The Gristle

Into the Briar Patch

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

INTO THE BRIAR PATCH: The Washington State Redistricting Commission this week released recommendations for the state’s new legislative boundaries, after canceling their scheduled meeting last week because of profound differences of opinion that remain on how the political boundaries should be drawn in the Puget Sound area. The commission—created by voters to meet after each U.S. Census to adjust representative districts to reflect changes in population—includes two Democrats and two Republicans as voting members, and a non-voting, non-partisan chair. Their recommendations on Congressional and Legislative districts will be forwarded to the state Legislature for approval.

Republican commissioners last week released their recommendations for the northern Puget Sound legislative districts, including Whatcom and Skagit counties, while Democrats confined their recommendations to the peninsula and southwest portions of the state. Fearing to butt heads, commissioners struggled to come to terms before their January 1 deadline. Negotiations stumbled and stalled again this week, but reported progress on the drawing of the new 10th congressional district.

Republicans favor leaving the legislative boundaries of Whatcom County much as they currently are, addressing population changes by shifting more of dense, populous Bellingham south into the 40th LD. The plan alarms Whatcom County Democrats, who see their traction eroding in future state elections in the northern tier. However, while commissioners remain guarded in their remarks to one another and their discussion of process, one senses the real disagreements lie farther south, in around around Seattle, with our region mostly a mixing zone of collective bargaining and sacrifice gambits.

Coloring it a different way, the chair of Whatcom Republicans expressed concern that proposed changes could tilt the 40th District to Democratic outcomes—a tilt, by the way, that is already the standard.

“For the record, I think the 42nd Legislative District is far more competitive for both parties than the 40th District,” Luanne Van Werven noted in an email to Bellingham Herald political reporter Jared Paben. “With the addition of liberal Bellingham precincts, the 40th is reliably Democratic for another decade. For the most part Republican voters will be disenfranchised and without influence in south Whatcom County.”

Her concern is remarkably at odds with recommendations Van Werven delivered to the commission in May when they took comments at Western Washington University. There, Citizen Van Werven recommended (notably without identifying herself as party chair) the commission should consider heaving all of Bellingham south into the 40th District. Now she begs that the kicking hare not be thrown into that briar patch.

Unpacked, her remarks serve to confirm the fears of 42nd District Democrats that proposed changes will indeed skew their once powerfully centrist and swing legislative district conservative for the next decade—another decade of Overstreets and Ericksens, permanent Republican outcomes for Whatcom County, and continued partitioning and isolation of Bellingham.

Yet the Democrats’ proposed map is hardly better, driving the 39th District north to create a huge rural district, bisecting Whatcom County along the Guide Meridian, politically isolating Foothills communities while still not doing much to sweeten the disposition of the 42nd District. The D’s map in particular seems to confirm the sense that the real political imperatives lie in alignments south, sacrificing larger territories in the homogenous northern Sound to greater polarization.

The reality is that, whether they’re in the 40th or 42nd districts, precincts north and east in Bellingham still shade non-progressive. The Gristle hesitates to employ the term “conservative” to describe these precincts because the values expressed in those areas of the city sometimes align with conservative values but are themselves not strictly, durably conservative. And we are talking here about very delicate (but measurable) shadings of fractions of percents in political preferences and outcomes.

The alignment, as it so often does in county politics, likely arrives through land-use policy. Not only do those areas represent newer, often more affordable housing and the socio-economics that implies, but the interstate divides the city in a very mechanical way. Topography and street layouts are dramatically different in northern and eastern portions of the city, with a dearth of sidewalks and trails compared to coastal Bellingham. The freeway creates a physical curtain pierced only in a few places, and those places uniformly require a car to safely navigate. We’ll speculate that the need for a car confers a suite of attitudes about land use and real estate, about parking and street improvements and transportation spending priorities, about big-box convenience and pricing versus downtown centers, that often do align with values expressed in rural areas that are similarly car-dependent.

What we’re suggesting here is that while folks in Fairhaven are just as likely as anyone to own a car, a policy decision to direct more road funds to multimodal transportation alternatives is not as intensely irritating as the decision might be to someone in Meridian or Cordata neighborhoods. Yet it’s a fragile alignment, easily broken on the uniform slate of (non-municipal) rightwing goals on items like women’s reproductive freedom and prayer in school.

These volatile, loosely aligned precincts represent the battlefield of local redistricting efforts, as the dilution or concentration of these precincts magnify outcomes in Whatcom County and the 42nd District. As Van Werven noted, the district was seen as largely competitive. Proposed changes—whether by dilution or bisection—will make it less so, as the county’s largest population center is strangled voiceless by the ligatures of gerrymandering.

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