Cuny Forum; Topic: 'Redistricting: Mapping The Future Of New York's Political Communities'

Good evening, my name is Bob Liff and this is the CUNY Forum, a monthly town meeting that brings prominent New Yorkers together with faculty and students of the Edward T. We were Galski Internship Program and Government and Public Affairs. It said that those who love sausage and the law shouldn't see either being made and that is especially true when it comes to redistricting. The quaint notion that voters should pick their representatives instead of their representatives picking their voters takes a beating every 10 years when state lawmakers set out to redraw district lines for Congress and for themselves after each census. First up this year were the congressional lines which were complicated by the fact that we're losing two of the 29 seats we currently have in the House of Representatives. Legislators under pressure from upstate Republicans and downstate Democrats, especially minority

elected officials and activists, ran through countless plans during districts that looked like rorshock ink plots before a federal magistrate stepped in and took over the process. The result was a series of districts that have actually generated some very interesting races. Some of those races involve emerging ethnic communities such as an attempt by assembly woman Grace Meng to become the city's first Asian American Congress member from a district in Queens and the Dominican state and Dominican board state senator Argyano Espayat's challenge to long-term incumbent Charles Wrangle in a district that is now majority Latino. I as usual have to declare my conflicts here. I am working with Congressman Wrangle on his reelection campaign. State legislative redistricting is not even completed yet. The Republicans in the closely divided Senate decided to enhance their 32-30 majority by creating a 63rd seat that in its makeup favors the GOP as of this taping that move is still under review by the state's highest court and federal courts, but it appears to be legal to me even if it's a bit sneaky.

None of this came close to meeting the letter or support or the spirit of the agreement lawmakers signed with former mayor Ed Koch's New York uprising promising independent and transparent redistricting, closer to the system that New York City will use next year to come up with new district in the lines for 51 city council seats. Governor Cuomo have to threatening to veto any redistricting plan that did not meet his own standards for transparency and independence did no such thing. It all goes to underscore Michael Kennedy's victim that the scandal is not what's illegal. The scandal is what's legal. We are joined by four New Yorkers who take part in the debates and maneuvering surrounding redistricting. As morale the Simmons is the executive director of the Medger Average Center for Law and Social Justice, Lucia Gomez, Gomez Jimenez is the executive director of left where to take, Jerry Varamala is a staff attorney with the Democracy Program for the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, and Andrew Beverage, the president and CEO of Social Explorer and a professor in the sociology department at Queens College and the

city university graduate center. As morale, you've been at this for quite a time, you've been on districting commissions, but we saw in what's now the 13th district, the Rangel Espayat district, where they tried to draw two separate districts, one of which may have looked like the old of the old nitty of Alaska's bullwinkle district. They face the problem of not having retrogression that you couldn't have fewer votes, that you couldn't dilute minority votes. How did that factor in, and whether they drew the two lines, and then the judge came in and drew one line? Well, I'm going to say, up front, they didn't draw any lines. There was a complete vote, they abdicated their duty, the legislative vote, nothing. They put nothing forward, they passed nothing, they gave nothing to the public, we had no public hearing, we never saw anything from them. So the federal court, urged them by groups like mine and all deaf and Latino justice

and last birthday, went forward to the court and asked the court to draw the line. So now, when I say they, I mean the state legislature as a whole, did nothing. That doesn't mean that individual legislators or groups were not proposing different maps. And the map you referred to, the one that went from Manhattan, swung up like an arch, it was almost like a sickle and reached all the way into Westchester County. That would have been the African-American dominated district. Yes, that was the African-American dominated district that was trying to have the Bronx be the tale of a small parliament in Manhattan. They called it the Harlem district, but most of the district was in the Bronx. So there was a lot of infighting. There was also a Latino district that was going to go somehow swing all the way around into Jackson Heights, wasn't there? Yes, thank you, yes. Some people call it Latino, but we'll see what we're going that way.

Those were just proposals by different sectors of people trying to protect political incumbency and not want to challenge one another. So I wouldn't say none of the advocacy groups, the civil rights groups, actually advocated for any of those kinds of districts. So when you talk about retrogression and whether or not the districts that we have now a retrogression, well, we propose those very districts that they have in place now. So voting rights groups and individuals that have been working on this for a long time did not feel or do not feel at this point that those districts that were actually drawn by the courts are retrogressive. So if you're retrogression, I would probably argue that the districts being proposed by those individuals who were trying to protect political incumbency were in fact could have been retrogressive had they been put in place. You're also seen in what's going on in Queens. You see a couple of things. You see a district which has kind of the largest concentration of Asian American voters that we've ever seen in a district in this city.

