April 8, 2022 Elections Commission Meeting - Part 1 of 2

PART 1: we're up and we're recording
okay i think our technical difficulties are solved unfortunately this room is still not
like so we're all going to be shouting as best we can and taking off our masks if we
please i'm not going to repeat the first two lines again i think you know who i am i think you feel welcome to this meeting
but let me begin by thanking our in-person and remote attendees for joining
thank you to the members of the redistricting task force for all of your efforts over the past months and for
coming to speak with us today thank you to members of the public and community organizations for the
thoughtful comments we have received over the past days thank you to the representatives from the league of women voters to dclu
and asian americans advancing justice for your letters this level of public engagement from all
sides is impressive and appreciated as authorized by california government
code section 54953e and mayor breed's 45th supplement to her
february 25 2020 emergency proclamation it is possible that some members of the
elections commission may attend this meeting remotely in that event those members will
participate and vote by video members of the public may attend the meeting to observe and provide public
comment at the physical meeting location and the ability listed online
secretary delgadillo could you please explain some procedures for today's meeting
thank you vice president um chapel the minutes of this meeting will reflect
that due to the covet 19 health emergency and to protect commission members city employees and the public
um we are conducting this meeting in city hall and
online on webex this precaution is taken
uh due to the various local state and federal orders and declarations
public comment will be available on each item on this agenda each member of the public will be allowed two minutes to
speak comments or opportunities to speak during the public comment period are available
by calling one four one five six five five zero zero zero one
that number again is one four one five six five five zero zero one access code
is two four nine three nine nine zero zero nine six five once again
two four nine three nine nine zero zero six i'm sorry zero nine six five
when it when your item of interest comes up to those who are joining us through the internet please dial star 3 to raise
your hand you will then hear your hand has been raised and
for you to if you have questions please wait until the host calls on you
when the system message says your line has been immuted this is your turn to speak
you are encouraged to state your name clearly and spell it out please as soon as he begins he will have two minutes to
provide public comment uh you will hear a bell go off when you have 30 seconds remaining if you change
your mind and wish to withdraw yourself from the public comment line press star 3 again you will hear the system say you
have lowered your hand when a phone is not available you can use your computer web browser make sure
the participants side panel is showing by clicking on the participants i icon
make sure the participants panel is extended in the side panel by pressing the small arrow indicator at the panel
you should see a list of panels followed by a list of attendees at the bottom of the list of attendees is a small button
or icon that looks like a hand press the hand icon to raise your hand the host will
unmute you when it's time for you to come when you are done with your comment click the hand icon again to lower your
hand public comment instructions are also on page four of the agenda public comment may be
submitted in writing it will be shared with the commission after this meeting has concluded and will be included as
part of the official meeting file written comments should be sent to elections dot
commission.org thank you
vice president chapel thank you with that i'll call the meeting to order secretary delgadillo
will you please proceed with the roll call
sure
president burnhawls are you in are you here i
i know that you're present remotely but you can mute you're here
i'm here martha she's here thank you vice
president chapel here
here with 600 chances we meet forum
okay thank you moving to item two on our agenda
discussion and possible action regarding election commission appointees to the san francisco redistricting task force
while i cannot speak on behalf of the elections commission i have a few opening remarks as the acting chair of
this meeting we have received hundreds of emails letters and public comments calling for
the removal or not of our appointees to the redistricting task force however from my perspective this meeting
has been called for the purpose of allowing our appointees to respond publicly to public concerns that have
been directed to the elections commission regarding the redistricting task force decision making process
moreover it bears reminding that the elections commission is not responsible for drawing discussing or debating
specific maps that is the work of the redistricting task force and it is work that this election commission should not
disrupt or influence the three members of the redistricting tax force appointed by this elections
commission were appointed in good faith and we are confident in our transparent appointment process
our june 2021 process was based on that used ten years prior was informed by
some of the same community members and organizations that have reached out to us this week and all materials and decisions from
that process are archived on the election commission's website upon the swearing-in of our appointees
it is my understanding that the election commission's role with respect to the redistricting is complete and the
election commission has been uninvolved with the redistricting task force this commission understands that
redistricting is a complicated process and that transparency is an important part of that process
with that in mind we have invited our appointees to this meeting to address four points
one without getting into specifics of the maps themselves what process occurred between saturday and monday
and we're referring to the most recent saturday and monday can you describe the process by which
the redistricting task force tracks and accounts for public input from communities
can you describe the process by which the redistricting task force evaluates and establishes priorities for the
purpose of drawing maps and what factors do you consider or can you confirm the redistricting
task force commitment to and describe some of the actions you have taken for the purpose of reflecting communities of
interest within the city and county of san francisco i will ask each appointee these four
questions before moving on to the next appointee i invite my fellow commissioners to interject with relevant follow-up
questions as and when appropriate since you are three in attendance would
one of you like to speak first thank you mr cooper
and i will repeat the questions for you okay okay so the first question oh i guess that doesn't matter yeah
first question without getting into the specifics of the maps themselves what process occurred between saturday and
monday thank you uh thank you for that question um yeah uh without getting to the specifics
i'll i'll talk about the maps and and talk about that process um the first
um on saturday we saturday was our first meeting after a week break that uh lined
up with the board of supervisors recess going into that into that meeting we had a meeting right before that break where
we asked our redistricting consultant q2 redistributing consultants uh to
bring us a set of maps and we had a long discussion at that meeting uh based and talking about what sort of
things we want to see on those maps this is this was our going into our fourth round of doing
that we asked them to do that once to get us started and that created a map that was 1a
talked about 1a gave them instructions to create a 2a and 2d we advanced one of those maps
then we we had them create a 3a and a 3b and then we advanced one of those maps and then after working with 3b for for a
while on the prior saturday we asked q2 to send us back um to bring us
back four maps and we gave them um long set up instructions i don't have them with me right now unfortunately but we
gave them a set of instructions and what they they do is they do their best to make maps that
that meet those instructions that are our legal maps within within the guidelines and then they also take into account uh the feedback that we've
received and the way they do that is in addition to just the census blocks which are our building blocks for
redistricting they also have access to the uh our cultural districts uh our community
benefit districts and most importantly our communities of interest so uh
let's take things back a little bit further we'd spent much of january and february uh in march having district
specific meetings where we our original plan was to have those in district but with omicron we had to have
those first remotely and then at city hall uh but we had an agenda item for each district and members we did
outreach to that district members of the public from that district or with a relationship to that district were
invited to come and give testimonies to their communities of interest just as a reminder communities of
interest are geographical areas that have some sort of shared social cultural socioeconomic um uh status
that brings them together so we took those submissions and any submission that we received either in
person via email um you know online through our web form
that was mappable that was given with actual boundaries of the streets um was
mapped by q2 and added into our database i don't have the number on top of our head but as time has gone on the numbers
really started to blossom so qt when they're making the maps takes into account those communities of interest that we've received as well as
as the other geographies as well as the uh sf uh neighborhoods map as um created
by the mayor's office of neighborhood services um a few years prior to this
so that so we we gave you to the instructions one of the maps that we came with um was 4a which was a map
based on the discussion that we had on that prior saturday and then there were three new maps
created for b or c and 4d um with the draft draft mapping process uh
it's this put stage i know it's it's relatively close to the deadline but we were still
at a place where we feel like we were relatively early on and when we were looking at maps we were evaluating uh
not just the specific choices that those maps made but where they stand as a starting point for future discussion in
future mapping so on that on that um saturday uh that the most recent saturday we we voted to
advance map four b um as in delta to
um the mapping uh to the mapping and i think i think for a lot of us i think at least
for me in particular but i think for everyone in the past course we felt um that with some tweaks it might have been
the best possible basis for a map that did keep the communities of interest whole and responded to the feedback we
received um so we go to monday uh and monday we get we
have public comment and then we get started to working on the map and um
4d uh it seemed to be that it was going to be a much more difficult starting point than we had imagined
we edited and discussed it for over two hours with different configurations balancing the needs of the communities
of interest as well as our requirements to retain uh to remain within five percent of the
mean district uh and we we had some some really serious discussions we moved various
different parts of the map just to try to make things balance we have even had a motion to make a move that did not
pass that affected the kind of the the viability of the rest of the map
uh at a certain point we got to a point where the only the only way forward
with that map was either to
make some some changes that we that we did not feel as a task force we were gonna we're comfortable making
and or changes that would have fundamentally um you know change the the
makeup of them of the map you know we on saturday we did hear um feedback we heard feedback in support for both map4d
and 4v uh and in that feedback um you know 4b and 4d those are just
letters and lines i think when we heard the feedback and on 4d people give feedback about specific
aspects of that map that they they felt were important and given where we were on monday night it
didn't seem like that there was a way possible way forward on 4d that would have made it a 4d that those
members of the public would have supported i think the change is necessary to that map to break to keep
it within compliance um given the the discussion and given the the guidelines we set up for
ourselves in that discussion would have um would have made that a completely different map so
we we made the choice to uh to you know call call it there and and
just choose to discuss a different map and i think it's really important to be clear that we
that this was not a flip-flop or a reversal we spent a lot of time making making discussions about the various
lines the various districts on the map and we could not if we could not find a viable solution um that we could agree
upon to move that map forward uh and this was like i said after hours hours of work um
and and to address the the time of the vote i i will you know admit that 2 53 a.m
probably not an ideal time to have a vote but we were less concerned about how late into the night it was and more
concerned with how late into the calendar we were as as a task force and if i
i felt that if and we felt that if we didn't have that vote at 2 53
whenever it was tuesday morning monday night um that we would have likely had that same vote or a similar vote
on wednesday and that's so much further down the calendar and i think by having the vote when we have the vote
