AN ORDINANCE revising the appointment process for the districting committee; and amending Ordinance 5327, Section 1, as amended, and K.C.C. 1.22.010.
Thank you. By your vote, we've given a do pass recommendation to a motion 2020 299. We will expedite that to full council next Tuesday and place it on consent. It takes us to item ten. Our final agenda item for today is a motion that would revise the appointment process for the District and Committee, which redraws the County Council district boundaries every ten years informed by the annual the decimal census. Patrick Hamacher, the director of Council Initiatives, is here to provide this report. Mr. Hamacher, the screen is yours. Thank you, Mr. Chair, and council members. Good afternoon. Patrick Hamacher, Council Staff. The materials for this item are at the end of your packet and they begin on page 163. The county charter, as you noted in. Your introduction. Requires that the district for the offices of County Council member be redrawn every ten years. The next time they need to be redrawn is by the end of 2021. So coming up prior to 2008 and the passage of Initiative 26, the office was actually a partizan office. So council members would run as as a representative of their political parties. Council Initiative 26 made the offices nonpartizan. However, the code has never been updated to remove the partizan references from the code section pertaining to redistricting and actually calls for PARTIZAN appointments to the District and Commission to fully understand what the district doing process requires. You actually need to reference state law, the county charter and county code. And so just by way of background, a quickly go through that state law and the charter. And now on the bottom of page one, 63 state law and the charter both require require a district due process every ten years. RTW 29 876 actually lays out criteria that any district team process must meet and the highlights of those districts district requirements are laid out on the bottom there. I'll go over them very quickly. The population in each district must be as equal as possible. Districts must be as compact as possible. Districts must be geographic. Must be a geographical contiguous area. Population data cannot be used to favor or disfavor one racial group. Population data must be not used to favor or disfavor one political party. And to the extent possible, districts should use existing natural boundaries and preserve existing communities of related and mutual interest. So those are the criteria laid out in state law. And largely what that does in Washington state is prevent some of the kind of crazy, crazily drawn, gerrymandered districts that you might see, particularly with congressional districts and other states. The district can process also has criteria laid out in the county charter. So I've now moved on to page 164. On the top of the page there, Section 650 of the county charter lays out the criteria of the district being process, and it requires a district in committee to be appointed every ten years. The next one, as we noted, coming up at the beginning of 2021. The council under this process appoints four members, and those four members appoint the fifth member who serves as chair of the district being committee. The committee also needs to select what the charter calls a district master. In this case, think of it as a person or firm that actually is responsible for drawing the maps and coming up with coming up with a district to report which which approves the new districts. And the work must be complete by December 31st of the year, the committee begins. So in this case, it would need to be completed by December 31st of next year. Finally, the part that is covered by this ordinance, Section 122 of the King County Code places additional criteria on the membership and the appointment process for the district in committee. There are two key provisions there. Each council member may nominate someone from the council members political party and the county council shall appoint two Republican and two Democratic nominees to the committee. So those two provisions are essentially the bulk of what's in Section 122 of the code, and both would be changed by the proposed ordinance as before the before the committee now just four years. And because it's a relatively straightforward matter, I've actually included towards the bottom of page 164, I've included how each section would look as affected by this ordinance. And so the first section would be amended to add a little bit of process around the appointment process, and it would include new language that it would see by December 1st, December 1st of the December preceding a district in committee process. So that's a little clunky, but it's because of how it's drawn. So it would be this December by written notice to the chair of the council. Each council member may nominate a person to serve on the district committee. So what gets removed there is of the council members political party and that the chair of the council show cause to be introduced or introduce a motion for consideration and action by the Council that appoints the District Committee as described in the next section. So that would be the process where the Council would appoint the four members that are the council appointees. Those four members would then go on to appoint the remaining member. The moving to now, page 165, the second section of KCC 122 would be amended to remove, as it's shown there, the requirement that two appointees from each of the Democratic and Republican Party parties be nominated and instead replace that language with