The effort to redraw state district maps for House of Representatives and Senate seats is drawing criticism from concerned residents and neighborhood boards and raising questions about transparency.
Every 10 years, Hawaii is tasked with redrawing the district maps for state and congressional lawmakers based on the latest U.S. Census data. The maps establish who lawmakers will be representing and who, in turn, will be voting for them.
Hawaii, unlike most states across the country, uses a reapportionment commission of private citizens instead of the lawmakers themselves to redraw the maps. The idea is that a panel comprising citizens decreases opportunities for gerrymandering, or manipulating district boundaries to benefit one political party over another.
The Hawaii State Reapportionment Commission has nine members: two selected by Senate President Ron Kouchi, two selected by House Speaker Scott Saiki and two each by House Minority Leader Val Okimoto and Senate Minority Leader Kurt Favella.
The ninth member is selected by the other commissioners by a supermajority vote and chairs the commission.
So far the main critique of the Oahu map currently proposed by the Reapportionment Commission, which must finish its work by early February, is that it combines parts of Hawaii Kai in East Honolulu with swaths of Waimanalo and Lanikai on the Windward side into one House district.
“The Waimanalo community has spoken up about the lack of equity that we will potentially be seeing as this reapportionment sandwiches us between Kaohao Lanikai as well as the Portlock community,” said Waimanalo Neighborhood Board Chair Kimeona Kane during Wednesday’s commission meeting.
The Waimanalo and Hawaii Kai Neighborhood boards and nine other neighborhood boards all have passed nonbinding resolutions rejecting the current map.
Instead many are opting for a map drawn by Bill Hicks, a member of the Kailua Neighborhood Board who took an interest in the reapportionment process and didn’t like the maps the commission was considering. So he drew up his own and continues make adjustments based on the public testimony given during commission meetings.
Hicks’ map uses Makapuu Point as the boundary to separate the Portlock/Hawaii Kai district from the Waimanalo/Lanikai district.
When making amendments to the maps, commissioners must comply with a one-person, one-vote rule that requires each district to have roughly the same number of people. Given that exact compliance can be problematic, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that a deviation under 10% is acceptable.
The commission’s proposed House of Representatives Oahu map has a deviation of about 8%. Hicks’ map has a deviation of 2%.
“I did a revision, improvements, so they’ve got something they can take off the shelf and use,” Hicks told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser on Wednesday. “The feedback that I’ve received from neighborhood chairs so far has been completely favorable.”
Hundreds of pages of testimony submitted for the commission’s Wednesday meeting were nearly all opposed to its proposed maps.
Another issue being raised is the lack of transparency in the process. When the commission first began having meetings, members voted to create a technical permitted interaction group to draw and alter the redistricting map for the entire state. The group comprises four commissioners: Charlotte Nekota, Dylan Nonaka, Diane T. Ono and Kevin Rathbun.
The group presented its final map to the full commission Wednesday to be voted on for adoption at a later meeting.
Permitted interaction groups are not required to have open meetings the public can attend like the regular Reapportionment Commission. The group also does not need to produce minutes or publish meeting notices.
That means the public is left in the dark about its discussions and decision making, and why some public testimony was taken into account, such as adjusting the House districts in Manoa after residents testified at previous meetings and not others such as the proposed Waimanalo/Hawaii Kai district.
“Did they comply with the law? They did. They got together, they drew the maps. They presented the maps at the first sunshine notice meeting of the entire commission,” Sandy Ma, executive director at Common Cause Hawaii, a government watchdog organization, told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser Wednesday.
“How did they come up with these maps? What were the reasons? We presented all this testimony. And here are the maps, they didn’t take into account our testimony for Mililani area, for Windward and East Oahu.”
The Hawaii State Constitution also requires county advisory councils to help guide the Reapportionment Commission. The councils meet and provide feedback to the commission based on public testimony.
The Oahu Advisory Council recommended that the commission reject the permitted interaction group’s map and consider using Hicks’ map as “a barometer for keeping neighborhoods whole.” The group, however, did not take the recommendations into account and finalized its maps before the Oahu Advisory Council had its last meeting Dec. 17.
Oahu Advisory Council Chair Mike Rompel resigned from his position Tuesday because he did not approve of the way the commission was conducting the reapportionment process.
“I just felt like our advisory council is tethered to the commission. And yet we have no real say on what they are doing or see what they are doing,” Rompel said. “I just didn’t want to be tied to that and held responsible for whatever they’re doing behind closed doors.”
The Reapportionment Commission is scheduled to have meetings Jan. 3 and Jan. 6, when a final decision on the redistricting maps could be made. However, the commission is still waiting for updated information from the military on the number of permanent military residents in Hawaii, which could again affect the current maps.