and having having that discussion having that complete and frank discussion and then having that when we had it gave the
public an opportunity to respond to what they heard and gave the public an opportunity to compare and contrast um those options
and give us an opportunity to learn more about some of the trade-offs that we're going to have to make yeah this is a very difficult process a lot of very
complex trade-offs and i think this gave us an opportunity to um give us an opportunity
to really weigh those trade-offs and talk about these trade-offs um and one more point i
know i know i've gone along here one more point i do want to make it because this is very important we did not kill any maps we did not
take anything off the table um in the in that motion we we never had we've had we've had consensus moves
we've had votes um but we did not kill matt 4d at that meeting um it is if we
sort of left it as it is it became 4d a it remained in our track it means something remains something we discussed
we are still discussing it you may still discuss it at some point between now and saturday we just felt like based on the state of
our discussion and based on the state of the maps that 4b was going to be a more productive place for us to begin drawing
the next day
so i don't know what the trajectory of the number of public members of the public present during that evening but
um could you tell us like how many members of the public were present either online or in
person during that vote and also what was the like the last public comment in relation to that
motion um that's a great question i could uh i i don't have the exact numbers in front
of me and i i wasn't paying attention to the web apps i couldn't really really see that um i will say that
um and that's something that we may be able to try to provide at a later time um i will say that
we had this meeting started at 5 30 we had some discussions and then public the
public comment on the mapping we decided to go with that first before we we dug into the mapping the main reason for
that is is translators we've had a number of speakers primarily cantonese but other languages speaking and we have
the translators up until a certain time um and we felt that it was it made sense for us
to have that public comment first the the downside of that being that that pushed the discussion far later into the
evening um and in terms of the number of people there i i would say that
there are a lot of people who made public comment and then left and i would say roughly the number of
people who were there at the end of that mapping public comment which is around 11 pm
a lot of those same people were there straight through until till 3 a.m and we did receive we had general public con
after and we had general public comment um i don't know the exact number off top my head but we did have general public
comment after that and i think you know at this point thankfully you know we for
a long time we were sort of foiling in obscurity for a little bit but thankfully at this point there are a
number of reporters and journalists who are covering this uh and a number of members of the community prominent um
coalition builders within the community um and it you know people found out about it
very very very quickly i i have an email you had an email right at 8 00 in the morning the next day expressing
disappointment so i think um the time the time of the vote i don't think made any difference in
what what the vote would have happened and i think the ability for the credibility for the public to see
the vote um i think didn't make a difference on the vote itself and on the discussion
thank you i have a question during public comment uh on at
wednesday's hearing we heard a suggestion that there's no civil or criminal penalty
associated with not abiding by the city charter uh we we haven't been separately advised by the city attorney's office
yet probably because this was 48 hours ago or less but uh you know with respect to that
reference to the april 15th date in the city charter you mentioned that 2 53 a.m was you know
maybe not an ideal time to take that vote but you were uh as or more concerned about the proximity of the
april 15 deadline can you explain what's the uh
significance of that deadline outside the fact that it's a state in the city charter uh thank you um so april 15th is exactly
as you mentioned stated in the city charter and to be clear um and as i'm saying this i i do hope that
their city attorney will correct me press anything um very incorrect but um
my understanding is that it's before april 15th so technically april 14th at 11 59 um and there is state legislation
around voting rights that say we have to have a draft map posted 72 hours before
so we have to have a meeting that creates that map that map has to be up for 72 hours and then we kind of prove
it as a body um the and we can make very minor mostly clerical modifications to it at that
time so really our april 15th is the charter deadline um 10 example 14 technically technically based on the
meetings that we have currently scheduled april 9th and we've been clear with the public about this april 9th is really
the last day that we can can do any major mapping that could go in a little bit into that sunday if we need to but
april 9th is that last day we can be real mapping um and i think felt that if we were going to make a make abroad change i
think that ahead of time was and that april 9 deadline that's driven
by state law um the i believe the three the three-day posting period of the map i believe is
state law um and then the april 15th deadline is in the same charter thank you and
and to that to that end i asked um i i've inquired about what happens if we
don't hit that deadline and it's we've gotten sort of a shrug it's kind of we're not we're not sure what
happens after that so we're we have that very front of mind that's very important to us
so there have been some allegations in the media that some of the members have been acting on
behalf of certain like kind of political factions within the city and between those two votes on that evening were
there um did you like receive any lobbying communications like emails or texts from
these people between the saturday vote and the monday though
between the the votes for this um or do you followed by the
the the voters i did not um yeah and i
i think we take our commitment very seriously um there's a commitment to
not drawing lines based on political preferences political parties and that's something we take pretty seriously
it's been difficult for us these last week or so because we've had so much of a comment that's based on asking us to
draw districts that keep a certain uh political faction and the whole
landscape happy um and that's been um it's been it's been you know difficult for us to pass through
that but i i can i can assure you that all my members are acting in good faith to that commitment
including myself thank you um i wanted to follow up on commissioner
john's question um so first of all thank you for your service i've been
where you are um being a redistricting commissioner or task force member is
uniquely challenging so um
the hard trade-offs that that you're trying to make um can you tell me a little bit about the timeline
that the task force set out for draft maps because
california citizens redistricting commission you know had a constitutional deadline
of june 15th put out the first draft maps
in order that we could do a final map with time for public input and time for us to
revise it or our august 15th deadline so i'm just curious
what was the timeline for the draft maps because you said this was the fourth round
have there has there been an official release of a draft map um
thank you that question well there has not been an official uh
we have we have our draft maps we haven't made a distinction yet as to what an official draft map is and i
think we're still in the process of creating that i think with with this process um
we we really emphasized the the community of interest input and we really wanted that to not be
um not be tainted by the the sort of some of the political
uh conversations that we've heard recently we wanted to have that be separate um before before the mapping so
we we've not really strapped that but we've had on each stage we've had these draft maps that we've been working off of and
all of our proceedings everyone gets to see how the sausage gets made all of our proceedings of in public and in public
meetings okay so if i understand correctly there has been no official draft map
released yet i um i would not uh
i don't know if i would characterize that i i don't know what the sort of marker for official is if there's if there's one yeah no we had to like
officially release it and post it for a certain number of days and so ours was an official draft map i think in that in
that context no but we've had you know multiple draft maps that we've been working working through
in this process okay so so we called those kind of early
drafts we called them visualizations because we wanted to distinguish between the draft map and so
as i understand there has been but there has not been an official draft map and these are all visualizations
that's i'd say that's a fair characterization okay and then just to um
understand the math here you said there's a 72-hour posting deadline with the throne act
which would be then april 12th but then you also mentioned april 9th is that your deadline for
draft map right so we we do not have a meeting i think we want to give time
to for to make sure that we get everything uh posted and set um and we also do not have a meeting on
the uh [Music] from the 12th we don't have a meeting
so we would have to set it on the ninth and vote it on it on the 13th
okay thanks thanks
hi mr cooper i'm robin shapiro um i'm a new commissioner and i just wanted to say thank you for your service
um i imagine this has been a very difficult process and i just wanted to say thank you
um to start and um i just wanted to follow up on a quick
question if you don't mind um following your the beginning of the task
force in september can you talk about the step from september to
the meetings in january and february and then the first release of the map in
march i was trying to follow the element of the um
the 4a and for sorry when you presented the 4b 4c in 4d because you had said something
to the effect of it was relatively early on in that process and then later on
um the explanation for the um late night
change or move um without putting words into your mouth i want to just
i recall you saying something to the effect that it was how late in the calendar that that was more of what your
intention was with doing it at that hour um so could you just kind of walk through how you got to that specific
point from like a date standpoint i think that would just really help me understand the big picture here
great thank you yeah um so so yeah we were um we were
i was the three of us were appointed in june uh the mayor's appointees were appointed a little bit later as well as
the board of supervisors appointees there was some delay of unknown origin but we didn't really get started until
september and the whole process was delayed a little bit because the charter requires um requires the census data to
be published before the task force is created um and the sense there were delays with the
census data this year and the various relationships to that so you were pushed pushed back slightly because of that and
no no to any future chartered amendment rights we're going to have to redistrict every 10 years so hopefully that that census uh that census uh starting point
goes away but um yeah so so we started in september and a
lot of september october november was um us trying to to do our best in terms of
first figuring out who we are as a body we were at that point meeting remotely and we still had to we came in with no
schedule no just some draft by laws that we had to approve we had to get through all all
that process we also had to get to know our consultants we have q2 redistricting consultants who were helping with the
mapping process um and helping as i mentioned with the community of interest input they also did they also created a
redistricting mapping tool which we did iterations on helping them out with that's what allows members of the public
and members of the task force to create and submit maps base and it allows you to select
census blocks and count how many people live in that census block um so we had to work with
them on that um we also had an outreach consultant civic edge consulting and we worked with them on
on planning outreach and we had some some back and forth and changes on on the exact scope of their work and and
what they would do but we ended up getting setting them up for that um and then
we sort of hit an odd point where in december we were getting ready to schedule our first big
round we were going to do 11 11 meetings in each of the 11 districts community meetings and then
we had omicron happen and so we had to we had to delay the start of that sort of for a second and hoping that we would
be able to actually lose in person uh but that didn't end up working out so we ended up doing those all remote and that
sort of pushed that back a little bit um we had conversations at the time about
just going ahead and starting the mapping earlier um at the time you know we decided that it
was important really important to really focus on that community of interest input because we knew that was going to be so important
in building those kind of building blocks for the rest of our mapping so process so that we had those meetings and then we
sort of began the mapping process in earnest at the beginning of march um and that kind of leads us to where we are today
thank you just a follow-up question um that all is very helpful in getting to
what happened leading up to um omicron and then kind of thereafter but can you
talk a little bit about what happened after the first map was released in terms of the timeline just so i
