|
Tails
Administrator
2682 Posts |
 Posted - 07/13/2011 : 09:04:22 AM
|
Group looks to more than double majority-minority legislative seats
Two groups representing minority voters endorsed plans Monday to make Boston the heart of a majority-minority Congressional district, with one organization also outlining plans to more than double the number of majority-minority state legislative districts to 22.
Massachusetts will lose one of its 10 Congressional seats and a 28-member legislative panel on Monday was wrapping up its last public hearing before redrawing districts in a process that will require all of the districts to grow and could end with members of the state's U.S. House delegation running against each other. Showing lawmakers don't relish pitting incumbents against each other, committee co-chair Sen. Stanley Rosenberg joked that if a House incumbent ran for U.S. Senate "that might solve our problem."
"Somebody is going to be the odd person out here," added Rep. Martin Walsh (D-Dorchester).
The proposals to boost minority representation were outlined at press conferences called by the Black Empowerment Coalition, which met with members of the Legislature's Black and Latino Legislative Caucus, and the Drawing Democracy Coalition, which unveiled Congressional maps outside the capitol.
Minorities account for 20 percent of the state's population but hold 5 percent of seats in the Legislature, according to Kevin Peterson, co-chair of the Mass Black Empowerment Coalition and executive director of the New Democracy Coalition, a Boston-based civic rights group.
New majority-minority state House seats would be based in Brockton, Chelsea, Randolph, Lawrence, Lynn, and Worcester, along with two new majority-minority House seats in Springfield, according to Peterson, who joined other coalition members to brief Reps. Benjamin Swan (D-Springfield), Byron Rushing (D-South End), Linda Dorcena Forry (D-Dorchester), Marcos Devers (D-Lawrence) and Carlos Henriques (D-Dorchester).
In the Senate, there would be two new majority-minority state Senate seats in Boston, including a majority-minority African-American seat comprising the old Second Suffolk District created in 1970 and featuring the Dorchester, Mattapan, Hyde Park and Roslindale areas of the city.
A new "progressive Boston" Senate seat would include parts of Boston, Jamaica Plain, the South End, the Back Bay and Brookline. "We create a progressive district for [Sen. Sonia] Chang-Diaz," Peterson said.
"That would revolutionize or revamp the electoral landscape throughout the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in terms of the State House," Peterson said during a press conference in the State House.
Peterson said the group also hopes for new majority-minority Senate seats in Lawrence and Springfield.
Peterson also outlined a majority-minority, non-incumbent Congressional seat running from Brockton north through Boston into Cambridge, Chelsea, Everett and parts of Somerville.
Peterson said the coalition drew its districts without incumbents in mind, but under questioning said Rep. Michael Capuano of Somerville is drawn out of his current district under the coalition's map.
"We looked for the opportunity to create a denser majority-minority seat that extended into Boston so the outcome is that he is not in but I wouldn't say there was any intentional malice to draw him out," Peterson said. "We're looking for the opportunity to create a majority-minority seat that would likely elect a person of color to the House of Representatives for the first time in the history of the Commonwealth."
Drawing Democracy Coalition representatives said they planned to offer legislative district maps in August and outlined two Congressional district maps that would give the 8th Congressional District a majority-minority voting age population. Coalition representative Rahsaan Hall, staff attorney for the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law of the Boston Bar Association, said that as constituted presently, the 8th Congressional District is a majority-minority district based on its total population.
Under one map offered by the coalition, the 8th would dive southward into Randolph while under another it would expand to the north into Cambridge, Everett and part of Malden. Hall told the committee the coalition opted against stretching the 8th south, to Brockton, in part because it would have created an oddly shaped district and might have made the map subject to charges of what Redistricting Committee Co-chairman Sen. Stanley Rosenberg called racial gerrymandering.
At the committee's final hearing, U.S. Rep Stephen Lynch of South Boston urged the panel to keep intact as much as possible his 9th Congressional District, saying it was among the state's most compact, that he could drive through the district in 45 minutes and that it featured many Irish-American neighborhoods. Lynch's district includes parts of Boston, Brockton and 19 other communities bound together by Rtes. 93, 128 and 24 and by the Red Line on the subway and commuter rail from Boston to the south.
Rep. Cory Atkins (D-Concord), House chair of the Legislature's Women's Caucus, noted Rep. Niki Tsongas (D-Lowell) is the only female members of the state's Congressional delegation. She said women should rank as high as any protected group in the redistricting process.
"Fifty-two percent of the population is female but we only have a fraction of a percentage in terms of representation," Atkins said. "We are a majority that is entirely underrepresented by every single measure that we can view."
Rep. Paul Frost (R-Auburn) expressed concern that making the state's two western-most Congressional districts larger by picking off areas in central Massachusetts makes it more difficult to meet the goal of establishing compact regional districts.
Copyright 2011 Cambridge Chronicle. Some rights reserved
Read more: Group looks to more than double majority-minority legislative seats - Cambridge, Massachusetts - Cambridge Chronicle You must be logged in to see this link.
|
|
double majority-minority legislative seats
