Posted on 05/05/2005 5:48:25 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
ELK GROVE, Calif. (AP) - Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced the completion Thursday of a petition drive to change how legislative districts are drawn - the second of three measures he wants to put before voters in a proposed special election this fall.
Supporters turned in about 215,000 signatures to county officials in Los Angeles Thursday, the first of nearly 1 million they expect to deliver to election offices statewide by Monday.
The measure requires 600,000 valid signatures to qualify for the ballot.
Speaking at a press conference in an upscale neighborhood, Schwarzenegger advocated for the redistricting measure that would put retired judges in charge of drawing boundaries instead of the Legislature.
"The politicians have divided neighborhoods, they've divided cities, towns and people - and that is what we want to eliminate," said Schwarzenegger. "The district lines were drawn to favor the incumbents rather than to favor the voters."
Although the Legislature's Democratic majority largely view the measure as targeting them, Schwarzenegger is selling the proposal as a nonpartisan issue. He has noted many times - including Thursday - that because of how legislative and congressional districts have been drawn not a single seat changed party hands in November's election.
Bill Mundell, a Los Angeles software entrepreneur and chairman of Californians for Fair Redistricting, said he believes the measure will attract support from voters of both parties.
"I think this is one of those issues that fair-minded Democrats and fair-minded Republicans can come together on," said Mundell, a Republican. "We want to remove the partisanship from the process."
But Democrats contend that drawing new district boundaries before a new census is taken means many thousands of voters will not be properly represented. Since the last census was taken in 2000, California has added 2.4 million people but there is not good data on where the new residents live.
"The whole purpose of redistricting is to ensure that each person has equal representation," said Assemblyman Tom Umberg, D-Santa Ana. "So right out of the box, the data is so old that it's a flawed product."
Further, Umberg said, the initiative has a partisan element - retired judges as a group tend to be Republicans and thus might not be as objective as portrayed.
The governor is pushing three measures he believes would overhaul California's political landscape and help solve many of the state's spending problems: the redistricting initiative; a proposal to lengthen the time it takes public teachers to pass probation; and a measure that would impose new limits on state spending.
On Wednesday, Schwarzenegger turned in the first petitions to qualify the teacher tenure proposal and he said Thursday that supporters will start dropping off signatures for his budget initiative in the next few days.
The governor has said he will call a November special election to put the measures before voters but still wants to negotiate with legislative leaders on compromise solutions.
He said he has until the middle of June to decide whether to call the special election.
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On the Net:
California Secretary of State: http://www.ss.ca.gov/
Get out your pens!
Waste of time. California will be a Democratic stronghold until the illegal alien issue is delt with. Arnold is urinating in the wind on all this little issues.
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