understand once the first draft was or design was released um as it's not a specific draft
the design was released the lines were drawn um to the point of uh the week before the
change um that is in question i suppose um can you just kind of talk more specifically
about that timeline sure so um don't don't have all the dates on top
no problem we had um we did have a map 1a um that i believe
was released sometime right around the middle of march and that was just based on our first set of instructions to q2
we were finishing up a second round of district meetings and then we we had one a 1a was the was a map that
had a lot of issues um so we so we then starting the week of
starting two weeks before i guess around the week of the 17th day we had we were going right into
mapping meetings and well those words we would take that take whatever draft map we had um give comments and feedback and then
create a set of instructions for qt to come back with us to make those new sets of maps so we didn't play and then we got two a and
two b and then we got three a and three b um and then going into that that break that
we have where we couldn't schedule any meetings because of the the recess i insisted that and we agreed that we
should have uh more than two maps i mean we ended up with four maps uh and those the first map was based on what we did
that day so that came out uh i believe that next day basically or the day after
um and then there the other three maps that you two put together came out after that
thank you great
okay uh thank you i appreciate that you covered a lot of ground in that in that first question um as we go through the
next ones if you feel you've already touched on something feel free to kind of note that and pass through
we're also aware that we only have 30 minutes left until your meeting and certainly we don't want to hold up the
process from a timing perspective so we'll try to go quickly and
make time for for your fellow uh task force members so second question
can you describe the process by which the redistricting task force tracks and accounts for public input from
communities sure um yeah so i had mentioned the the community of interest feedback that q2 youtube does they take
any of the any of the feedback that we get um and any of the sort of mappable
community of interest feedback that we get uh and we put that in there we also are you know we get we get emails all
the emailed and comment or written in comment uh or hand delivered comments is emailed to us and i think so for the
community of interest feedback we use that um first that's the building blocks for q2 and the work that they do we also
use that feedback for uh in our in our mapping so if we know that we're we're about to edit lines in
a neighborhood we'll ask them to call up that that particular community of interest feedback um and the community of interest is not
just the geography i think that that input uh it's easy to say how we use that very
particular like geographical input but it also comes with a more well assigned it's a little bit harder to quantify and
a little bit harder to sort of talk about how we use that and i think it's i think different members probably have different approaches but i think
um we do appreciate hearing those human stories in this human angles because at the end of the day we're a
deliberative body it's not you know it's not a popularity contest so we're trying to
get in all the input take it all in and make it work
okay i will roll right through to the third question can you describe the process by which
the redistricting task force evaluates and establishes priorities for the purpose of drawing maps and what factors
do you consider um that's a good question um so the uh
the i think the values and the priorities uh a lot of this is is we're sort of
having as we are deliberating on these maps um we're having these really serious
conversations about this because a lot of these things are are very personal and are are very are very
serious there are of course a lot of you know non-personal impersonal guidelines that we have to follow we
have the um you know we have to be contiguous and compact and we to keep communities of
interest together and of course the the deviations but i think um
i think for me for me personally i i i could talk to my to my approach
and i think everybody else has their own their own angle to it but for me i you know i work for sfmta and residential
parking policy manager for the city and for me when i am hearing community of interest input and i'm hearing this
input i think about people's relationships with city and with city government and i'm always when i started i'm always shocked that
you know we have a website we have everything but so many people that only weigh into the tangled mess that is local government is
their supervisor's offices and um so when we're talking about keeping communities of interest whole um which
we we endeavor to do to me that's that's sort of the main reason because if something happens to a community of
interest they're going to want to have a single point of contact and somebody who's paying attention to those problems and those issues and i think
the members of the task are in our discussions it's clear that keeping communities of interest together is uh
is very important and is is important because of that reason because
uh of representation really isn't just about the numbers and it isn't just about who is getting elected but it's
about how the um how us as government can hear from the community
any questions from the commission okay so yeah
so besides keeping communities of interest whole that's the only criteria for i've heard
you mentioned so far what sure because they're obviously obviously yes there are obviously other ones i think
um the sort of next step beyond that is communities of interest that show an affinity for each other um and
we've yeah without getting in and into the particular lines we've heard from a lot of communities that have that particular
connection to other communities um and you know for those it's helpful just
when they are able to demonstrate those connections through shared services shared socioeconomic status um things like that so
we take those into consideration as well um there's also you know there's also non um
sort of non-polygonal communities of interest technically a community of interest is as you sort of define it as
the shared splits geography but there's also certain types of assets certain types of housings that or certain um
transportation assets that are shared that are scattered and we take that into consideration as well
um and i think the hard question is is how you balance all of that and i think
that i i i can't really give you a formal formula for that and i think it's something that we are having the as we have the
discussions about everyone is sort of you know coming making making the case of how they're understanding it and
coming to the people so just to follow up you made a point that certain maps were
[Music] you know non-viable at some point [Music]
can you elaborate on what you meant by non-viable sure um without yeah without
um getting into the specifics of the maps um i would say yeah on on monday we
we had discussions about um about 4d and with that map a lot of the
numbers were were very large um in a lot of the districts and a lot of the moves would have
involved um either some of the moves were involved moving communities of interest um out of
districts where they did not um they did not did not choose choose to go
to and i think um we had we were having discussions about how to how to weigh that um the way that
aspect but we also had to a lot of the moves would have also involved splitting up communities of
interest and we had to have we were going to have to have conversations about to what extent we want to do that and why
and i or generally why not right we and i think um
there were many discussions that we had about specifically communities of interest that have um
i think that there was a desire in general to not split up communities of interest that was kind of key and it was
really hard to make those numbers work without doing that um
within that context and based based on the conversations and based on everything else about
what where other districts should where other neighborhoods should go it didn't seem like that was going to work out
okay thank you [Music] so um one of the things that i'm having
hard time understanding is like the the redistricting process isn't a zero-sum game there's like the nature of drawing
boundaries is there's a lot of room for compromise and but in this case from the comments we've been hearing it seems like
you know one group of people is very um dissatisfied with with the the direction
things are going and so can you explain to me like why is it
um not possible to create a map that kind of makes all sides a little bit unsatisfied
instead of it appears that one side is kicking the front of that i i would say
that um that's to be honest i think that's the direction we're going in um i think
you know if you took a snapshot at on monday night i i could see how one would come to that that conclusion um but
again try not get too specific in the lines but with the maps with the changes we've made to the maps that we've been working
on yesterday wednesday and yesterday um we've we've definitely gone in a
direction where we responded to some to some not all of the complaints of folks
who were dissatisfied by that vote on monday night uh we've made we've made some changes to the map that are responding to that
and um having spent a lot of time with 4d and with that map
and from hearing that from the result of the vote that we had on monday night on that motion and the discussion that we
had on that night based on what types of maps could have gotten five votes
i don't i do not think that there was a 4d
map that could have gotten five votes that will that preserve the things about 4d that
that those people um that the people who commented on talked about it it's it's it and
it's going to be a hard conversation right because there is we're talking about communities that
gave you really dedicated passionate input and passionate feedback but it's also
communities with large numbers that are gonna it's gonna be hard to fit within the context of everything else in a way
that satisfies enough of the enough of the body so
yeah so i think i i think that the pivot gave us an opportunity to talk about
you know going to the other side and talking about kind of how to come come to some sort of conclusion and we're currently in the process
i'm curious about one thing so i mean you talked about various factors that uh the members of the task force
considered right um geographically you want to um you know make the lines compact and
take contiguous uh you know you define communities of interest that can be defined in a variety of ways
can you can you give me a sense and and i'm not sure whether this is quantifiable but um
give me a sense of the magnitude of the potential communities of interest that you
take into account or would have to take into account when drawing during these maps yeah it's um i believe
we're definitely over 100 especially when you factor in just the neighborhoods themselves and um you
factor in um cultural districts green benefit district um community benefit districts
um and the other you know the frustration is you have so many not frustration because it's a lovely feature of san francisco but the other
difficulty with that is that we have so many overlapping neighborhoods as well so um if you you try to you try to split
one neighborhood you try to say this is the line between two neighborhoods some people say no no that's that overlaps so
uh yeah it's a large number and i think we knew going in and anybody anybody interacting with this process in good
faith i should hope knew going in that you are not going to be able to keep every single community of interest intact
just a follow-on question is sometimes um
the redistricting value will make a decision that there are certain lines that should
not be crossed and by you know literally drawing a line in the
sand it it makes other possibilities and options
uh yeah and achievable right um so just to give you a concrete
example when the california citizens registration commission was trying to draw the bay area
we got very very strong and firm public input not to cross the golden gate bridge
okay and i was part of the team since i live here that tried to redraw the bay area a
million times to also accommodate the very large south asian population
that is in south bay and and east bay because they had given very strong
testimony that they want to be to to be kept together and those were kind of not compatible
goals [Music] however in our case we were able to explain this
to the public that because of this barrier of not crossing the golden gate bridge it did not allow us to
to not split them in the smaller versions of the district so you only have one version of the
district we were we had to split them in the assembly and and some of the other districts but we already keep them together in a state
senate district which is a almost a million people it's very large bigger than san francisco um
so do you feel like uh was there some root kind of line in the sand that has caused
some of these other options to be non-viable because for example you were saying some of
these communities interests are just too large that they want to be kept together but could they be most of them be kept together in one district and most be
kept together in another district i mean there there are ways to to compromise as
sure and and yeah within the framework of that map there definitely were
because of where we were with the um with the deviation within the framework of that map there were definitely places
where there were sort of kind of trade-off points where you had to sort of decide if
