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After A Commission, Ad Hoc Committee, And Lots Of Public Comment, LA City Council Adopts New Redistricting Map
LA City Council vote on 7th December 2021
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Screenshot of LA City Council
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After a commission and months of hearing public testimony, debating the pros and cons of publicly submitted maps, and considering draft map after draft map, the Los Angeles City Council has officially adopted an ordinance defining new district lines for the next decade.
The vote, which was originally scheduled last week, was bumped to this week after a small error in the boundary between Council Districts 1 and 10 was discovered.
Here are the new lines as adopted, in map form:
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Next, the map goes to Mayor Eric Garcetti for his signature.
As we reported ahead of the last public hearing about this map:
The council’s ... map addresses some issues highlighted by advocates.
One that's likely to come up in the public hearing: which district or districts should get South L.A.’s big economic assets, like USC and the museums and stadiums in Exposition Park?
We asked residents of both CD 8 and 9 about why these landmarks mean so much to them, which you can read and listen to here.
The ... map also unites Koreatown into one council district, CD 10, something residents had been asking for since the community was split up into multiple districts last time around.
But it still redraws CD 4, currently represented by Nithya Raman, in a way that she says will cause her to lose 40% of her current constituents in the new year.
During the last hearing on the maps in late November, the debate over what to do about USC and Exposition Park, which are currently in Council District 9, but had previously been in the 8th district for decades, continued in comments by the public and by the councilmembers for the two districts.
At the time, Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson made another attempt at compromise, asking to move Exposition Park, at least, back into his district, CD 8.
“Twenty-five years from now, it’s all new people … and someone says, Well, how the hell did Los Angeles have the one Black district with no economic asset? How did that happen?, Harris-Dawson said when addressing his fellow council members. “Well, folks, we’re in the room.”
But the councilmember in the ninth — Curren Price — pushed back.
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“CD 9 is still the most impoverished district in the city, with Black and Brown folks … and it certainly doesn’t make sense to take assets from a district that’s showing some progress,” Price said.
Harris-Dawson’s motion failed, leaving both USC and Exposition Park in CD 9 in the map adopted by the council.
The city council also voted last week to adopt the new Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education district boundaries. My colleague Kyle Stokes has more on that here.
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