Reapportion Plan Calls for Bipartisan Commission

Populist crusader Paul Gann, retired Legislative Analyst A. Alan Post and the League of Women voters teamed up Tuesday to announce support for a ballot initiative to strip the Legislature and governor of their reapportionment power.

If enacted by the voters in the June, 1990, primary, the initiative would turn over the task of redrawing legislative, congressional and Board of Equalization districts to an appointed bipartisan commission.

Reapportionment is based on population changes reflected in the federal Census, which is taken every 10 years. The next Census will occur in 1990.

Redrawing districts is crucial to attaining political power--especially in the Legislature--because the majority party traditionally designs boundaries that will work to the advantage of its candidates for the next decade.

The ballot proposal would create a 12-member commission empowered to review and select redistricting plans that met strict standards of citizen representation without regard to partisan political advantage, its sponsors said.

Key Supporters

The proposal was announced by Gann, perhaps best known as a co-sponsor of the property tax-cutting Proposition 13 in 1978; Post, who retired as the Legislature’s nonpartisan budget adviser in 1977 after nearly three decades in the job; Ellen Elliott of the nonpartisan League of Women Voters; and Tom Huening, a San Mateo County supervisor who spearheaded the drafting process.

Post told a press conference that turning over reapportionment to an independent commission would represent a substantial advance toward restoring high-quality state government in California.

“You write articles all the time about how bad it is, and it is bad,” Post told reporters. “This is a major first step, I think, in reducing partisanship and the diversion that takes place . . . where deals are made not in terms of public interest, but simply in terms of the position of the parties.”

Gann, a veteran of many initiative campaigns who labled the reapportionment proposal the “most important bill that I personally have ever been involved in,” declared, “This is the greatest day of my life. I love this program. It’s the people’s program.”

Basically, the initiative would create the commission of five Democrats, five Republicans and two others who would be representative of the state’s geographic, social and ethnic diversity. The commissioners would be appointed by three retired appellate court justices from a pool nominated by “public-interest organizations,” which are defined as nonpartisan and nonprofit.

The commission would not draft a reapportionment plan, but would select from among plans submitted to it by a variety of groups, including political parties and citizen organizations. Any plan would have to meet standards aimed at assuring “fair” representation, for example, of women and minorities and an elimination of strangely shaped districts designed to benefit incumbents and members of the majority party.

He said Californians for Political Reform, the campaign organization, intends to gather the necessary 595,485 voter signatures to qualify the measure for the ballot by next November. He said he expects a budget of $600,000 to $700,000.

Huening said that although the reapportionment commission would be nonpartisan, David Packard, a major Republican fund raiser and contributor, had already made a “substantial contribution” to the initiative campaign. He refused to disclose how much.