one community of interest was going to be split or the other and based on the conversation and based on
the motion that was made that night it seemed like that there were there are a few points where the answer was going to be neither and we just were
not going to be able to move past that um but that you know that was monday we've we've had
we've had more more discussions and that's changed a little bit um in in recent days and i think
i think going forward we're going to continue to look at ways to make that work um but it seemed like
it seemed based on where we were that conversation with everything we've explored with that map that night um
that we were not going we're definitely we definitely weren't going to get any further on that um at at that time i
should mention we also had to take a recess that night for moving cars for street cleaning so it was even artificially later than uh than it could
have been um but we weren't gonna make it for the move that night and i think i i really don't know if
you know based on that conversation if we just went straight back into it on wednesday we would have had
i think we would have just had that same conversation so yeah okay
great oh please for anyone that's watching the webex and saw president bernholtz trying to make a
comment she's actually put her hand down you've answered it so i'm not ignoring her
okay going to the fourth question can you confirm the rediscripting task force commitment to and describe some of
the actions you have taken for the purpose of reflecting communities of interest within the city and county of
san francisco and again if you feel you've answered this one uh yeah i can confirm yes um
yeah i'll mention the redistricting tool and the sorry the community of interest tool and
the submissions and the work that q2 has done to incorporate those and you know in our conversations that's
sort of what we're centering our communities of interest um and i think um
i think what the sort of in the conversations that we're having yeah the question
thankfully we have we have the submissions from the public and that's kind of where where our starting line is but uh we we still have to have
discussions because as i said not every community of interest can be kept whole and which ones we keep whole and which ones we don't are
sort of where that discussion happens
i have one statement you know maybe slash comment which is that you know the these
questions that were presented to you today uh you know these weren't run by the commission before being sent to you
and they're you know they're suggestive right in the sense that sometimes by posing a question
uh you know it can appear on the receiving end that someone is you know that you've
done something wrong that is not the case and that's not the role of this commission the role this commission is not to substitute our judgment for your
judgment so i don't want you to take anything that is posed of you or
the fact that you're here today to suggest that you've done anything wrong we are agnostic and have to be agnostic
as to that we're not talking about substance we're talking about procedure
thank you
thank you commissioner john uh well said thank you mr cooper that uh appreciate
your your thorough responses in the in the interest of time uh i think what
we'd like to do because we're aware of your meeting in in a few minutes so mr lee ms raynor if you have things to add
that are relevant for these please you know come up and do so and we'll ask follow-up questions but don't feel the
need to reiterate what mr cooper has said thank you
thank you president burden holds thank you uh vice president chapel uh patiently
a member of the san francisco registration task force um
as my fellow member um reno cooper said
we spent seven months hearing
and listening to all the communities in san francisco in a variety of languages
i happen to be blessed to be able to understand cantonese and mandarin
most of my has most of my task force my investment laws and when i applied for this com before
the task force before this commission i specifically stated
that i want to lift up the voices of the young voice
to lift up those to empower those who were silent or were silenced
in many ways they were silenced because of language barriers they were silenced
because no one knew they existed and i think we fellow task force members and all task
force members have done a good job in uplifting those voices bringing them to the floor
we had we were confronted with a lot of difficult decisions
especially since once part of the city was 30 over the mean
and the rest and and there was one side of the city that was systemically below the mean
that involves difficult conversations there is no minimum change when one is that out of
stack um and in making those difficult decisions
i want to emphasize that we did not take those decisions lightly
they were they considered all the input that we have received over
days nights weeks and months that
they they called on a lot they're called on their consciences
the con the the principles that we sought to establish because at the end of the day
we had we had legal criteria that we had to read and when i stopped unstoppable after
using a soluble force i think i mangled that decision hard decisions have to be made
and we often make those decisions with heavy hearts but we make those improvements
and we made those in the spirit of of having
a map that the city
could either be proud of or that the city could work for the next 10 years
we contributed hours and hours and hours of our efforts
unpaid we volunteer because we love this because we
because we truly love the communities that i personally love
and that they have joined or definitely or definitely lived in
and so i want to emphasize that yes we made very difficult decisions we make
decisions that obviously not everyone liked but we definitely mean
but we definitely strive and we're trying to
to accomplish the tasks that you the elections commission have asked us to do to the best
that's exciting thank you mr lee
any questions yes yes um mr lee i think we were supposed to be on a panel together to finally meet you and
thank you for your service i uh appreciate the hours that you and the registering task force members have put
for this task um i am also used to having committed thrown at me i know that you're not
going to make everyone happy i i hear the passion in your voice and i appreciate that
um what we heard it's very difficult
okay we'll do we'll do our best um so so what we heard um both from members of
the public as well as league of women voters and aclu watchdog
groups they also stalked us at the state level i have a lot of respect for those organizations
there was a concern expressed that affluent communities were being
prioritized over more vulnerable and working class communities immigrant
communities you know again i i know the impossibility of making
everyone happy i know that you probably need to move people around who may have an emotional attachment to their
district number but the question is can you can you speak to
the concerns that we heard expressed thank you commissioner um yes i can
speak to those concerns um before i answer the question substantively i want
to it with where i am i come from visitation valve
okay no one has no one assumes that presentation visitation valley is a national accommodating a great working
class and so i innately understand
what it's like to grow up in that environment in a marginalized community
and it's and to an extent it is painful to
and say and have an appellation unfairly attached but
i guess politics is positive to answer your substantive question we listen to all
the communities especially those who are marginalized especially because um a lot and i also want to emphasize we
also listen to those who have not never even spoken up before because
part of my one of my principles going into this process was uplifting those who are voiceless right
and some of those voices along this voiceless are marginalized communities and i think we
all the task force members that definitely spent have definitely considered all that
input they might not be those um but we have definitely can we have
definitely incorporated that input in the map that we're making i do not personally believe that we have prioritized
um i definitely believe that we have prioritized marginalized communities
in the in a way that makes the map work we have not disregarded their input
we have not disregarded the importance of their participation we
have not disregarded the substance of the message
uh president bernholtz has a question so i believe she's on that screen
thank you vice president chapel thank you mr lee and thank you mr cooper uh
two questions uh following up on uh both uh
speaker's comments um mr lee was there any mr cooper gave us a very
thorough description of the timeline um in your experience was there anything
that you wanted to add or edit or anything unusual that uh in your mind between the the meeting on saturday and
the decision on monday um and basically commenting on what mr cooper was a uh so
well able to reproduce for memory and then my other question is a general question
for the task force members which is if the consulting firms or the task force staff is um keeping
quantitative uh track of the uh testimonies that are given and the
communities of interest that are speaking to you thank you
um thank you president burnholtz uh to to your first question i thank my followers
member member cooper uh has laid it all out um
the full timeline and i have no further additions to that okay please repeat my second question
uh thank you for that uh the second question was whether there's a process in place at the task force either
through the consulting firms or task force staff that's keeping quantitative track of the testimonies
and numbers of speakers and positions and things like that how is that community of interest input
being tracked over time so we we do have um
a table of all the communities of interest that that the public has submitted we have
uh an air table of all of the maps that have been submitted um
we we have been receiving thousands and thousands of thousands of emails i think i received 200 yesterday alone
um but i also want to address the part where um you said quantitative
i think it's also important to emphasize the qualitative aspects of those messages um both it's supposed and right
it's not either or it's a both and and um
i i think reducing them to just oh just another tally mark is not it's not the way to it's not was not
certainly not my way of engaging in the redistricting process but yes it does lend a heavier
impact on a voice for a certain opinion but it also has to make the map at the
end of the day is a holistic process
we have to look at the totality of the circumstances and we have to make it work um and so that that is certainly my
approach i cannot speak for others of course
thank you any other questions from silly
okay thank you thank you so much thank you
um the entire commission um thank you for letting us speak
i won't get into some of the specifics and i try not to repeat some of the things that um our my fellow members have said
i'd rather focus a little bit on some of the things that maybe are more process oriented that
will help you get a sense of both the timeline of how we got here and
how we handle some of these things that we've been talking about but first before um
i go there if you would permit me i would like to say something about my fellow um
members in general both members liam cooper of two are two
of the most dedicated intelligent and thoughtful individuals i've had the pleasure working with
they're young passionate and very committed i have become a bit of a mother hint to
them and coaching them both personally and professionally
when i was in business i looked for people who were coachable sure they had to have qualifications but coachability
was the most important thing for me these two young outstanding men are not only coachable
but they're respectful they respect the wisdom of others they listen to the input of others and they learn very
quickly to accuse them of not listening and not caring
is hurtful and i wonder if they've been listening to them if people have been listening to
them because as member lee said we have spent hours and hours talking to people
i i'll also try to address some aspects of the complaints against
us please remember that this task force started in the middle of a pandemic
we have had to do most of our work remotely in fact it's only been in the last few weeks that we have even been
able to see each other in person yet we've developed terrific rapport and i think we work very well together
having to work remotely was a great advantage but the the clerk
and her staff have been astounding they have been just fantastic and the support that they have done have made our jobs
much easier they are truly impressive but we did not take our responsibilities
rightly lightly we didn't select our outreach consulting so as far as talking about the outreach
process let me address that process working with the amazing folks from the clerk's office we developed a best
process a best practices process that we were able to do under the circumstances and we documented that
because we were aware that all the problems that we were running into other people would run into so we
documented it for future i read every minute of the last task
force that met in 2010-12
and i looked at the things that they had done things that applied to us and i sort of became like the operations
person for the task force trying to organize some processes and procedures so that we had something that we can
grip onto we not only supplemented the consultant's work but we created a
process of reporting to hold them accountable provided presentations the six key points are
redistricting every single every single session that we had mr casa lee was the one who was