And you see on the political side, you see the Queens Democratic Organization doing what smart organizations have done in this city, which is to say, rather than have you challenged me, I'm going to bring you in. I'm going to kind of subvert you by dragging you into. And the Queens organization is supporting Grace Meng, who's trying to replace Gary Ackerman. Even though the county leader's cousin is one of the candidates challenging, challenging Grace Meng. This is, we're seeing it with Senator S. Bayat, we're seeing of Grace Meng, this idea in New York City of Firsts, that we're still dealing with the emergence of Firsts. Yeah, well, you know, Asian Americans have grown tremendously over the last decade. And there's over 1 million Asian Americans in New York City alone. And in Queens, it's over 500,000. So if you took just the population of Asian Americans, just the population of Asian Americans in New York City, there would be the 10th largest city in the United States right behind Dallas. And it's unfathomable to most people, that you have this many people from one ethnicity with shared concerns that have never had a state senator or elected member of Congress

from New York State. So I think this configuration is the best opportunity for those communities that have been traditionally divided, sliced and diced into numerous districts to finally have one representative to represent them in Congress. And the communities I'm talking about are Flushing, Bayside, Elmhurst, Briarwood and Jamaica Hills. Especially, you know, Flushing is a unique neighborhood in Queens. It's really the center, the hub for culture, social gatherings, economic hub, people numerous churches and religious organizations there. That is where the Asian American community is centered in Queens. And that is the community that's traditionally been divided. For the first time we're seeing now, that community is being kept whole. And that's where we're seeing the opportunity now for someone like Grace Meng to be elected. Andrew, how much did ethnicity, excuse me, ethnicity always drives much of redistricting, did it drive it as much this year, less this year?

Well, I think the where we are now with Congress, the congressional lines were drawn by a Columbia University law prof who's a real expert and he did a really excellent job. And it would be very nice if he got to finish his job and draw the state senate and well, even the assembly lines, I don't think there's any chance that that's going to happen. Because, you know, they're very careful because you have to balance these things off. You balance race, race, race proportion with, you know, communities of interest with making the districts reasonably compact. So you have to balance all these things off. And I think that of the districted Queens, it's actually only about 30% Asian American. But I think the important thing is what the public, the Democratic committee did because if they put a, if they put a strong Asian person in there and they can cross over, get people from across over, they probably will be an Asian representative coming out of Queens. And that'd be really terrific. Let me ask, when you see in Jerry this is that when you, and I obviously have a bias

in the sense that I'm working for Charlie Rankle. So everybody understands my bias, don't, but I mean, when you, when you, when you talk about Latino voters, when you talk about Latino voters, when you talk about Latino voters, that is Puerto Rican. Yeah, it is. He's rediscovered that. I think, but when you're quite nice, I'm going to let you make the arguments for him. When you talk about Latino voters, you're talking about Dominicans, you're talking about Puerto Ricans, you're talking about a growing Mexican community that probably hasn't reached citizenship numbers that really have as, you know, as much impact. Similarly with Asian American voters, I mean, Chinese voters, you know, we have, we have Korean, we have a Korean city council member, but these are not community, you have tremendous South Asian, Indian, Indian, you know, Indian, Pakistan, communities. Are these two broad categories Latino, two broad categories, let's try some to Asian, two broader categories.

Let's try something novel, right, let's stop trying to think of ethnicity as the only vehicle for electing individuals that happen to be of that ethnicity or for particular race. Reality is black Latino's Asians, they've been electing white individuals in their districts for decades, novel, that's not, I mean, that's typical for us. All of a sudden Latinos want to exercise some muscle, happens to be a Dominican candidate in Washington Heights, who wants to exercise a community's muscle and be able to say, hey, I can try and I can potentially challenge a four-term, you know, a four-decade incumbent, you know, regardless of race and ethnicity, let's get down to the point here. The point is that you have white candidates running in black and Latino neighborhoods for years and we elect them all the time. What is wrong with black or Latino Asian candidates running in districts that even though they're not majority, they still have a potential to be able to say there's leadership in our neighborhoods, we've come, we've risen, we have an opportunity to both register our individuals, go out there and exercise our rights at the polls, regardless of how many we have in numbers, reality is all of a sudden you have communities that are organizing

and getting a little savvy about who's making decisions and who's bringing food and who's bringing money into districts and now we want to criticize that, we want to be into questions that are getting to try and analyze it, I'm trying to analyze it. And I think it's possible, I mean, I think we have districts across the state where you have a Latino elected Peter Lopez up in some district in the assembly of state that has niche of Latinos. You have a district up in Suffolk County in the county legislature, a county legislator, a female that has been elected in that district time after time and she's Dominican in the Suffolk County legislature in a part that is majority white. I mean, there's nothing to be said about that, you have a Dominican city council member representing a largely Puerto Rican neighborhood in Brooklyn and Bushwick. Well, also, when I under the lines, well, well, you know, I don't divide white people between Germans and Irish and Italians and Jewish and I mean, I don't do that. Well, people, except some of those people do, so I think there are certain unifying factors that I'll speak just for the Asian American community where there's a tremendous high percentage

of immigrants that have issues with naturalization, language access, and just having that shared immigrant experience, there's a unifying factor there. However, we did not advocate and we don't, we don't, that all Asian Americans have the same concerns and are similar and should be grouped in the same districts. We submitted a community of interest report to Latfor and to the court that detailed community by community, the demographic makeup, socioeconomic status, the shared concerns of those communities and all the communities that we felt had similar concerns that we say should be grouped together. We didn't say group all the Asian Americans together and just going on further. We didn't advocate for Asian American representatives. We asked only that those communities that have shared concerns be grouped together into one district so they could elect one candidate or the choice, whoever that is. We, you know, we're nonpartisan, we don't endorse Rory Lansman, Grace Meng, whoever.

