Foes Say Advisory Board’s Redistricting Map Tainted by Hidden Political Agendas

Opponents of a redistricting map drawn earlier this year by an appointed advisory board said Friday that the board is not an “impartial, unbiased body” and that its proposed map for the city of San Diego is tainted by some members’ hidden political agendas.

The map flap began July 9, when the City Council rejected the map the advisory board had approved by a 10-4 vote. The council, in its 5-4 vote, instead gave tentative approval to a redistricting map introduced by Councilman John Hartley.

Meeting at a Friday press conference, opponents of the advisory board map outlined their concerns in a letter mailed to U.S. District Court Judge John Rhoades, who is overseeing the redistricting effort. The group includes a former board member and a handful of San Diegans who submitted maps to the board for consideration.

“All of us are disturbed by the flagrant misrepresentations now being made about the (board) map and the process that produced it,” according to the letter that was signed by Robert M. Colasanto, the former board member. Also signing the letter were Bob Glaser, Charles L. McKain III and Alan Sakarias, each of whom submitted a map to the board.

McKain said the map he introduced at a May 21 advisory board meeting incorporated much of the map that the council subsequently considered at its July 9 meeting. Sakarias said he supported a map that provided for a “Latino majority in District 8 and environmental protection” for the city’s rapidly growing northern region.

Jonnie Stahl, a La Jolla resident who also submitted a map to the board, was at the press conference as well. Although Stahl, now president of the League of Women Voters, did not sign the letter to Rhoades, she said she could not support either the board’s map or the map proposed by the council.

Glaser and the others used Friday’s press conference to focus media attention on the process that generated the advisory board’s map. Glaser maintained that the board is being described as “sacrosanct,” when, in reality, it was a highly political body that entertained “perfunctory debate” before adopting a map introduced “at the last minute” by Jess Haro, former chairman of the Chicano Federation, which earlier had alleged that the city’s electoral process discriminated against Latinos.

Glaser and Colasanto suggested that the board’s leaders might have violated California’s Brown Act during deliberations by not keeping adequate records of the meeting. They also maintained that the board’s leaders, in their rush to adopt their own map, failed to give adequate consideration to other maps introduced by board members and the public.

Dan Greenblat, one of the board consultants attacked Friday by Glaser, called the press conference “the latest attempt by the manipulators who created the (Hartley) map to tell a big lie and to tell it loudly. . . . It stretches credibility beyond breaking to suggest that a process which involved seven months of hard work and careful listening could be compared to the less than 10 minutes it took the Gang of Five to adopt their biased map.”

Friday’s press conference was the latest in a string conducted by San Diegans who have a stake in the redistricting fight. On Thursday, for example, a wide-ranging group of San Diegans held a press conference to show support for the advisory board’s map.

The growing controversy may mushroom during a 7 p.m. Monday council meeting at Golden Hall that is expected to draw hundreds of San Diegans.

At the meeting, council members will take public testimony and may vote on a map. But the council--through the city attorney and a growing cadre of private attorneys hired to represent individual members--must report the outcome of the meeting to U.S. Magistrate Harry McCue during an 11:30 a.m. meeting Tuesday.

In a related development Friday, Councilwoman Linda Bernhardt, one of the five council members who voted for Hartley’s map, announced that she had crafted a “plan to reunite Scripps Ranch,” one of the neighborhoods cut in half by the redistricting plan she voted for on July 9. However, Bernhardt was not able to talk about the plan Friday because “it’s not done yet,” according to Bernhardt spokeswoman Faith Saculles.