responsible for um providing actually that was um that was someone else but we
we had presentations that um two of the task force members were responsible for presenting and before every single
meeting we would go through what is redistricting why is it important what is your role what are the things that we
want you to help us to understand tell us how do you tell us about what a koi is
and we went through all of that to have some sort of a parameter around all the
distributions and all the things that we were going to be happening um so
we provided these presentations at each meeting to the public and we specifically said over and over again
we don't want to know who your supervisor is we don't want to talk politics political implications are have
nothing to do with our job we supplemented where we could in fact
member cooper personally went out and hung flyers on polls all around this
country this state around the city telling people of when the meetings were and what they needed to do to come there
um we did not take our responsibility lightly we recommend that the process of
selection of the outreach consultant be reworked and we intend to make some significant recommendations to that
effect in our final report the mapping tool the mapping tool is not
designed for the public it's quite sophisticated and it has so much data behind it that any change you
make takes a lot of work to bring the results and you have to know how to process it it's not designed for cell
phones that's for sure but a lot of people were trying to do create maps on their cell phones so we saw the problems
there it's a geeky tool and nobody's going to spend money on a tool that's only used
once every 10 years to make it user friendly so we have to figure out how to deal with that however
myself member question and member cooper worked with the outreach consultants and developed an upfront training program
for the um the public so that we could teach them how to use the tool that
program is online we were hoping to go out to the community and do training but
we really didn't have the capacity and we didn't have the staff we didn't have the money and that's also something that
will be in the final report as a recommendation for the future
um it was a good idea also but we also couldn't go out to the public most of
the time because of the pandemic just as we were about to go out and and do some of the training the
omicron hit and we got shut down again so i just want to really emphasize one more time we did not take our
responsibility likely and we'll make some recommendations the other thing is that we have not been
listening to the marginalized disadvantaged and vulnerable communities in san francisco
nothing could be further from the truth i'm not sure what that is based on
we've had so many you've heard about all the submissions we get we've tried
really hard and worked really hard to make sure that everybody understood what we needed
for those submissions so that we could they could help us after we got got to the outreach portion
the and i want to stop right there one of the things that we were told is that we
needed to make sure that every district had their had their opportunity to speak
we thought that district six which was the most complicated district that was over
um the numbers so significantly deserve multiple tries of the apple so
we told them over and over again to try to get them to get ready for this so part of the
schedule was also scheduling all these districts to come in and speak to us individually so the outreach included
specific district specific outreach as well as general outreach
so it's not unusual for us on a given day to get hundreds of emails with all sorts of submissions
some of them because people go out and they they they help you know um bring the community together
we get the same thing over and over again sometimes so we have to parse through all of this
it's really hard when you're working a full-time job you're on the commission and you're
getting all of this information in the middle of a pandemic to do all this but we've managed i think we've done a
good job however sometimes we were there because there
was so much public comment five or six hours four four hours three hours of public comment sometimes we're there
until late at night garages close at different times street cleaners come at two in the
morning i have no idea that the street cleaners come in two in the morning so we'd have to break one
out or two in the morning move our cars try to run around the street cleaner and park there
i'm not sure if you know what it feels like to go out at four in the morning and walk across the plaza to get to your
car at night it's not pleasant marty that happened to us
i think it was monday night when we were there my supervisor heard that i was walking
across the plaza by myself monday night and she was leaving for holiday and she
said called me and said i'm leaving you my parking pass i want you to park in my parking spot when you come to work
i parked there one day and immediately there was all sorts of of um
notices out there that i was biased how could i be honest because i was parking in my supervisor's heart was fun
so it feels really you know she was trying to help me but it feels you feel a little attacked when those kinds of
things happen and we try not to we try to be really um evil and even and level-headed about
this but we are trying to do a good job and it's really tiring when you're getting home
at four in the morning and you have a couple of hours of sleep and then the next day you have to prepare for the next mapping process or the next meeting
so let me address the big kahuna in the room the big where we supposedly
switched at three in the morning after we had all unanimously picked a man it's been addressed by mr cooper very
very well as to what happened that night but let me just assure you that that was a consensus almost a
consensus report we mapped for days before then on consensus we're going to have to take a vote
that's really complicated that's really hard as a commission you know how hard that is to keep consensus going
and to keep things moving through consensus but that night we came up we came up
against an impossibility of numbers this city is so asymmetrical
this particular mapping process is so much more complicated than any of the ones i've seen before
and it and it's really difficult to figure out what communities are gonna
move i sat down with some of the communities and said okay
tell us instead of telling us that you can't move or you don't want to be separated which
we understand so clearly help us figure out how we can make you happy what will make you happy
and sometimes it's worked and we've gotten uh japantown and and and we sat down and
they give us a a map that we can live with and it's no problem and we can go up with that we met with some of the
other committees we met with some of the people from russian hill we met with some of the people
from uh anza vista we we try to work with the community to try to help make them whole but this
map is so hard it's so difficult to make the numbers work because there's eight percent less
on the western side and thirty some percent and eight plus percent on the east side and then in between
there are such difficult areas like the tenderloin in the city and to move people in the communities
the filipino cultural districts the leather cultural districts all of these cultural districts which we respect and
make san francisco great but it's really difficult to make the numbers work
when nobody wants to so that that's basically what happened that
night we hit a wall and i'll be honest with you one of the members said the optics of this is not
going to be great and we said it's more important that we have we can move forward
than the optics maybe we weren't so smart and maybe we should have listened to him he might have had more uh
experience than the rest of us but we were trying to do the right thing and we care
and we take our responsibilities really seriously um
you know people all think that that they know how to do this i mean it sounds like it's not as complicated as it is
but it isn't complicated and the task force you know i i really
i have to say i had not heard from the aclu until i saw this myth
if the aclu had any concerns we would have had them come and talk to us about what they think is the right thing to do
we would have loved for them to show up and help us with that i would have been very happy to to make
time on our roster for that we are we have we have people who come and talk to us about what it's like to be
um in a certain neighborhood what certain um language barriers create what are the
what are some of those items that are difficult for people there are all sorts of specialists who have come and talked
to us we would always have been happy to hear from them we have our dcas that
advise us on regularly if we need something but we are always open to other suggestions
it's this task force is a wonderful group of individuals chosen by a disparate group who has been
working amazingly well together we've developed significant respect for one another and are respectful even when we
disagree we work together for seven months without paying many as a second job
to do the civic duty we've missed significant family events and i for one am proud of the work we
are doing this task force should hold our heads high this work is really really hard
we don't take our responsibility lightly and i am happy to answer any questions if you still have self
i think one one point of clarification the accusations and attacks you're referring
to are from members of the public and organizations i understand that i understand i do i do and we get them too
i i don't think you've heard anything that we haven't heard we hear them regularly nightly
they talk to us about it and when and we hear them when we know this is our our schedule
and it was a very difficult schedule to set up so the question that you had about why it took so long to get to the
mapping because we wanted to go through the public then the public wanted a second meeting
so some areas we doubled up you know how complicated it is to get meetings scheduled so to have all these
on the schedule and move the schedules around took a while especially since we had no process no procedures no no no
nothing to to go off of so we used youtube to learn how to line trump
so thank you
yeah um thank you for your service as well thank you again
i appreciate that this is a difficult job okay uh and and uh
the time gets crunched the closer you get to the deadline no question tomorrow again i'm
i'm i'm curious uh from your perspective um
you know what was behind the letter from the league of women voters because like i said the league is
famously nonpartisan they have been observers of all the redistricting processes
it's very unusual for them to write a letter like that and i'd be very curious about
your perspective on what prompted that letter um like i said it's highly
unusual did i consider myself under oath um we've heard from the league of women
voters every night there is i don't think there's a night that we have had and sometimes multiple times a night
and so we we hear them we've heard them and i like you have always thought of the women the league
of women voters is very non-partisan i'm not sure after this experience i feel the same
and i don't know what prompted them to do it because we have listened to them we have talked to them we have opened
our doors to them so maybe you should ask them we will thank you very much oh one more
question okay um the other uh question i have was
regarding you you talked about the the outreach base
and it seems like you did it by district and there's nothing that i could read in
the city charter that says anything about the task force being required to preserve existing
districts that's usually right what bakes in gerrymandering right so
um i'm curious why the task force decided to
approach a district kind of focused i mean that seems like it's underlying
uh yeah in your decision-making exactly what the last task force did and their recommendation was that we
um go through the districts and um i don't know if they recommended that we
use certain ones that were more complicated i don't know if they had as difficult a numbers issue but that's
what they did and it seemed to work really well they were able to go out to the community the community actually demanded it
the community not only demanded they were very upset when we couldn't go out they had recommendations for us which
places we should go to to be present and we wanted to be
uh present with the community um the understanding was that we would talk to
each district they would tell us what was special about their districts what their communities of interests were what
they were interested in preserving and we would get to know each district more
personally in terms of not only their communities but the things that make the district special
and so we wanted each one of them to come and do those presentations to us and that
uh president burns waltz as a question for you so
uh ms raynor thank you for your service um i'm quite struck by your comment just now
about the letter from the league of women voters um and
i guess uh this is a question to you but if either of the other two task force members
wants to respond i'm interested in their responses as well which is to say given the concerns expressed
by many people as well as um a well-respected
independent watchdog groups are there uh or is it your position that there's
no validity to their concerns or are there things you or your colleagues
feel like the task force um could learn from what's being
uh expressed or maybe being expressed by others as you
hit this final week of your work or are you dismissing their concerns as
inappropriate um i'm not dismissing their concerns
i'm saying that we've heard them we've talked to them before they've been at all of our meetings they sent us letters
