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Greetings!

As we enter the holiday season, it is time for each one of us to stop for a moment, take a deep breath, and GIVE THANKS for how far we have come in our collective recovery from the negative impacts of the pandemic.

As urban place managers, we often find ourselves on the frontline of a wide array of challenges facing our community, but the pandemic has pushed all of us to unimaginable limits. I would like to take this opportunity to thank every one of you who has gone above and beyond to support your community. Whether it was offering support and resources to struggling small businesses or ensuring your staff and fellow employees were safe during these uncertain times, it has been a difficult journey. I am grateful for those leaders in our industry, like you, who have put in the work and led with love and compassion.

I am also thankful for the member leadership of our CDA Board of Directors, like Kathy Hemmenway from Walnut Creek Downtown, who has worked diligently for months to launch and execute a very successful membership and fundraising drive. It has brought about many renewed memberships, recruited new members, and even successfully brought old members back as members of CDA. We are a much stronger organization because of this critical effort.

As we start to slow down and gather with our loved ones for the holidays, I would like to share with you a visually stunning 6-minute film by Louie Schwartzberg called Gratitude that accompanies a spontaneous, heartfelt meditation delivered in 2006 by Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk.

To truly be effective in our work, we must take the time to reflect on our accomplishments, acknowledge our blessings, and simply express our gratitude. I believe this beautiful film helps get you there. We will undoubtedly need to tap into a more bottomless well of wisdom and energy to continue our great work as place managers and creative placemakers as we work together to heal the communities we love so much.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Steve Snider, CDA President

Executive Director

Downtown Oakland Association

 

For centuries “gerrymandering” was an established practice in American politics intended to provide an advantage to a particular party by manipulating the boundaries of electoral districts based on the establishment of the census count conducted every ten years. The term “gerrymandering” is named after former Vice President Elbridge Gerry who, when Governor of Massachusetts in 1812, signed a bill that created a partisan district in the City of Boston that was compared to the shape of a mythological salamander. The term was used in reference to this type of political district line drawing that benefitted preferred incumbent elected officials and had almost always been considered a corruption of the democratic process.

The use of political gerrymandering ended in California when in 2008, voters passed the “Voters First Act” which established an independent California Citizens Redistricting Commission and empowered the Commission to draw the district boundaries of the State Legislature, Congressional districts and Board of Equalization seats. https://www.wedrawthelinesca.org/.

Earlier this fall, the Citizens Redistricting Commission released a series of draft district boundaries that were drawn in conformity with strict, non-partisan rules designed to create districts of relatively equal population that will provide fair representation for all Californians. The lines are designed to ensure equal opportunity for minority communities to elect a candidate of their choice, must be connected, have geographic integrity, should be geographically compact and, to the extent possible, be nested into other legislative and congressional districts.

Based on the Commission’s release of the latest legislative boundaries last week, the implications of these new districts are likely to be significant because as it stands, there are 20 members of Congress, 29 State Assembly members and 19 State Senators who live in the same district as another incumbent representative.  The effects of these new district boundaries are well analyzed in the recent CalMatters piece here: https://calmatters.org/politics/2021/11/california-redistricting-incumbents/

The Commission will finalize the district boundaries no later than December 27, 2021, and these maps will be the basis for which candidates file to run for the State Legislature, Congress and the Board of Equalization. Elected members will either “stay put” and run for the existing redrawn seat where they reside or move into a “new” neighboring district to run – perhaps against another incumbent elected representative.  Another outcome will be likely to be a number of retirements – those elected officials determining not to seek another term given the political makeup of the new district boundaries.  The effects of this process are almost certain to mean significant changes in the makeup of the State Legislature and the California Congressional Delegation for the next decade.

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