A phrase popped up throughout Saturday’s redistricting hearing in Tucson that, to me, cast sadness over the process.
“Nothing in common.”
Over and over, residents of the Tucson metro area rejected or defended the draft maps of legislative districts by saying that they have “nothing in common” with people living elsewhere in the Tucson area.
I found that sad mostly because it strikes me as fundamentally false. We almost all share hopes for peace and prosperity, love for our family and friends, a desire for strong education and to protect nature. Most of the big values are universal.
But it also struck me as sad because people seemed to be emphasizing contrived cultural differences as a cover for a simple partisan divide.
Of course, dividing the state is what redistricting is all about. As Bill Beard, the former chair of the Pima County GOP, put it Saturday: “Drawing lines on a map is inherently divisive.”
True enough: When you say you’re in a “community of interest” — one of the vague concepts enshrined in law — that inherently means someone else is out of that community of interest.
The us-versus-them rhetoric arose especially in the debate over the proposed new Legislative District 17. That district, which exists in the draft maps under consideration now, wraps from SaddleBrooke in Pinal County down to Marana and Oro Valley, then across the Santa Catalina Mountains to Tanque Verde and the Houghton corridor all the way down to Vail.
Foot-in-mouth moment
This is the district that, as you may recall, Commissioner David Mehl brought into the process in late October and was quickly adopted into the Independent Redistricting Commission’s draft maps. It has become perhaps the most controversial legislative boundary in the state.
That’s because it is, explicitly, a partisan gerrymander. The lines are drawn so that Republicans in Pima County have a district with a significant registration advantage. The Southern Arizona Leadership Council, which brought the map to Mehl’s attention, said they wanted it to ensure Republicans from Pima County are elected.
The current Legislative District 11, which has most of its population in Pima County but stretches across Pinal County, had a purely Republican legislative delegation for 10 years but was not good enough for the SALC.
The chair of the commission, the registered independent Erika Neuberg, said at the time she voted for the establishment of LD17: “I am focused on ensuring some accountability in the Tucson area for right-of-center folks, a community of interest, to not be neglected.”
This was a foot-in-mouth moment, because residents’ party membership is not supposed to determine a “community of interest.”
But the story behind the drawing of LD17 is even more tangled, as Democratic consultant Tony Cani found through a series of public records requests. The map proposing LD17 was submitted by Anna Clark, a Pima County GOP vice chair, and immediately treated differently than other outside proposals.
The effort to sell the map took off immediately, Cani found through public records. Republican State Sen. Vince Leach, who lives in SaddleBrooke, had a Senate staffer draw up a letter arguing that the new LD17 represents a strong community of interest, that these diverse and distant communities, separated by a mountain range, belong together.
That letter was sent to the the commission’s chair, Neuberg, the next day, on the mayor of Marana’s letterhead, signed by Mayor Ed Honea, Leach, one Marana council member, a GOP district chair and Clark, who had submitted the map in the first place. It was an odd assortment of signatories.
That day, Neuberg accepted the new boundaries, and seemed to reference the Marana letter as evidence that the community wants this boundary.
Community of gardeners
The boundary, of course, benefits Leach directly. By including SaddleBrooke in a new Republican-majority district, it almost guarantees his reelection.
The first person to speak at Saturday’s hearing was Clark.
“Residents of SaddleBrooke and SaddleBrooke Ranch are part of our community,” she said. “Specifically, SaddleBrooke and SaddleBrooke Ranch have more in common with us in Oro Valley and Marana than they do with northern Pinal and Navajo County. They live a rural lifestyle as does the Houghton corridor.
“As residents of these communities, we have actively chosen not to live in the city of Tucson and have nothing in common with these urban areas. Unincorporated Pima County and the smaller surrounding towns need a check and a balance. LD17 provides that,” she said.
Many residents of Marana and Oro Valley made the same points, even using the same words, mistakenly referencing Navajo County, as if this were a script. One woman from Catalina went so far in her comments as to request that the commission approve LD17 “on behalf of every equestrian and gardener” from Vail to Catalina.
This is how absurd the attempts to establish a “community of interest” become when people are trying to paper over a partisan gerrymander. Gardeners, of course, exist throughout the Tucson area, even in the despised urban core. Equestrians are everywhere. And much of this proposed district is not accurately described as “rural” — it’s suburban.
Opponents of LD17, many of them saying they live in the Tanque Verde area, made just that point. And some said, refreshingly, that they consider themselves more connected to Tucson than to Marana or SaddleBrooke.
Others lashed out at the chair and the board, one person even suggesting that Mehl should resign, and another, Patricia Maish, saying their work was “disgraceful and disgusting.”
Midtown to Mexico
It wasn’t just conservatives in the northwest metro area trying to define themselves apart. Many midtown residents objected to having their neighborhoods placed in a new district that stretches down to the Mexican border.
“Midtown Tucson is lumped in with parts of Arizona that have nothing in common with it,” said Julianne Hurst of the Peter Howell Neighborhood Association.
There was the phrase again.
My sensitive soul took some solace from the comments of many residents of Green Valley who objected to being separated from their neighbors in Sahuarita and elsewhere in the Interstate 19 corridor.
“The I-19 corridor should remain intact,” one Green Valley resident said.
Indeed, it should, because they have something in common. But in reality, we all do.