we've worked with them in the beginning they were very complimentary because i was working really hard to try to get
processes and dates done and they were driving us very hard to try to get some dates on the calendar and they were
driving us very hard on the meetings they had comments every single meeting that we had on
the district meetings things that we were doing and we we were very happy to
hear those comments and many of them we took we acted on but after you know after all we are the
task force and the tool is the tool and the fact that it wasn't that easy to
work with and the community had a struggle with that that was something that the link struggled with too
and there are lots of things that we agreed on but there wasn't much that i we could do and we have to keep moving
forward so we heard the comments we tried to act wherever we could
on those comments especially if we felt that they were something that we could do
but i'm surprised at the letter because i thought that we listened we did what
we the best we could and i think the task force has been working very very hard there are lots of people who feel
that we're not listening to them but that's because we can't do everything that they want and
i know that people are going to be unhappy and you know in the beginning somebody said if you make everybody
unhappy you know you're doing a good job i'm not so sure that i'm going to take that to heart and
feel good about that because we're trying to do the best that we can
i have a question
yeah thank you um and yeah i think the the a lot of the concerns from league of legends voters
they see you in a lot of these groups there there's definitely some as as spicer writer mentioned
a lot a lot of things on the i mean the outreach that that could have been smoothed over and and helped out with
and i think if we gotten this letter in a different context i think it would have been a little bit better received
but i think you know with is the letter was received within the context of of this hearing and was within the context
of why we are having this hearing and i think i think at some point we have to be honest about that and i think uh you
know we've done as much as we can with with outreach and i really do as i mentioned earnestly believe that we've
done as much as we can with those maps and i will say that yes from from voices that are
representing certain marginalized communities the map that we switched to
was is worse than the map that we started from based on the way they were then but again as i said we're addressing those
changes and it was an iterative process and i think for me you know i've been as open as i
can be about my thoughts on this process taken just about every meeting from any
community member who wants to talk with me and you know the thing with the meeting on monday we
knew as vice chairman said that that last vote was going to be controversial we were going to hear from people and i
i took a meeting that next day with members of the community who are disappointed with that outcome that tuesday was our only day off this
week the disappointed outcome of that previous day's meeting and i there's an hour-long meeting over an hour listening
to specific concerns a lot of that was really productive really good conversations trying to move us forward
he met for over an hour and it was it was really a lot of the comments i heard really affected me and affected
the direction that we were moving the next few days so when one of the organizers of that
meeting just 24 hours later came into our hearing room to gleefully celebrate
the creation of this hearing for the purpose of removing us from that task force
that was an absolute gut punch it was so harmful because of all of the time
and energy and emotional capacity we've given up to this task force to this effort
and honestly seeing somebody who i have i've met with multiple times and seen
groups that i've met with multiple times in good faith and to listen to and hurt out seeing somebody representing from
that come in and he's and the next day use this as an opportunity to try to
remove us from the task force it shook my faith in the fellow humans so
much uh and it really it really harmed in my my drive for public service you know i
i have a lot of faith and faith in the fellow human that's why i've always worked in government always probably always will work in government and it's
because i think we're all in this together and we're all trying to do our best with what we have and what we're
working with and it really was disappointing to see that someone took that you know
took my time took that opportunity to have these honest discussions and and decided that the the best way to move forward was to
just just try to do something like this so i appreciate i hope you do not take this personally
obviously elections commission i appreciate your questions and your candor but i think we do need to talk about that context i
think that was important
president bernholds do you have any follow-up from that yeah i i want to thank uh whoever just
spoke i can't see you and i'm not good at distinguishing the voices mr cooper thank you
um for that i i do want to um acknowledge that
for the elections committee which is itself a independent body
to get these letters and um the
uh outpouring of concern uh over the course of this week from
uh on many many um opinions about the work of the task force strikes me as an extreme
um an unusual and i hope not to be repeated um
event because you're the very existence of an independent elections commission and an independent
task force is to let you do your work um so i want to thank you for that um
i want to thank you for your work um and i appreciate the insights from all three
of your of of the task force members about the um
previous interactions with those uh the groups who have written to us and and uh
who uh have been expressing their concerns about process um it's unfortunate that
um there's such a sense of um there's so many process concerns
because i think i i i'm sure all nine members of the task force took on their
roles knowing full well that they would make they would win no popularity contests um
by serving in the role that you're serving in um so the outreach both to the
independent elections commission about the independent task force um
is is serious and um our interest in hearing directly from you
three and uh regarding this is um is helpful so thank you
thank you very much and i just want to say that i actually had to um hold back mr cooper he was so upset
he was ready to leave san francisco he was really really hurt and he and the process we have worked so
hard we have worked really hard in an environment where there was no process
to create a process and i believe we have created a process and i could show you i can send you
i can send you procedures i could send you documentation i could send you that um so it was really surprising to us
but i think ms rainer you had a couple other questions and mr lee maybe we can get back to you when those questions are
answered thank you thank you we have more questions for you yes yeah
robin yeah i have a question uh miss rainer so uh this uh this morning i read a san
francisco on a publication san francisco standard a um an article and in that
can someone close the door please
yeah you can open it so um i i read a piece in the san francisco standard uh
this morning um there was an article and in it there was uh it looks like a photograph of
elections commission talking points and presumably these were the talking points uh provided to some of the
commenters which is fine that's their first amendment right to engage in that activity i'm not condemning that at all
but i do recall one of the commenters suggesting i think they were referencing
a comment that you made and it's it's quoted here in the talking points and i'll just read it from it because i don't have the minutes from
the last meeting is that one of your appointees and again i think they're referencing you
actually said i resent pulling out the names uh you know quote vulnerable
community to get things moving on a map uh is is that something that you said
and uh can you please explain actually it's not something i said i don't recognize that quote and i actually
don't recognize it from anyone in the task force so i really don't recognize that
can you say it again yeah the quote is i resent pulling out the name vulnerable
community to get things moving on a map no i don't recall that at all
so i don't recall anyone saying anything like that
uh mr rainer thank you for being here as well um i was wondering if you could uh speak a
little bit to your um your political involvement this past year and more recently um
i've read in the media some reports that you've been involved in some political campaigns and i know one of the
questions in our application form was to describe your electoral engagement and i'm wondering if um
if these were things that you started after applying or um i can't wait this word what
would you like me to start from the week just this last thing uh if if these are things that you started um
where in relation to applying to our commission did you start these additional political activities sure i
have always been involved with politics i am very clear about that fact i'm an immigrant
i escaped from hungary as a child and voting is a really important thing to me
to be a citizen is an important thing to me i actually choked up when we were taking our oath of office and surprised
me i was so glad that we were virtual and nobody could see me but it's really important to me to be
involved in politics and to to be um present i'm currently on my only
involvement with politics is to help ukraine but i have always been involved with politics i have been
i have not ever held office i have been invited to be involved in politics on a personal level this is the first time
i've ever done it um but i have always been uh supportive of
people whose voices and whose campaigns i thought were valuable uh since i took the job on this task
force i not only have not been involved within the politics but when there was a request from one of the supervisors for
the task force member's phone numbers i gladly gave that phone number and said i would love to meet with the supervisor
after we were done napping so i'm very very aware of that responsibility and
don't have any interactions and i'm not involved with any political movements i will be as soon as i'm done
with the task force because that's who i am were you involved in one of the recall campaigns no but i was involved in the
signature the original signature and i i heard that that's the only thing about me that i ever hear
is that i was one of the original people that signed the recall va
campaign and i was one of the people but i have not been involved with the campaign since then
i will once i'm done commissioner shapiro did you have a question
yes hi i wanted to first introduce myself as well to both of you um as i was not on the commission
when you were selected and appointed um thank you for your service and for answering the questions today and just
the painstaking process that this has that this has been i wanted to just clarify one specific
actually a couple of specific points and then respond to the politics component of that
you had referred in one of your comments to my my questions pertaining to the
amount of time that it took to present a first
iteration of a map and i want to be clear that the intention and i believe
one of my colleagues mentioned this as well the intention was not to assume anything it was to provide an
opportunity for you and your colleagues to clarify to the public who have
questions um and i am sorry that this has been hard for you personally i
do think that many people share feelings as well and that is what we are we are
trying to provide an open forum to have a conversation where you can set
the record of your these questions straight it is not to interrogate um so i would like to
just say that as my own personal opinion not um those on the others on the commission
can you just um clarify your comment in as it pertains to the board of supervisors um because
you had just said that someone had reached out to you and um i just wanted to clarify that and
then again i think just answering the question about any sort of
influence um as it pertains to the the the night the night in question for lack
of a better um yes but there have been questions like
from the from the like from the public as it pertains to
any sort of behavior on that evening and if you could just respond to that for the
public yeah i'm not sure what that's referring to i do want to make something clear
the task force made a decision that we would hear from every district before we started mapping so that we
could understand their concerns and so the dates were driven by the districts
and the meeting with the districts we ended up doubling up some districts and moving some districts up
we actually decided that after we went through each district we were going to go through
them the second time because they had requested a second time we would start mapping first
and then while while the iteration of those maps were continuing we would then have the second districts
and we doubled up those districts to try to get through them faster and then after we were finished with the
districts then we went full time into mapping so that's how the mapping dates were set
was based on that um the the the comment about the board of
supervisors is really simple this is a supervisorial district mapping and
i wanted to be an example to the public and and to myself
about the fact that we aren't going to be talking about this with the supervisors i didn't know with the
exception of my own supervisor who i've known since she was a legislative aide or any of the supervisors live and i'm
really happy to keep it that way we had one person public public comment who told us about one of them and i actually
