SLO County judge hears arguments over redistricting map. Here’s when a decision could come
A San Luis Obispo County judge on Wednesday heard arguments for and against allowing a recently approved redistricting map to be used in upcoming elections — and she’ll issue a decision this week.
Superior Court Judge Rita Federman listened as attorneys for SLO County Citizens for Good Government and those representing the county made their cases regarding the Patten redistricting map the Board of Supervisors adopted in December.
SLO County Citizens is suing the county over the map, claiming it violates the California Fair Maps Act with the goal of advancing Republican candidates. Richard Patten, an Arroyo Grande resident, drew the five-district map, and the local Republican Party rallied members to lobby for its adoption.
A Tribune analysis of voter registration data showed Patten’s map increases the advantage Republican supervisor candidates already narrowly have in the county.
Federman said she intends to issue a preliminary decision by the end of business hours on Thursday to allow the county Clerk-Recorder Elaina Cano to meet her deadlines for the June 7 primary election.
The nomination period for supervisor candidates begins on Monday, and the Clerk-Recorder’s Office must send the Secretary of State a map showing voting district and precinct boundaries by Tuesday, according to a court declaration from Cano.
“The court is very aware of the time constraints that their office is under,” Federman said. “Our court leadership took action as soon as this petition was filed to ensure that we were able to accommodate the workload that was going to be needed in order to resolve this case as expeditiously as possible.”
SLO County citizens group argues against Patten map, for 2011 ‘status quo’ map
SLO County Citizens for Good Government attorneys want Federman to issue a preliminary injunction preventing the county from implementing the map during the upcoming primary elections in June.
Instead, they want Federman to “preserve the status quo” and suggested possibly reverting to the map the county Board of Supervisors approved in 2011.
Ellison Folk of Shute, Mihaly & Weinberger — the San Francisco firm representing SLO County Citizens — told Federman she wants the court to suspend the Patten map and pick a different map for the county.
Folk suggested the court select either the 2011 map or Map A, an option put forward by Redistricting Partners — the county’s consultant — that is very similar to the previous map.
The attorney argued that the Patten map would clearly hurt Democrats by creating districts that aren’t competitive for their candidates and don’t reflect the political makeup of the county. In selecting this kind of map, supervisors favored packing most of San Luis Obispo into one district over preserving communities of interest, Folk said.
“I just want to emphasize here that this case is not about ensuring that every district and county has a distribution of Republicans and Democrats that reflects the overall county distribution,” Folk said. “But the map has to be symmetrical in its distribution of the opportunity to win an election. In other words, if equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans turn out to vote, they should have an equal chance of winning a majority of seats. And it’s not even close here.”
Folk also said Patten’s map disproportionately defers many Democrats’ votes, meaning large numbers of people who would have voted in 2022 would have to wait six years to cast their ballots in 2024.
On the other hand, more Republicans would have their votes accelerated, meaning they would vote in 2022 when they were supposed to have waited until 2024 under the old map, Folk said. Furthermore, these significant changes didn’t need to happen, as the county’s population had not grown enough to merit major changes to the district map, Folk said.
Conservative supervisors claimed in the resolution they approved when adopting the map that they did not consider partisan data during their map-drawing process. But Folk pointed out that “the board did not draw the map at all — Richard Patten drew the map.”
“The resolution doesn’t say anything about how Patten drew the map,” Folk said. “There’s no telling what data he looked at because it was never made public. And that process was the opposite of the transparent process that the Fair Maps Act requires.”
Even though supervisors didn’t openly state they picked the Patten map because of its partisan advantages, they ignored evidence that the Patten map would favor Republicans over Democrats and adopted it anyways, Folk said.
County attorneys say group wants to ‘overturn the entire legislative process’
On the other hand, attorneys Daniel Lee Richards and Jeffrey Dunn of Best, Best & Krieger — the Irvine firm representing the county — argued SLO County Citizens is trying to upend “the entire legislative process that’s constitutionally, lawfully delegated to the Board of Supervisors.”
“It gets difficult to overstate the harm to the public if an injunction is entered here,” Dunn said. “It would be to overturn the entire legislative process that has played out over the course of many months and instead put the the next week or so literally into somewhat of a chaos.”
Dunn and Richards disagreed with Folk’s view that reverting to the 2011 map would mean keeping the status quo. They said retaining the supervisors’ chosen map in place would actually maintain the current situation.
“So the harm to the public really is the process that plays out and did play out is overturned,” Dunn said.
The two also pointed out that supervisors approved the 2011 map before the Fair Maps Act was law, meaning they didn’t consider new criteria when they drew it.
“We take great issue with that representation, that somehow people are not going to be allowed to vote,” Dunn said. “This decision does not take away the right to vote from anyone. And so no matter how you look at this, people still are going to be able to exercise their constitutional right to vote.”
Federman’s decision on the injunction will be available on the San Luis Obispo Superior Court website at slo.courts.ca.gov by the end of business hours on Thursday.
This story was originally published February 9, 2022 at 2:06 PM.
