 101 corridor east of Ukiah, including Potter Valley, is District 1.

The two major redistricting possibilities are just tweaking the current map and focusing District 4 around the coastal Albion to Fort Bragg population center. In the second case District 5 would take up even more rural land, all the way to the borders of Willits, while District 3 would spread west to take up the unpopulated north coast and District 1 would expand down the southern 101 corridor.

A variety of proposals can be seen at the Mendocino County Citizen's Redistricting Advisory Committee web page.

In any case the committee is to draw the boundaries without regard to the effect it will have on current Supervisors' ability to win re-election. The committee's final proposal needs approval of the Board of Supervisors to go into effect.