Time to Slice 'n' Dice

So just where will your "community" wind up?

The Independent Districting Commission is about to get down to the grim business of cutting the city up into four big chunks—and not a minute too soon, since the members will have to reconcile their inevitable differences (mostly racial, we predict) before September 1.

As usual, the city’s media will pay no attention.

The big kickoff will be a ZOOM meeting—does anyone in government actually meet face-to-face anymore?—next Wednesday. Check out the agenda, such as it is, here…but it looks like one of those carefully “facilitated” meetings that Portland’s governing class likes to put on to give the taxpaying mopes the idea that someone is (fave word coming up) “listening.”

They won’t be—the membership was carefully massaged by our lame-duck mayor to represent the various tax-exempts and racial pressure-groups, with everything viewed through the inevitable “lens” of race. Not all races, of course—that would just spoil the fun.

So there will no doubt be far less listening than “telling,” as the representatives of the various racial-preference “communities” get in their licks. This is fully in line with the standard progressive belief that a certain number of self-selected (and racially qualified) people have achieved satori and may therefore instruct the rest of us on all manner of things. Which have a funny way of morphing as the party line shifts—usually after some progressive pipe dream blows up (see: 110, proposition).

The really big event on the agenda is the sudden appearance of Paul Mitchell, head of yet another entity called “Redistricting Partners,” based in (dare we say it?) Sacramento, California. Their website’s word salad says…

Redistricting Partners has been working for the last 10+ years on redistricting, racially polarized voting analysis, California Voting Rights Act (CVRA) implementation, and mid-decade redistricting work, primarily in California, for the past decade, with GIS and political experience that goes back more than 20 years.

…and you will be happy to note that, among Mr. Mitchell’s bona fides…

Our work has also extended to outside organizations working to ensure a fair redistricting process, and protect communities.  This includes groups like Equality California, who have sought to preserve the power of LGBTQ communities within redistricting.

…and involvement in the…

American Civil Liberties Union, the Advancement Project, Common Cause and others.

The Advancement Project, in case you haven’t bumped into them in non-profitland, offers this about one of their spin-off causes…

The Justice Project supports grassroots movements in communities of color that challenge racial criminalization and attack all aspects of the criminal legal system, forefronting police.

C’mon down, DA Schmidt!

It should make for a very chummy meeting.

Mr. Mitchell will be offering the 13 innocents on the Commission a short course, which might be titled, “Redistricting for Dummies.” There’s a copy of his memo here; if Mr. Mitchell reads it in its lugubrious length, some members of the Commission will probably nod off.

He goes off the tracks in the very first graf, when he writes that…

…three city council members will be elected in each district via rank choice voting…

Sorry; “ranked choice” will be for the mayor; the councilors will be elected (if that’s the right word) by an even more bizarre method, known as “single transferrable vote.” If you fully understand it, please write. But the end result will be mathematical magic that will put an absolute majority of councilors—nine—on the council with 25-percent of the vote. Apiece.

Here’s the grand plan…

…the only important criteria being number three—those mushy-slushy “communities of common interest.” Your guess being as good as mine…or Mr. Mitchell’s for that matter…

The State of Oregon does not have a specific definition of communities of common interest, but communities of interest are recognized by academics and jurisdictions throughout the country as groups that share a common policy concern and would benefit from being districted together.

As for me, paraphrasing progressive Saint Trotsky, “When I hear the word academics, I reach for my gun.” (Metaphorically, of course.)

So many “communities”—God knows Portland has a zillion, each more exclusive and esoteric than the rest—but we can be sure that Mr. Mitchell and his minions will have to grapple with this confession repeated in all of the Charter Commission’s “Progress Reports…”

In other words—as we have often pointed out—the city is too damned integrated, ie., “diverse” and, maybe even “inclusive” to allow an outright racial gerrymander.

It will be fascinating to watch Mr. Mitchell grapple with this.

Undeterred, Mr. Mitchell voyages into the deep weeds of a collection of often agonized, contradictory court decisions, federal law, the “Gingles factors,” the Long-Form Census, CVAP, and other arcana, which might interest the only actual lawyer, Edie Van Ness, on the Commission.

By the way, here’s what the city’s website doesn’t bother explaining about Mr. Mitchell’s appearance…

• How did Redistricting Partners get the job?

• What are they being paid?

• Who made the selection?

• What’s in the contract—assuming one exists.

• Any criteria for judging the success of the “training?”

I’ve written to the city for answers, but don’t hold your breath.

Meanwhile, now that the mayor has made his picks, the city has decided to tell us a little something about the commission’s members beyond the initial, sterile list of only names. The squibs are probably self-authored, and the pictures are nice, but you’ll have to plow through the profiles on your own, since none of the city’s media can be bothered to tell us anything about their credentials. Or lack thereof.

Just to entertain yourselves, try parsing all of the “other interests” stuff…where you’ll be happy that, for example, DaWayne Judd…

…enjoys dining on Ethiopian food at Enat’s, cognacs at Olive or Twist, catching up on community news at Champion’s Barber…

…but would he like to tell us where he lives, since his LinkedIn page mentions residence in Beaverton? Or why any reference to his latest gig, B-More Management LLC, dead-ends in a weird link that connects to a comic book about how people in Baltimore saved Nike’s Air Force 1.

Then you’ll encounter Kari Chisholm, proprietor of yet another political consulting firm, Mandate Media—could rivalries erupt with Mr. Mitchell in the advice department?

And how will Melody Valdini use any of her expertise as a PSU professor and co-editor of the journal, Women, Politics and Policy? and who…

…spends her free time watching elections around the world…

..although she will be hard-pressed to find any three-member districts anywhere—since the people of Baltimore voted out their own experiment with trifectas.

And let’s not forget Sharon VanSickle-Robbins, who started her career at WillyWeek and is now…

…passionate about ensuring that the diversity of our community is reflected in the leadership of the organizations she works with and that their missions are inclusive…

…and who might be asked, “What are the metrics that prove that ‘diversity’ actually produces any tangible improvements to the city at large?”

Of course, Steve Fleischman has his own consultancy—Change Dynamics, LLC—(another Mitchell rival?) and is on the inclusion bus, along with Neisha Saxena (She/Her), one of the enforcers in the ever-expanding Multnomah Office of Diversity and Equity and devoted to…

…dismantling the root causes of poverty and systemic racism…

…and who doesn’t seem to have gotten the Comintern memo on going easy on that “systemic” stuff, which seems to have closed in Memphis.

Somehow, a super-majority of these naifs will have to cut up the city, which has a big river running through it and a vast social divide between west and east-sides. But Mr. Mitchell, in his training memo, has an answer, of sorts…

…we at Redistricting Partners have come to describe as functional contiguity, a term that encapsulates two concepts to describe how a geographic area is used to determine its ability to be considered one unit.

…although if he mentioned the “two concepts,” it must have been in itty-bitty fine print.

Next Wednesday, on ZOOM, we might find out.