language cover that states. In appointing the members of the committee, the Council should consider equity and attempt to represent the demographic, geographic and political diversity of the county, and also that appointees to the committee should have a history of civic or community engagement and have the necessary background and skill to actively participate in the district due process. So those are the bulk of the changes. Those are all of the changes actually that would be made by this ordinance. And it would bring the. Remaining section or the King County Code in compliance with the Charter as it was amended by Initiative 26. So taken together in the last section of this staff report, I just want to cover what the new process for districting would look like if this ordinance were passed. So step one, by December of this year, each of the County Council members may nominate by, in writing to the chair of the council, someone to serve on the committee. The Council chair would then introduce or caused to be introduced a motion appointing four four members of the committee. The charter lays out that those members must be appointed by the end of January of next year. So sometime between December and the end of January, you would need to appoint the four members. Those four members will then vote to pick the fifth member of the District Committee who would serve as chair. By April, the committee, the district committee should appoint the district master. And by the if for some reason the District Committee can't appoint the District Master by April one. The Council is then charged with selecting someone by the end of May. Hopefully that wouldn't come into play, but it's at least in the code structure, a section of the charter. And then by December 31, the District D.M. submits a plan to the committee. The committee must then adopt the plan with or without amendment within 15 days. So technically, this process could trickle over into the very early part of 2022 if the district master does not submit the plan until the very end of 2021, and that once the plan is approved by the committee and submitted to the clerk, the those become the new council districts. So in terms of the election schedule, these would probably not be the council districts until the 2023 council elections, unless somehow the district committee completed its work incredibly quickly, in other words, before the open enrollment or the registration period for the 2021 elections. Which seems incredibly unlikely considering the work they would have to do. That concludes my staff report. Mr. Chair. Leonard Cohen from our legal counsel, it makes sense from the prosecutor's office, did a lot of help in helping to prepare this ordinance. So I just want to recognize their work as well, and I'd be happy to answer any questions. Thank you, Mr. Hamacher. Questions, colleagues. Councilmember Balducci for a motion. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, of adoption of proposed ordinance number 2020 DASH 0298 with a do pass recommendation. Councilmember Bell Duties Moved Adoption of Motion 2020 298 with the due pass recommendation. Discussion. Let me speak to it. Councilmember Banducci. Mr. Harker covered this really pretty well, but just for the purposes of those following law, this comes forward because we do every ten years adopt district boundaries for the districts within the Kane County Council. And ten years ago our charter had been changed to remove reference to these positions as being partizan, Democrat or Republican. But it wasn't fully implemented yet. Half of the council had switched over to nonpartisan, but there were still members on the council who were nominally Democrats and Republicans. And so the last charter commissioner and chair of the last District Commission retained this language around appointing two Democrats and two Republicans. But we are fully nonpartisan now, as is the rest of all of the elected officials in acting, as are the rest of all the elected officials in King County. So this proposal thinks our ordinance and our process with our charter, and because the only requirements to be appointed in the ordinance prior to this change were that two of them be Democrats and two of them be Republicans. We have added some some language that is flexible enough that we can select people who are good and who bring a variety of backgrounds, experience, etc.. But, you know, also tell us a little bit about qualifications. So I urge your support and will be as we get through budget and all the other budgets that Councilmember Caldwell's was laying out today, we will also be starting to stand up our redistricting committees. Thank you. See no further questions. And would you please call the roll? Thank you, Mr. Chair. Councilmember Belushi. Hi. Councilmember DEMBOSKY. Hi. Councilmember Dunn. I. Councilmember calls I council member Lambert high council member of the growth I. Councilmember one right there. I. Councilman Rizal. I. Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, the vote is 19 zero noes. Thank you. By your vote, we've given a do pass recommendation to motion 2020 298. We will expedite that to full council next Tuesday and put it on consent. That concludes the action items in today's agenda. I want to make sure that we haven't lost any votes due to technical difficulties. Madam Clerk, do you have all votes recorded? Yes, Mr. Chair. All votes have been recorded. All right, with all votes recorded and knowing of no other business to come before the council, I want to thank everyone who has participated in today's council meeting and we are adjourned. Thank you, everyone.