said please don't mention those because we don't want to know we want to be objective when it comes to that so that was my comment and some of the
supervisors i think met met with some of the task force members and some task
force members actually reached out for outreach purposes for support to some of the supervisors
but i did not have that you know responsibility so i didn't have that conflict thank you for clarifying
any other questions no thank you thank you
thank you commissioners for your indulgence i want to supplement some of my remarks uh especially regarding uh
member cooper's um references to how we scheduled these
mapping meetings many of our task force members uh
strongly believe that we should hear from kitty first that we hear from the communities with
uh regarding their interest their communities of interest regarding their priorities without the influence of
potential outside influences such as having a draft math out there because
we've definitely heard um input saying we should put out a draft map early to drive engagement
personally i think i know we are in the social media age
trolling the public for comment is not good public policy it's definitely not
the way to draw on that and so that's why we took the approach to go through all the communities all
the districts first hear from them hear about what their aspirations are
what their goals are what their communities of interests are how they conceive of themselves before we started drawing themselves
that's right that was what i wanted to clarify and i also want
to emphasize i think uh both uh vice chair ryan i remember cooper i met you were volunteers
we're not sophisticated polished people that have the political consultants you know
dressing up we're just volunteering for a job uh that we for a task that we believe
very strongly in to make uh to make a fair and equitable map for san francisco
i think it's that's something to episode for for us to for me to emphasize we're volunteers we
volunteered hours at big time um unpaid
because we love the city and we love our communities thank you
there's no further questions for the commission then thank you to our three appointees
this was so helpful so informative we really appreciate you making the time especially since it's driven your
meeting late we'd like to let you guys leave now so you can start your meeting and then
we'll carry on with ours so we'll take a five-minute recess while you guys leave and then we'll come back and thank you
thank you we're gonna take public
we're gonna take a public comment after the next section
all right everyone we're gonna get started
thank you everyone we have the same uh technical issues as before so uh to
the extent you can keep your is down that will help everyone hear us
uh close the door all right so now now i'm going to open up to
commissioner discussion um i don't know president bernholtz do you want to kick us off
uh sure thank you um i don't i so i assume the task force
members have left the room i want to just thank them again um
uh normally um i mean now would be the time to make some kind of motion
um i wanna say that my own position on this whole conversation has been that the
purpose and structure of having an independent task force as the purpose and structure of having
an independent elections commission is to let the groups do their do their work and while there's
um i have some concerns about
various things that were said within the context of what we just heard
i believe they probably come down to a difference of opinion and what um
i heard very clearly from the task force members was uh differences of opinion or what they are
dealing with um so i find it um
i think it's quite important to respect the independence of the task force um when we appointed individuals last
june we followed the same process that has been used in the past all of that
information that we used and we had was is available publicly and i feel like
our task was to appoint members and that's the end of our task and so anything else we might do
including this meeting but certainly anything else um i i enter into those conversations
with with great concern about respecting the independence of the task force and
doing doing as little as possible to interfere with their process
uh this is commissioner dye i'm hearing a little bit of echo
i um also agree that as a strong supporter of
independent redistricting that great deference should be given to
a citizens commission or task force at the same time i
quite concerned about about what was expressed by members of the
public and also watchdog organizations um
about issues with the process uh so
i am very interested in hearing from in particular the watchdog organizations before
[Music] i would be ready to make any kind of motion
i do think that our choices as a commission are to
remove zero one or two or three
of the task force members and i think any of those are possibilities
uh like i said i'd like to i'd like to hear from the league and some of the other folks who wrote that
as to us i will
uh i guess throw my hat in the same camp as president bernholt's
say that while i think this certainly appears to have been a very
complicated redistricting process and a complicated redistricting process and
did not go smoothly from start to where we are now by any means
i similarly think that what it's coming down to is
difference of opinion on choices and i don't think we're here to litigate
their decisions on the task force and so even though we might disagree
with those decisions individually or as a commission i don't think it is our place to take
action based on those disagreements so i i think i
i agree with president bernholtz i also want to
emphasize that the elections commission is an independent body that is focused on
overseeing the department of elections and ensuring free fair and functional
elections and we are not a partisan group and we should not be
involved in partisan policies and my concern is that given where we are in the
redistricting process that uh we could be running a foul of that
principle
i my last comment is that i do want to underscore the importance that the redistricting
process is conducted transparently which i think this meeting has helped quite a
bit and in accordance with the rules that are applicable for the redistricting task force and the san
francisco charter so i i encourage and
want to emphasize to the task force how important it is to keep those things at its heart as it goes through its final
days
well i first want to thank everyone for being here today and i want to thank the people that came
um it seems like it's been so long um at our last meeting
um so i was i should say it was very hard to
hear mr cooper's remarks that this is still a process that's still going on they're working to try to
um you know they want to accommodate everyone's concerns to the best they can and reach a position that is um
you know makes as many people as happy as possible and as far as beyond that i i would like
to hear from all of you today yesterday we heard from um
you know i would say more kind of one side of things and i think today we're probably gonna hear a mix from both sides
so i'm looking forward to all of your comments today and um i'm sure we'll have more to say after that so thank you again
as i said at the last meeting um
it's important to keep in mind even we if we have the power to do something does not make it wise to do it it
doesn't make it wise and uh you know there's uh you know uh at two two
meetings ago i i or the last meeting two days ago you know there there were a lot of uh uh
opinions and uh uh you know legitimate viewpoints expressed and concerns expressed from this commission
um you know my view is sort of the same i have an open mind i want to hear from the advocacy
organizations that you invited um and uh you know withhold judgment until i hear from from that uh you know
those groups and also from public comment but um no matter who's in the room our job is
to do the right thing not the popular thing and so i you know i trust that each of the commissioners have that
have that goal in mind so a withhold judgment
this is commissioner shapiro um i keep forgetting this isn't a microphone um i
want to echo just the thanks um to everyone who's participated in this
um i will say i've been disheartened by the
intensity of the partisanship that has attempted to
call out or cause more attention around certain areas
that perhaps don't take into account the
neutral nonpartisan role that the commission plays
um i might be new to the commission but i'm very clear on that and
i value deeply the folks who came to the
wednesday meeting and the folks that are using their first amendment right to
speak up in addition to the folks who are here today and my question
in addition to or my question following all of the the comments that we'll hear
today um will just be that it around if this is really the
space where these decisions should be made as it pertains to
certain groups concerns around the redistricting decisions
and i don't feel that it would be i feel that it would be um
politically influenced for us to make decisions around
something that is supposed to be an independent process um i can't say what decision i would make
one way or another but i just i feel disappointed in the intense
partisanship the attempted influence in many different directions and
the the language that has been used to describe people and i just think that we can do better
um this is commissioner i just wanted to to add one thing which is
the purview of the elections commission is to provide oversight to the department of elections
and ensure uh fair
or free and functional free and functional elections as uh uh vice chair um
chappelle said fair being really a key part of that and
having participated in a redistricting process before i'm you know
intimately familiar with the fact that if the map
is not fair the elections will not be fair um and
the structure of san francisco's redistricting task force is that
three members are appointed by the mayor three members are appointed by the board
of supervisors the assumption is that those balance balance them out
and we the independent nonpartisan elections commission get the final three
so while i agree we are merely an appointing authority
um with it comes the ability to withdraw appointments
if we feel that our ultimate mandate which is fair free
and functional elections will not be attained um that is within our purview i think
i do think it's a highly unusual action uh it's never been done before
um and i just want to acknowledge these are extraordinary circumstances
uh and we do not take it lightly that this is literally days before
the deadline mandated by the charter and there's a state mandated deadline as
well and it will also screw up director arn's plans for the
june elections because all that redistricting information
has to be used by the department of election to re-precinct so
all of those things weigh on me the chair is raising height yep president bernholtz
thank you commissioner dye um very much appreciate the the
circumstances that bring you to the commission and that um bring your expertise i i
found uh and i'd actually would like to it's not a motion but second your
request to hear from the writers of the letters i i do feel
um that free fair functional elections absolutely are are what this commission
is about and that it begins with with districting um i may be
um not expert enough on the process um that's both available to
redistricting task forces and that which is being used by this one
so i look forward to hearing from uh the public and the letter writers
regarding procedural or process points or
decisions or um uh choices
that are viewed by those with more experience than i have as problematic or um
perhaps even inappropriate because uh otherwise i do um i am i am most
concerned about um issues raised by my fellow commissioners about
uh partisanship or simply putting a thumb on a scale that um one way or another
that's mostly based in um
differences of opinion or preference so i i guess i'm echoing commissioner
dye's request to hear from the letter writers if i don't know if they're in the room or online or even available
actually i don't know if that was a motion or not but uh if it is what i would suggest is
someone introduced me themselves to me at the break that's the
president or chair of the redistricting task force uh who's delaying his meeting i would also ask
that we we allow comment from from the uh from the chair
yeah i think it's all good comments from my fellow commissioners we have invited the
league of women voters the asian americans advancing justice and the aclu
who were the letter writers we received to join us and i think what we would do now is um
ask them to each speak and then we can include the chair of the redistricting task force as well
i should becca can you remind them that the meeting started sorry okay i can't
hear you here that people mind if i take a party at the redistricting oh the one one comment
before we get started the uh public comment has begun for the redistricting
task force so to the extent anyone wants to participate in that as well that is underway so that's a broadcast for you
all okay great good afternoon my name is
regina eslas and i'm here today representing the aclu of san francisco one of the letter writers
we sent the elections commission a letter of support regarding the concerns expressed by the
league of women voters of san francisco and asian americans advancing justice
because we too are deeply disturbed by the process we have witnessed during the rtf public
sessions aclu of san francisco deeply values community input and we are troubled by a
process that has been cavalier and disrespectful to the community and vulnerable communities of interest that
have provided public testimony despite the substantial time and effort that
they have made to provide input the task force has diminished their input and has