At this point, we feel the job is done, the first step at least in keeping the community whole. It's an opportunity. Yes. Now, whoever that community wants to elect, they can do it. And we're not saying it needs to be an Asian American or anybody else. But the first step needs to be taken and that's keeping the community whole and together. I mean, I think we've seen it, you know, and again, I'm analyzing it. I'm not criticizing it. So, you know, I've, you know, we've seen the same thing in Brooklyn, in particular in Central Brooklyn with the, you know, Caribbean American community versus the American born black community. And now you have a growing African immigrant community and there are, and, you know, it seems to me as a reporter for 21 years, that, you know, I grew up at a time when you talked about blacks, you know, blacks Hispanics and whites and it meant, and whites with this polyglot, the various European nationalities, Hispanics, been Puerto Ricans, blacks, men of the American, men of America. Well, I'm not showing my age, but, you know, I mean, you know, life is more, I think

life is, very, as much, is, much richer for it being much more complicated. I mean, I, you know, this is not a criticism of that, but in Central Brooklyn, there are blacks of varied ethnicities within the Caribbean American, there are blacks of varied ethnicities. Yes, nationalities, ethnicities, ethnic groups, and there are also, as you've mentioned, a wide variety of continental Africans living in, in the Central Brooklyn area. This is not one group of people, African Americans, those folks who, who families grew up in the south are moved north in a great migration, they share a common interest. The real question has been, with the major immigration of blacks from other areas of the world, can we all get along and more importantly, are our interests parallel. Do we have communities of interest?

What has really happened in Brooklyn, and I live in Brooklyn, is that there's been a merging of, of communities. It's not, it's no longer. This is a Caribbean American, Jamaican community, and this is a treaty place, and then we have the African American Southern folks, no, folks are basically mixed in together. And what has come out of that is that they not only has community grown, but ties have grown. And people have to end candidates have to appeal more broadly. Candidates have to appeal more broadly, but I think even more significant than that, is that the people on the ground, the people that live in those neighborhoods, have grown to know their neighbors, and have grown to coalesce around issues that affect them all. When they start talking about cutting out post offices, when they start talking about, when they remove the supermarket from the neighborhood, yeah, closings are played, or putting another school into a fifth school, into a building, are all of the community of those communities come out together and support each other.

Those are children, it's all streets, it's all community. But that doesn't mean that there's still a definition between the community in terms of what their desires are, particularly around immigration issues, particularly around issues about getting a good education for children. Now, in both, in particular concerning the Dominican community, and many of the Asian immigrants when they ask you this, because you're the demographer and the bunch, voting always trails demography, because of the question of citizenship. I mean, Puerto Ricans are citizens by birth, or Puerto Rican can move here, and immigration is not an issue for a Dominican, for a Mexican, for a Salvadoran, for a Colombian citizenship is somebody who, you know, enemy people of that descent, but people who are immigrants, that's an issue. So, I mean, is this a question of citizenship catching up with the demography? Well, I think it's starting to catch up, I mean, you take, like Wrangles District, I think it's about, if you look at citizenship of voting engines, around 40% Latino, 30% African-American, so it's actually not as Latino as, you know, the top line would lead you to expect.

And Asian community often very low citizenship rates, initially, some of the Latino groups like you're mentioning in Mexicans, I think they're very low citizenship rates. But the other thing that happens is that they have to be represented. I mean, they're there, whether or not they can vote. And so I think it's very important, and, you know, we may have lost a little bit of sight of, you know, why there is a voting rights act, why there's a section too. But, you know, if you sit and divide districts up so that minority groups can't elect the candidate of their choice, that's really very, you know, reprehensible, I would say. And frankly, you know, I know you're saying, well, you think it's legal, you know, you said in the promo. That's because you're not expressing the support for it. Judge Liff or perhaps Judge Roberts decided that this was legal, but in fact, what they actually did was they deprived the downstate of, you know, if you're going to go to 63 seats, they provide the downstate of at least one or two more Latino seats, possibly

potentially, if you breach the Queen's line, another African-American seat. So basically, your friends in Albany, Bob, came up with a way to deprive the minority community in the Senate of probably around three or four seats. But that's because you can take the same 19 million people, and the way you divide them up. That's why they have the voting rights act. You can create a 60 seat majority for Democrats in the state assembly, and you can create a two seat majority for the Republicans. Well, another way to look at it is the state Senate. I mean, it's the power of mapping of a deal, but the other way to look at it is the Republicans have for years and years and years have tried not to recognize the demographic changes that have occurred in New York, both the growth of the downstate and the growth of various minority communities, because frankly, if you're a Republican, you know, it's unlikely they're going to vote for you.

I'm likely you'll be Black or Latino. Yeah, yeah. That's right. And so, you know, so I think that, and I think we've seen now with the kind of experiments that happen to California, what would happen if you had ineffective ferry districting? One happened in California, and it was both parties screened, but what happened to California is there are many fewer Republican seats in the Senate, the assembly, whatever, whatever they're called to the Senate Assembly, and Congress than there was before this very non-partisan, truly non-partisan, independent redistricting, a commission of redistricting. But they're different Democrats. So a lot of it come in Democrats where they went and did all sorts of crazy stuff to keep their, they're in power, are, you know, are out, and, you know, I was on a couple of conference calls listening to them flying. And basically, that's what we should have had in New York. We had that in New York. The Senate would be probably something on the order of 36, 24, 25, 26, depending on 27, what they put on the other side, and it would have huge effects for all of the services

