State Senate Remap Plan May Put Robbins’ Home Within His District

After nearly a decade, Sen. Alan Robbins’ Encino house may finally have found a home inside his state Senate district.

Placed several blocks outside his district because of a clerical error in the reapportionment of 1982, Robbins (D-Tarzana) says his house would be within the boundaries of his new district, under a state Senate reapportionment plan unveiled Wednesday at a Capitol news conference.

“I have been assured it is,” Robbins said.

“However, the map from the last time showed it was” inside his district too, cautioned Robbins, who has maintained a voting address in his district at the North Hollywood home of his former father-in-law.

The location of Robbins’ home was among thousands of details disclosed in the once-a-decade reapportionment map that showed Valley-area Senate districts would remain largely unchanged.

Whether the new state Senate political map is adopted remains in doubt. The plan is still subject to fine-tuning before it is voted on by lawmakers, who are scheduled to redraw Assembly, Senate and congressional lines before recessing for the year on Sept. 13.

Robbins’ district would continue to be totally within the San Fernando Valley. Robbins maintained that, of the Senate’s 40 seats, he would represent “the least changed district.”

Likewise, Sen. Ed Davis (R-Santa Clarita) would continue to represent the Chatsworth area but would lose the Santa Barbara County portion of his district. “I hate to lose Santa Barbara because I love it, but you can’t have everything,” Davis said.

And Sen. Herschel Rosenthal (D-Los Angeles), whose district needed to pick up 121,000 people to reach the 744,000 mark required of all Senate districts, would stretch from Tarzana to Lawndale in the South Bay.

At stake in the plan is control of the 40-member state Senate, where the breakdown is 26 Democrats, 13 Republicans and 1 independent.

As expected, the overall Senate redistricting plan appears to shift political clout away from coastal communities and into inland areas which have been growing at a much faster clip. The biggest change in Los Angeles County is the creation of a new, largely Latino district that stretches from Long Beach into the San Gabriel Valley.

While some of the San Fernando Valley-area districts have been slightly reconfigured, the voter registration figures in the districts remain virtually unchanged, meaning the seats continue to favor one party or the other.