Citizens helping redraw supervisor districts

OROVILLE — Butte County residents have been asked to help redraw the county supervisor districts, and a number of them have jumped at the opportunity.

Tuesday a consultant told the Board of Supervisors that three public input sessions were well attended, and a number of citizens have actually drawn maps using an online tool at the districtr.org website.

The maps can be viewed at https://districtr.org/event/Butte_County, and anyone can still add their own.

There are about a dozen full county maps there, a few partial maps, and others identifying “communities of interest”

Chris Chaffee of Redistricting Partners told the board communities of interest are building blocks of the redistricting process. They are areas with a common culture or common characteristics.

“It’s really focused on how people interact.”

He said by law, districts have to have roughly the same number of people, give or take 10 percent. They have to be contiguous and one can’t be an island surrounded by a different district. They should be compact, without weird shapes.

And they should group together communities of interest.

Chaffee said the public input sessions had identified a number of such communities. Residents in the area burned by the Camp Fire are one. Ag lands are another. The Chico and Oroville urban areas are others. Within Chico, the area around Chico State and the area around downtown were also identified.

Chaffee showed the supervisors a number of the maps people have drawn. One put the foothills in one district, ag lands in a second, the Oroville urban area in a third, and divided the core of Chico into two.

Board Chair Bill Connelly objected to the foothill district. “You can’t go all the way from Forest Ranch to Clipper Mills. They’re very different communities.”

It was also pointed out you really can’t go from Forest Ranch to Clipper Mills, not without driving down to Chico, over to Oroville, and then back uphill.

The map would also leave the foothills with just one representative on the board, while now, the area is divided between three districts.

Another map was somewhat similar to the current map, except the 2nd district was completely in the Chico urban area, with the 5th District expanding to take in the Forest Ranch and Cohasset ridges.

The 5th District will have to get larger in territory, as it lost roughly half its residents to the Camp Fire.

But Paradise Supervisor Doug Teeter pointed out that if current rebuilding projections hold, in five years his district will have substantially more population than the other four. He suggested redrawing the map in five years.

“Wouldn’t that take an act of the Legislature?” Chico Supervisor Debra Lucero asked.

“Yeah, but they’ve never had a whole town burn down before,” Teeter answered.

The map could be drawn so the 5th District was 10 percent smaller than the other four, to allow for that growth, but Teeter said there were so many unknowns. He’s heard of people canceling orders for manufactured housing, and putting lots for sale that they’d bought after they fire.

He reasoned some people have just decided they don’t want to live in Paradise after all, due to the threat of another fire, smoke from nearby fires, and other factors.

Supervisors had other comments on other maps, and Chaffee said he had a good insight into what they were looking for. A set of draft maps should be available Oct. 12 for the board to pick from. A finished map has to go to the register of voters in December.

In other action, the supervisors voted themselves a 3 percent raise, with Lucero and Tami Ritter voting no. The raise, effective Nov. 27, hikes their salaries from $60,997 to $62,827.

The board also directed staff to prepare legal documents exempting agricultural hoop structures from requiring building permits, within some limits. A maximum size of 24-by-75 feet was set, and electricity is not allowed.