downstate for CUNY. For the sorts of things, as we're all of us talking about, you know, schools, all the services, instead of the two big public works programs upstate, of course, are SUNY and prisons. And my, the running joke is that most of state voters would prefer prisons to SUNY because the difference between prisoners and SUNY students is that prisoners are locked up. They run wild. They come in near town. They might even register involved. Thank you. An issue that's very specific right now, just past the day in terms of the Dream Fund, I mean, the Dream Act, in terms of access to, tuition aid programs. At the end of the day, the not pass, or we didn't even see the light of the day of committee in the Senate, in particular, because the reality is that the Republicans don't even want to talk about access to tuition aid for undocumented students. That is an issue in it of itself, that is an example that they will continue to manipulate

so that legislation that is positive for our communities, and that things that we can coalesce around because there's a huge coalition across all races and ethnicities, they cannot come together to actually pass legislation that will have a major impact on the students and the future of the state and the economy. Right. And let's keep clearing. And we have our resident demographer here that the growth in New York State, the most of the growth in New York State, has taken place in New York City. And the last two decades, that's right. So the fact that the new Senate maps that came out of the legislature and was signed by the governor who would never sign, of course, signed by the governor actually puts a new district in... Outside Albany, right? Outside Albany. Right. It's a Republican area outside of all. It's a really powerful program. And they make no bones about the fact that this is basically a white district. Instead of putting the district with a majority of the growth has occurred in New York State.

Well, that's one of the reasons I said that the scandal, you know, I quoted Michael Kinsley, that the scandal is not what's illegal, the scandal is what's legal. But it's still really determined whether it's legal. Is that right? Well, that's right. I mean, but if I remember correctly, when it went before the state court of appeals, they were very skeptical, at least in their questioning, that because this is a political question, you have courts that are going to be reluctant to kind of stick their nose into what they believe is another branch's internal operation. But what the other thing is that that court has to deal with is that their particular niche in all the courts in this country is the interpretation of the New York State Constitution. And that's what that case is about. So they may die as a bullet. They may say it's too political. We don't want to get involved. But if they don't interpret the state constitution, who will? And we are hopeful that they grab that mantle and make a decision that's going to benefit the entire state, because you want to know something. It is better to have a definitive answer about how to interpret the state constitution than every 10 years, we don't know what's going to happen next.

And that's what governments are supposed to be about. People should know. All this secrecy, in case you don't know, that 63rd map did not come out until January where we went from June until January without them telling us that they were going to draw 60, 1 to 62, 10 years ago. Yes, and this time they refused to follow the law and actually use prison based, the actual adjusted data to account prisoners in their last known address. And they refused to put that data out and provide it until January along with their 63 district map. So some of us will stop and think, well, hey, you had prisoners, now they're brought back into New York City. And hey, let's increase one district and put it up state because we lost that population that we've been manipulating for decades now. And using the prison based population that's black and Latino for this majority, and all of a sudden, let's offset that by creating a white district and upstate. You also have, I mean, there are communities that are protected under the voting rights lack or act under the under civil rights laws, and in particular minority communities,

in specific African-Americans, Latinos, and Asians, you've seen now in parts of kind of Western Brooklyn around Borough Park and attempt, you have this hugely growing Orthodox Jewish community. And they're explicitly trying to create an Orthodox Jewish dominated district. That doesn't have any legal protection. That's a more of a pure political move, isn't it? Yes, it has no legal protection at all. And the famous New York State law that protects Italians also does apply to the federal in a federal statute. The famous Italian protection law that requires CUNY to give affirmative action to Italian-Americans because they've been so deprived. Right, right. That doesn't happen. It doesn't apply to redistrictive. But what's the right thing? It doesn't apply to that. It doesn't apply to that. There may still be a problem because in trying to draw the Orthodox, let's be clear here, the Orthodox acidic Jewish district, they have to cross through areas that of Brooklyn

where there are huge black and Latino population. So if they hurt us trying to get what they want, they will be a problem. And at the end of the day, there's different ways of manipulating the numbers, right? I mean, in the Department of Justice found that a district that goes from high bridge Bronx, comes down to East Harlem, nitpicks as certain blocks in East Harlem that only picks up Latinos and then goes into the Upper West Side to pick up, I don't know who in between the 70s, you know, and Broadway, over to Riverside, they consider that to be some type of community of interest district. And I'm thinking, okay, Yankee Stadium and, you know, the Children's Museum, the Upper West Side. I mean, you have to stop and think about what that exact, so there's different ways of manipulating. And at the end of the day, both Republicans and Democrats did a number on all our communities. They did a number, they negotiated at midnight, the governor signed it after he said he would veto anything that looked, you know, shady, that looked like a partisan and he did

a number on all of us. And at the end of the day, he signed it and, you know, they got what they wanted and hopefully the courts will overturn that. Go ahead. You've been on the city redistricting convention and next year, we turn to 51 city council districts. Well, actually, it's supposed to be this year. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, this year, and it's a very different, it seems to me it's a very different process that's a lot of the, that a lot of the, you know, it's not a perfect system and it's a political, you know, you can't take politics out of redistricting. That's kind of in a very, that's kind of a commission, that's called the New York City redistricting commission. The only reason why the voting rights act applies to New York City, three counties in New York City, is because of the massive amount of discrimination that had occurred upon black people and Puerto Ricans, Latino folks in New York City's history. So that's why New York City is covered by the Voting Rights Act that generally applies

