Irvine voters will decide in March whether they want to transition to by-district elections.
The City Council on Tuesday, Oct. 10, adopted a map drawing district boundaries that will be presented to voters during a special municipal election on March 5, the same day as the primary elections.
The map, broken down into six districts, largely keeps neighborhoods intact in single voting districts, including Woodbridge, Great Park and Turtle Rock, and has at least one Irvine Unified high school in each district with the exception of the sixth.
The map does not take effect unless residents vote in favor of moving to by-district elections, where voters choose the councilmember who represents their geographic area. If voters approve it, the size of the City Council would increase from five to seven members with only the mayor elected at large.
Councilmembers Tammy Kim and Kathleen Treseder, who voted against the chosen Map 151, said they were concerned with the boundaries stacking voters of Asian descent into two out of the six districts. They had brought up similar concerns during a public hearing in September.
“Part of when we’re looking at the citizen voting age population, what we’re trying to do is ensure that we have as much parity within the various protected classes as we do in our at-large system,” Kim said. “Map 151 packs the AAPI community into District 1 and District 2. That is a form of gerrymandering, and that is not doing the AAPI community any favors whatsoever.”
The breakdown of concentrations of voters of Asian descent in the map are: 49% for District 1, 50% for District 2, 39% for District 3, 34% for District 4, 27% for District 5 and 29% for District 6.
Treseder, who said she wanted a map with at least three districts with Asian representation above 40% and maintains UC Irvine student-populated areas in a common district, said the map is “by no means a unanimously favored map.”
Although most of the residents who spoke…
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