One day before its deadline, Marin County approved new boundaries for its supervisorial districts, striking a balance between the conflicting goals it had set for the once-in-a-decade redistricting process. Supervisor Dennis Rodoni, who represents West Marin and the Canal neighborhood, will now also represent a handful of neighboring San Rafael communities, a shift that could give the county’s Latino voters more political power.
The Board of Supervisors voted unanimously on Tuesday to accept a map drafted by a demographer firm that focused its major changes on District Four.
The new map “better unifies the Canal community of interest based on shared language, culture, income and housing,” said Anna Guiles, a strategic projects manager with the county administrator’s office. Ms. Guiles said the map addressed equity concerns while also reducing the total deviation between district populations, two goals that were difficult to balance.
The hurried redistricting process began in August, when the county received the 2020 census data delayed by months because of the pandemic. Marin was already starting from a better place than many counties: Its five districts already met the basic legal threshold for population deviation.
In public comments leading up to last week’s decision, Canal representatives asked the county to go further in uniting the Spanish-speaking populations of San Rafael. The Canal Alliance and other groups identified a “community of interest,” one with shared demographic and political interests in the Lincoln Avenue Corridor, Bret Harte, California Park and Montecito/Happy Valley areas of the city. Those neighborhoods are currently split between Districts One and Two, while the Canal itself falls in District Four. But they all share a relatively high proportion of Spanish-speaking residents, multifamily homes and low-income residents, advocates said.
Canal Alliance C.E.O. Omar Carrera told supervisors last week that the Latino community of San Rafael has expanded beyond the borders of the Canal. “We urge you to take this community into consideration and not rely on outdated assumptions that leave our community isolated and divided,” he said.
But supervisors ultimately chose the option recommended by county staff: National Demographics Corporation Map A, which left out the Montecito/Happy Valley area around San Rafael High School, allowing it to remain in District One. The addition of the Montecito/Happy Valley area would subtract too much population from Supervisor Damon Conolly’s district, staff argued, rendering the districts not much more even than they were before. They also pointed to the demographic difference: Montecito/Happy Valley is 28 percent Latino, while the Canal is 76 percent Latino. “We didn’t think those neighborhoods were as similar,” Supervisor Rodoni said.
Yet Paul Cohen, a public affairs consultant working for Canal Alliance, said that comparison was misleading. Montecito/Happy Valley may not be as heavily Latino as the highly segregated Canal, he said, but it is more demographically similar to District Four as a whole than it is to District One. Latinos make up 24 percent of District Four, but just 9 percent of District One.
Nonetheless, Mr. Cohen said the final map gave the Canal Alliance “80 percent of what we wanted” and struck a good compromise with the county’s objective of making the districts more balanced. “Given those two goals, I understand the decision they made,” he said. “We still view it as a huge win for the Latino community of Marin County that we serve.”
The new District Four boundaries mean that Supervisor Rodoni, who lives in Olema, will be representing even more San Rafael residents along with his West Marin, Corte Madera and Novato constituencies. Supervisor Rodoni told the Light the redistricting will bring about 1,700 more Spanish speakers into his district.
“I’m quite pleased about what it means for District Four, because it expands the Hispanic population of my district,” Supervisor Rodoni said. “I feel welcomed in that community, and very fortunate to represent them.”
One of Supervisor Rodoni’s two aides, Lorenzo Cordova, is a native Spanish speaker who grew up in the Canal. He’ll continue to focus on local issues in the Canal and the newly added neighborhoods, while Supervisor Rodoni’s other aide, Rhonda Kutter, focuses on West Marin.
Representing the amorphous District Four is a challenge for any supervisor, Supervisor Rodoni said, but a West Marin-only district was never an option because the area is so sparsely populated. Now, West Marin voters only make up about a quarter of Supervisor Rodoni’s constituents.
“The number of voters in West Marin keeps getting smaller, but we’re still thought of as the West Marin supervisor,” he said. “But the truth is now we’ve become a much more balanced district. It opens up the possibility of someone other than from West Marin becoming the District Four supervisor.”
As the supervisorial districts are being redrawn, new congressional district lines are also being drawn by the California Citizens Redistricting Commission, prompting statewide debates over representation. A map proposed in November would have removed Marin from the Second Congressional District, Rep. Jared Huffman’s North Coast constituency that extends all the way to the Oregon border, but the proposal was abandoned. The latest maps, which leave Rep. Huffman’s district intact, must be certified by the Secretary of State no later than Dec. 27.