to the deep south where we all think about people writing around sexual defense. So this was up south in New York in regard to voting and it's still up south in regard to voting. Now, going, going back to the question about New York City district commission, I searched on the first district commission, quote, independent, there are eight people appointed by the city council, seven people appointed by the mayor and I wanted to know that when I served, there was a very thin line regarding independence, okay? People were getting phone calls or we were meeting, telling them what they should be doing. So I don't know what's going to happen this time around. It has been very, very heavily controlled by both the council and the mayor. The good news is that it has to be diverse, particularly geographically diverse, covering all the boroughs. It has to be diverse regarding party and they say they tried to mimic the population of New York City. They've never actually done that, right? So we're going to see the names come out very, very soon on who the commissioners are

going to be and the real question is going to be once again, are the commissioners people that came out of our communities, that know our communities, that have our communities interested heart or are these people that are representing the interests of the mayor and the city council? But just before we go to questions, just to kind of follow up on one of your points about California is people, lawmakers will exploit redistricting and interpret it as incumbent protection, regardless of the race or the ethnicity of the district that, you know, I mean the classic example is- The color continuity. Well, it's all about it. No, but there are, but there were very broad implications. In my mind, you know, if you look at that when Republicans all of a sudden became great champions of, in particular, black elected officials who wanted to pack black as many black voters as possible into their district and the result was part of the expression to whiten the districts around those and I've always believed that was key to new to the

Republicans taking the House of Representatives and they think that they still do. So it's exploiting, this is the politics of redistricting, saying, I'm with you and of course what you should be doing is holding onto your wallet when somebody like that comes to you. It says, so I'm not sure you can, you know, too often it becomes incumbent protection rather than the kind of more open, well, no, let's all have a fight. Protection hurts minorities, largely. It might help a few minority members if you pack, but it hurts minorities because if they're the growing group, they are not going to get their appropriate representation. Well, you would think that the minority voters and all the voters from the district, if the elected official is good, we'll reelect them. We have a bit of it, but if they draw it, so 80%, you know, well, I mean, I think the Bronx is very specific and very prime example. You have a district, an entire county that's over 50% Latino over, I don't even know how much African American, but in its totality, its majority, minority county, I don't know

how they found a way to squeeze this white district in there as much as they can stretching out into, you know, Westchester. We thought it would be impossible for them to even fathom doing a bleach district, which they did it. And originally, it was to protect a Republican candidate that passed away 10 years ago, Valala, Guy Valala, and originally it was to protect the Republican- After he was failed. But now we have a Democratic white incumbent, and yet they still found a way of going out of the way to protect white voters to pack them. Well, here's voting, but the flip side of the Republican, but the flip side of this argument about packing people into a district is what happened in Asian districts, and what traditionally happened in many communities of color where they'd be divided up, so I mean, that's always kind of a- Well, both of those things could be illegal found under the voting rights, because, you know, I've testified, because, I mean, they could be illegal because if they dilute, if

they dilute minority voting strength by chopping up an already group, putting it in five districts, then they've lost the seat. If they over pack the authorities, unless they see you would have minorities in three or four districts, they pack them into two, that's also of depriving them of only one. That's what he was talking about. Absolutely. What's happening? What's happening? What's happening? Washington Heights Assembly District, you know, 773, yeah. Assemblyman Leonardo's district is over, like, 70-80, some of us have- Yeah, so about 80%, Latino. And when you look at the citizen voting age population, it's like, 70% Latino, and yet the neighboring district, which, yeah, it's like, you know, very, I mean, you would just take, give me 10% of that, right? Put it over, and it's not to elect the Latino, but it's to force the sitting incumbent to listen to the issues of those communities, but instead the sitting incumbent, very smart, very savvy for decades, you know, found a way to ensure that he don't have to do that. You don't have to-

Well, let's see, but if that district was probably challengeable, we've challenged one in Nassau, and it looks like they're willing to talk. So, I mean, I think that that district could have been challenged by a Latino Justice Pearl do, and that was not. Yes, sir. Tell us your name and your campus, please. My name is John Moreno, and I am a Queens College sociology major. Oh. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. The department chair. I'm considering the- What's the plan? The overwhelming demographic, uh, democratic demographic, uh, mapping powers have granted granted Republicans in more significant representation, uh, what we're saying to Republicans that if there was more fair representation in the mapping powers, uh, that are afraid that they'll lose proper representation from, from their representatives. That, that, that if there was a, the question is, if there is, if there was fair mapping the Republicans would have, would be behind the eight ball. Well, that's why the state Senate majority put $3 million aside to hire a very fine law firm, one of whom's partners charged $775 an hour, to defend this for cock to plan that

they put forward. I mean, they know it's, it's vulnerable, they wouldn't have to spend $3 million defending it. It's not my, you know. But it's also the case, I think, in the, in particular, in the case of the Asian community, the Asian community is not as overwhelmingly democratic as, you know, as either an African American community or a Latino. That's right. You know, there's only, there's two Asian American city council members and one of them is Republican who just recently switched to Democrat. Right. That's, that's, that's, that's, you know, who? Right. Yes, Peter Cooper. Right. Right. One is a word. They learned. And, uh, city council member, uh, Kevin Kim ran for a city council base side is very ugly campaign. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's the Republican, very democratic area, uh, won the election because that was enough. But, but, but you have more partisan, uh, parity, closer to partisan parity within the, within the Korean community within the, I mean, it's not as homogeneous as in some other

racial groups. Uh, we see in general, I mean, the people that are elected are tend to be Democrats, uh, but they are, you know, it's, it's certain Asian groups, especially, you know, not so much here in New York City, but Vietnamese American community tends to vote, uh, Republican. So it's not homogeneous as it is, and it's also the second generation trend, much more Democrat, because once they find out what the US is, as you see, as you, as you see with the Cuban community, as, you know, as you see the past, the, uh, prime example, you have Cuban. So, I mean, so you see that as a much more, you know, that there's a much more democratic cleaning. Yes, ma'am. Hello. My name is Karen Kispen. I come from Peru and I am, I'm coming from mega-era college, uh, my question is, um, what impact we're congressional, we're restricting half on the 2012 races for the House of Representatives. Will Republicans maintain their majority or will Democrats win back their House?

Well, true. You know, I mean, we're in New York, so we're, you know, we're kind of our parties are within the Democratic Party, um, but, um, redistricting, I mean, you had, you had led just, you had major Republican victories in legislative elections in 2010, um, we had Bob Turner, right? Take a 10. And we, well, but, I mean, right, you had Bob Turner, but Bob Turner was a very specific, Michael was a very, you know, they're a very specific thing. Well, all elections are, or idiosyncratic, and that is mother's more part, but her. The impact of this redistricting process on what it does to our electorate right now is going to be tremendous in the state of New York. I mean, the fact that you have a viable Dominican kind of Washington Heights in it of itself is amazing. The fact that you have a viable and Democratic Party supported Asian-American candidate in Queens is changing the landscape. So I think, um, in both those, not just the first, but the reality that they can have

a real vital, uh, viable, um, campaign that is causing attention to our communities. That is amazing, because I think that end of itself is going to allow our communities to actually be heard whoever wins, whoever wins will now have to pay attention to the issues that our communities have been yelling about for decades. So I actually want to address that question too, because I think it's an excellent question, because people think about redistricting and I think about their state or their city. But the real thing is that if you really do take a very broad scope and look at the entire United States, you realize that this is a chess game, and that the various major parties are looking to gain one, one man here, one woman here, and every time they do that, they recalculate how many people are in the, uh, the House of Representatives. Uh, so it is going on across the country. That's why it was such a raucous about the California redistricting because the California

has so many, uh, uh, congressional members. So yes, yes, where, where myopic here, because we're focusing on New York state, but a good thing to do for all of you is to take a good look about what, what the waves have been across the country and as a result of redistricting and I'll even say partisan redistricting have, have Democrats held on to what they have and Republicans held on to what they have or has there been a major shift. I don't think that there's all of this shuffling going on for nothing, the same law firm that was talked about before. They're doing cases across the country, redistricting cases trying to chip the balance for their client. Right. And I think, I think Democrats are going to do better with this round than a lot of people thought because they, they don't tend to realize that there have been the same similar population shifts all over the country and tremendous number of the plans are still in court.

But I think that the Democrats are going to do well across the country because the Republicans have fallen off the deep end politically and that that's kind of exists, you know, the kind, it seems to me that the kind of politics of the Republican Party trapped by the hard right, supersedes a lot of what we're discussing, you know, there are things that are beyond acceptability to a majority of voters, at least I hope. So pardon by having an opinion here. Yes, ma'am. Good evening, my name is Maria Moniv and I'm a public administration mayor from John J. College. My question is, does the current redistricting scheme reveal on a spoken tensions among between different ethnic communities in New York? And also how the current redistricting will affect gentrification? Or how will gentrification affect? That's an interesting, I mean, that's an interesting question about gentrification. I mean, I know that we see a lot of the, you know, a lot of the changing demographics in Congress and Wrangles district who had a plurality Latino district for the last ten

years and, but a lot of the people who have come into the southern end of that district have been, I guess most of them are white, but there's people of, you know, all ethnicities who have more money than the people than they were replacing. And that's why that district had to go to the Bronx. I mean, they chopped off that component that had continuously become more gentrified. And now I brought that community towards the Bronx across because that's where the majority of the population had to move the shift went to the Bronx because of housing stock and the reality that people's inability to pay the atrocious rents in Washington Heights have begun to move into the Bronx. But I just want to say, I mean, about the race and ethnic and the divisions and all those, you know, the fighting. I think it's overrated. I think people, you know, love, you know, to talk about the sensational, aspect of things. I think the reality is that this is what democracy looks like. This is what democracy should be looking like. Canada should be running and we should be exercising our ability to cast a ballot at the

polls and let the voters decide on who the best Canada is and we should not be just thinking about, you know, racial and ethnic divides and whether, I mean, the reality is if candidates are going to do the division, the reality is that there's a much broader problem on the base and it can't be the candidates that are causing that division, that's probably a much broader. And even more significant than that, this is the first redistricting round and I have to say it's my fourth, where we actually had civil rights groups from the Latino community, the Asian community and the black community come together and draw maps together that respected each other's community and we call those maps the unity maps and I've done quite a bit of work with the folks around the table because it took quite a bit of work to come to an agreement and when we did that, there was shaking in the city because they had, they had depended upon dividing in conquer, they had depended upon it. So I'm proud of the work we've done this time.

I hope we can go forward with it because we still have the city council land. Well, also the court master personally, he took very seriously the unity map, you know, he really truly did and he actually dismissed all the political maps. This is for Congress because he said, well, they're just partisan. And he also dismissed all the one district maps, like the Esplot, triple play three, the three, the three borough map, he dismissed the NAACP, let's go up to Mount Vernon map. It was up there. So I thought, you know, so he did a really excellent job and he's as close as you could get to nonpartisan redistricting. So if he did it to the state Senate, New York will be changed forever. And I just wanted to add real quick, you know, so far, you know, we worked with community groups to develop these unity maps. And it's great to hear now after the congressional maps were completed. I'm getting calls from these same community groups saying, you know, we're getting calls from people that are involved in this race in congressional district six, which is the one Grace Meng's running in, asking us for input from the community.

And this is would never have happened before when, you know, the Asian American community was a 10th or a 5th or less of a district. Now that there almost 40% of this congressional district, everybody who's seriously considering running for that seat has to find out what, what, what, what do the Asian American community? What do they want? And it's the first time we're getting calls like this and it's great to hear. And that's what redistricting is about because if you're not, you know, a significant part of that district, the people who are running for it or who eventually get elected, don't care about your community. You know, just to stay in the congressional election for a second, you know, it's not only the Meng district and the, and the wrangle district that are of interest, you know, you have some very interesting races in, in Brooklyn in particular. I mean, you have a, you had a generational challenge by Hakeem Jeffries and some of you mid-Jeffries that essentially drove a long time incumbent at towns that decide he just didn't want to run. That's pretty old.

I mean. It was dangerous talking about that. It was certainly as as low as slaughter, but you also have low, but you also have a, you know, you have a challenge to Congresswoman Niddy of Alaska as well by, by, uh, city council member named Eric Malabe Delan, which is essentially a power struggle around Assemblyman Vito Lopez's leadership of the Brooklyn Democrat, the Brooklyn Democratic, the Brooklyn Democratic, the Brooklyn Democratic party, uh, broadly and also within his power base in northern Brooklyn. I mean, you have these, you have these races in which, you know, you'd be hard pressed to argue at that, to argue as, as, as this city is, is an issue as either generational or it's, but it's, you know, you have a non Latino manipulating a Latino candidate to run against another long term incumbent Latino candidate. I mean, and then you also put in a white, I think that's the market of white, I mean, if you can have two viable candidates fighting for, you know, a population's vote, then hey, that's what democracy should look like.

Unfortunately, in that area, I, I won't possibly say that that is exactly the case, especially when a non Latino is, is, you know, there's, there's power. I mean, it's political machinery at, at this stage right now that we're talking about. So I think one of the things that we haven't talked about is something like Crowley's district in Queens, where non Latinos in the past were divided between the southern, for those that are in Queens, the southern portion of Corona, the northern portion of Corona, are now all wholly contained within Crowley's district, which should be significant. I mean, obviously, you know, the, the Queens Democratic Party did not say, hey, let's put a Latino to run because Crowley's the chair of the Queens Democratic Party, but essentially what we do see is an opportunity for again, something similar to happen where now you're going to have the chair of the Democratic Party, the congressman of that district representing a huge number of Latinos that have a senator, have an assembly person, and have a city council. But just the way, and you know, just the way those, you know, the Latino voters in that part of Queens can make a judgment that says, Joe Crowley has a lot of, a lot of seniority.

He's the county chair. He can serve me best, which is the same argument that wrangle is making to people who have supported him in Washington Heights for a long time and to people in East Harlem and now to the people in the Bronx is that your best interests are not necessarily served by somebody of the same color, ethnicity, however you want to look at it. But it's that. So, you know, I mean, politics is a variety, there's a variety. I mean, there's a major difference, there are one, the community was split in Washington Heights. The community has never been split. It's always been wholly contained within Congress and wrangle, and now it just increased by going to the Bronx. In Crowley's district, the community was split between Ackerman and Crowley and the fact that the now the community's unified allows that community now begin to speak as a voice as a collective and immigrant populations across because there's diverse, immigrant populations now Asian communities that were South of Corona line, North of Corona line. I mean, the reality is that two different scenarios. Upper Manhattan has been Latino for a very long time, was a lot of majority Latino 10 years

ago. You know, there's like a little waiting game, people are saying, you know, giving two more years and then he'll step down. I mean, there's a lot more and very different politics going on in those two scenarios than to make a comparison, like Apple's and Paris, comparing the two. South of Navacado, fruit salad, yes ma'am. Hello, my name is Mona Sabori. I am from Queens College, and I'm a political science major. And my question is, do you believe Bob Turner's district will have another Republican representative? No. No. I think that would happen with Bob Turner is that basically people voted against David Grepren and four Ed Koch, so I mean, that had, you know, elections are very, you know, they all have, when an election gets a lot of attention, and that was a special election. You had, you know, whatever political focus there was was on that particular election, including the rather spectacular way in which the former incumbent Anthony Wiener claimed

out and lost his seat, and the former tabloid reporter in the actually, you know, I'm a big, I'm a big fan of Anthony Wiener's and that was, that was bizarre enough, but there you had, but there you had, you know, you had a particular set of, you had a particular set of factors. One of the things about this city, and the reason that organization is so powerful is because you go into any other city in the country, you got one congressman represents that whole city, and you know, even state legislative elections become much more important. Here we have something like 12 members, you know, representing pieces of New York City, and there's no coverage in the media of those, of those elections. And so the kind of grassroots stuff that you all are talking about becomes that much more important, and I believe that money is actually less important in a New York City election than it is elsewhere in the country because nobody's going to buy TV ads if you've got one 12th of the city, you're not going to buy an entire, you know, so our politics is

very, you know, the role of the media, being the former reporter is very different, whereas Bob Turner's election had all the focus because there was the only game, because it was the only game in town, you know, yes sir. Get in, my name is Daniel Lestay, I'm from the Graduate School of Broken College, and I also will let you know, what does redistricting look like today versus 10 or 20 years ago, and can two or more people attack that question? Oh, the good news, right, the good news is that today, people of color who make up the majority of New York City have actually grabbed redistricting and are not letting other people do the redistricting manipulations for them, we're doing it for ourselves, so that's a big difference, before there would be some friendly big brother like he talked about before that, put that hand around, you know, your shoulder, and told you this is the best

way to go, and there was a lot of fighting that went on because some people wanted to do independent redistricting within their own community. The other difference is that 10 years ago there was still a lot of tension in the state legislature about whether Republicans were going to lose control of the state legislature. That continues today, but it's even more of a tension because they only have a very, very small majority. So that's why we see all these manipulations going on regarding the state Senate. We have a lot more people of color now, both in the Assembly and the Senate, who are trying to protect their seats too, as well as incumbents, who there are certain levels of incumbency protection, as well as within the leadership, right? We have five minutes, let me ask you a question, the exact arguments that they're making about this heightened voice of, you know, you've got three members of who help put together this unity map. How important is it to have a structural reform, the kind of independent, I mean, they're

exerting political power, and so does that political power, that they're talking about just as they get to exert that political power? Is it threatened? Well, I don't think, I mean, I think the unity map is a very nice map, but the reality is that the closest thing that it was actually put into place from the unity map was put into place by the court. The other two maps don't really look very much like the unity map. I mean, as we're held at least and Jerry would not have drawn the Senate or the Assembly the way they drew it, and I mean, and just what you were saying about District 72, there's a similar thing out in Nassau County where they packed a black district and, you know, diluted the one next door. And so... No, but the question, no, no, but they're exerting a political power. No, but they don't. They're not, because they didn't control the district. They control, you know, the thing that's powerful about the unity thing is that they're opposing in a united way the state Senate and Assembly maps, and they opposed, well, as well, the said, no map from the Congress.

But they, you know, if we got into a position where personally was drawing the Senate and the Assembly, I think, then the unity map would come into play, because they would have tremendous power there in that forum in the federal court, not in the state corporate in the federal court, because the federal court is obligated to look at minority voting rights. But I am listening to the level of threat, because at the end of the day, a lot of the fight and a lot of the struggle amongst civil rights groups and good government, we call them good government white groups. At the end of the day was all of a sudden, we learned the damn game. We figured out the power plays, we have leadership in both the House and the Assembly, the Senate and the Assembly, and all of a sudden, you're going to come in and you want to change the rules. And make it an independent. Yeah. And then who do you talk to about that? And you have a conversation where we all got the point of view, ask, and who gets a point in who's in the table making the, and guess who was at the table, cutting the deals with Cuomo, last minute, running it through, not people of color, not civil rights groups, no government white groups, at the end of the day, the same day came to save the day and

help us through, you know, navigate the system of, you know, you know, help us into happy lands. At the end of the day, we know what we need and that's not what we need. As a white person, you have to exclude, speaking of behalf of white people, come and call us, call us, who is that part of that. Come and cause and knife her, went the other way, in fact, not all of them, not all. So it's, so you even, it's always a sector. So let me just grab, we only have about a minute and a half left, let me grab a quick question, please. Sure. My name is Alexander Ruiz. I'm a history graduate student from Queens College, and I think you guys started to answer my question, but I will elaborate. Will any independent redistricting commission really be nonpartisan, or will the political parties in New York still be in control of the process? I mean, and is there a difference between partisan and politics, and can you do politics without being partisan? That's a pretty broad question. And what they pass in the legislature basically says that if you don't like, if the legislature doesn't like what this supposed and quasi-independent group comes up with, they can then

draw it themselves. So is it really an independent commission that they pass? Well, it's a bipartisan commission, it's not a non-partisan commission. It's basically, in trenching the current system of having the two parties draw the lines. And just across the river in New Jersey, there's a bipartisan commission with the supposed and independent member, and we see what, you know, it assumes that there's only Democrats and Republicans throughout the entire state when there's all these other party structures and what happens to third parties, and people like the working family's parties or individuals that are not registered within a party, what happens to the voice, you know, their voice when it comes to that. I guess the question is, you know, it's independent, really independent. Thank you. And can it be independent? Yeah. Should it be independent? Yeah, and should you take politics? Well, I'll tell you, Aldeff, we didn't take a position on this because it is a very complicated issue. It would be great if it really was independent, if it could be independent, that's a different issue. I think there's no such thing as an independent commission, but that doesn't mean that the New York State redistricting process does not need to be reformed.

It's a farce right now. We need to have a commission and folks who are looking out for the people of New York and really not just for the incumbent. And then you should have brought the member of the redistricting commission called it a farce. So I just got the good-bye sign, I always make deadline, and thank you all because this was very spirited. We'll see you next time on CUNY Forum. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, Joe. Finally. You