made the mapping process itself difficult by scrapping draft after draft
to be clear the aclu does not advocate for any
particular version of the map but the process must respect community input
incidences such as the 3 a.m massacre where a sudden and unexpected change was
made by the task force excuse me i'm holding the floor
made by the task force and a non-public matter comment by a task force member and i'm
going to read it out directly on monday vice chair rainer
voiced her dislike of prioritizing vulnerable communities
excuse me
saying i resent pulling out the name vulnerable community to get things moving on the map because that's an area
that someone wants to move i think that there are vulnerable communities and we should be looking at both communities
the point is these kind of comments and actions erode
public trust in the redistricting process given that there are only two more days
one of which is today happening now for public commentary to be heard we
urge the elect elections commission to have a follow-up meeting after today to
make certain that real change and improvement to process are in effect
not merely superficial changes in tone we thank you for your public service and
consideration i have a question miss sliss
yes thank you for thank you for your comments um
does aclu san francisco support the removal of the election
commission's appointees we don't have that's your jurisdiction
not ours we wrote to express our concerns about process what you do is what you do no certainly
that's within the the uh that's within our jurisdiction but i'm asking you are you taking a position on
that we had a discussion with our northern california affiliate about actual removal so i'm not going to
comment on that thank you sir that's true thank you for being here and thank you
for participating in the conversation um i kind of want to follow up on that
question particularly as it pertains to removal and additional
issues with that becoming potentially undemocratic in terms of how
what a replacement process would even look like and it being so close to
the deadline and so i think the decision of the task force or sorry
of the commission in any direction um i
frankly am not sure it's a win for any of the sides that have expressed concern
um i do think that perhaps in conversation around future process and future procedure
is also necessary but i i guess my question to you would be if you're not going to take a position
could you speak on the level of whether there is concern for democratic
principles of removal and replacing in the last few days before
i'm not going to make a comment on that i'm sorry without speaking to my affiliate understood yeah thank you
any other questions yes so just to clarify you were saying that you're
you're hoping that there could be a second meeting yes that there would be a follow-up meeting by this commission um
with the uh to make sure that real change and improvements the process are
in effect not merely superficial changes in tone
so commissioners can sound nicer or more conciliatory but are they really making
changes to hear and respect the communities and communities of interest
that have been uh bringing their opinions and comments forward about the mapping process
when should that be um we've got until the 14th
yeah that's that is so just to be clear is that the position of aclu san francisco that this
follow-up meeting should take place before the 14th we hope that you'll make a decision
about making a meeting happen before the final map to make sure
that improvements are made and that's the position of your organization that should happen by or before the 14th
before the end map is uh finally presented but what does that mean does that mean
before the 14th yes i think so what do you think i mean honestly really
you know that the map is done by the 15th we'd like you to have a
check-in process to make sure that improvements are being made thank you yeah thank you the chair
president yes um mrs what do improve meaningful improvements
in process look like so really listening to the i'm sorry there's a lot of talk going on here and
i'd like a little bit of silence as we gave everybody else respectfully
so in terms of really listening to communities of interests
and other vulnerable members not making comments such as the comment that was
made by vice chair reitener on monday these are discouraging to public
discourse if you're a person who is participating for the first or second time and you're hearing a task force
member make a comment about public commentary or testimony that's not going to
encourage you to participate in the process and we are concerned about that
thank you thank you unders do you mind
understanding the um and thank you for clarifying that understanding the really tight timeline yeah um
do you have current recommendations as to what those significant changes i
think which is that's all i can say about this i'm not an expert on this process so
yeah i have another follow-up question so i know your organization is not taking a position right now with respect to
removal but what factors if any should this commission consider uh on this date uh with this uh
composition one second please i listen to you uh so what factors should we consider when
evaluating a decision on whether we should remove uh appointed members today i think i've
said three times that that's not in my jurisdiction to speak about
so i'm going to stay with that thank you you you are the body you are the body
thank you thank you thank you for your service it's very
important uh i believe martha that the representative
for the league of women voters was going to join uh via webex
are you able to elevate her to a panelist position
uh i think you're talking to me but i cannot hear you
i'm sorry but i would need to know her name because allison go my
friends alison go she's on the list
please feel free to go hello um so okay can you hear me this is my first time on webex um my name is
allison go i'm the president of the league of women voters of san francisco
to introduce ourselves we are a volunteer-led non-partisan nonprofit that empowers
voters and defends democracy we do not support or oppose candidates
or political parties we do take positions however on issues after extensive study that they align
with our mission and our values in our letter with the asians americans advancing justice asian law caucus also
supported by the aclu san francisco it expresses our deep concerns that the draft supervisor district maps created
so far by the redistricting task force failed to adequately reflect the input
shared by communities of interest particularly those made up of the most vulnerable and least represented people
in our city so thank you for calling this meeting and for listening to our concerns
we would like to remind the task force members appointed by the elections commission that they have a duty and an
obligation to give due weight to the public input of historically and system systemically
marginalized vulnerable and disadvantaged communities of interest in the league calls on a transparent and
open government process and this oversight body here is an essential part of that
it is better to have a thorough thoughtful process rather than a rushed emotionally driven
one and to this end we would prefer to have a late but deliberate map than a
rushed one that does not reflect the input of the most vulnerable and least represented communities in san francisco
thank you all for your time and really your continued service to our fellow san franciscans
i have a question for msco
we know what that noise is in the room it's the door oh okay thank you
miss nisko i want to express my appreciation uh to the legal women voters for
weighing in and for your letter and you know just speaking for myself i know
that i read that letter very carefully as i did the aclu letter and thank you
for your comments um but i'll ask the same question that i asked to miss islas which is that are
you taking the position as the representative of your organization that the appointed members
of the task force those appointed by our commission should be removed here today
as the appointing body any actions are yours to decide we have specifically not
described any next steps to the elections commission okay and let me ask one follow-up question which is that i understand
you're not taking a position here today that any or all of those appointed members
should be removed but what factors should we consider uh when weighing whether it's wise for
us as a commission to remove any or all of those members today similarly to uh what my colleague at the
aclu has uh has responded with that is also not my jurisdiction and definitely something
for the election commission to weigh in and for us not to decide what your next steps will be
okay thank you you're welcome president bernholtz um thank you miss go for your letter and
for your service and for the work of the league um my question like commissioners jung is the same i asked of ms islas
which is you've asked for meaningful change
that would adequately reflect the interests of the
most vulnerable marginalized and marginalized and disadvantaged communities
from a process standpoint how would we as the elections commission know
if the task force is is is doing that especially between now and
whenever the final maps are done what what in fact what changes are you looking for and how would we be able to
measure progress toward them um
similarly i i can't i cannot prescribe what what exactly
you should be looking for as the elections commission we are just speaking up on behalf of the the
populations who have lined up for hours to give public comment throughout the last week and several weeks prior to
this moment thank you i i appreciate it because i i
feel like it's important to just say out loud that this is where
um it gets very difficult to distinguish between
process and um and the act of listening and
i mean there are clear ways of showing respect
listening and taking into account the voices of those who are making time to express themselves um
particularly those from communities uh who have
repeatedly been disenfranchised by this process i respect that what i'm
struggling to figure out and perhaps you can help me is where is the line
between recognizing attention respect and listening
and insisting upon changes that
um effectively put us the elections committee in the
position in a partisan position so we are also as you know nonpartisan
and we have not endorsed any uh single map or
we cannot be the people endorsing maps or drawing the maps so therefore we are not able to
make these distinctions either for the task force or for the elections commission okay thank you
again i appreciate your time i i believe um vice president chapel you uh were
have the presence of the task force chair with us and i'm eager to hear from
him because i imagine he may be asking similar questions what is
going to be um meaningful change in process
that can assuage these concerns um
so eager i'm maybe i'm eager to hear from him thank you mrs go miss go
uh i have a question mr this is uh commissioner dye um can you give us some examples of
uh how you feel that um
uh can you give us some examples of uh
you know what prompted you to to write this letter that
certainly we know there's been a lot of public comment
before the redistricting task force the three members
that that our appointees
told us that they've done their best to hear them i guess
what we're looking for are some concrete examples of where you feel that
input has been disregarded there was an example given by
ms isles do you have some too yeah um as a
i think somebody called us a government washington earlier as a an organization that focuses on open government and
transparency definitely one of the things we point to was a late night vote reversing a decision um that as as many
have have pointed out happened in the wee hours of the morning um that a lot of i i do not think would
have been accessible apologies can everyone in the room please stay quiet it's obviously very difficult
to hear everyone especially over webex thank you apologies continue
so i was i was uh pointing out the late night vote um at three in the morning as a government transparency and
accessibility organization that is definitely a a an example of
a place that is not always accessible to members of the public
i think that some of our other colleagues and letter writers especially from the asian law caucus may have some
other examples and expect you'll hear some examples from them later um
and um
did we did we lose you
can you still hear her i i'm sorry um we just have a lot of concerns about the
mapping decisions that may go against legal advice um we will want to make
sure that these maps are legally valid um for elections in the future and
those are those just some of our critiques
can i ask what's the illegality
misgo are you there
um i believe that these were some of the opinions that were provided by the city attorney um i i am i am not a legal
counsel so i will not be pointing out specifics um but uh
these were some concerns that have been expressed in meetings right but you just said you one of your
concerns is that the maps drawn uh abide by the law what what is the
specific illegality concern that you have
uh we we just we just hear the concerns that are being expressed in the meetings by other members so we need to if we
hear concerns that like there are concerns about these these la maps being ill
being not valid we want to make sure that they are able to be used in the elections and so that is another thing that we have heard the past
do you have anything more specific than that i do not at this time and i am uh again not legal counsel so it cannot be more
specific around it
there's no further questions then i think we'll move on to
the asian americans advancing justice asian law caucus
i don't know if we received a response the representative that the representative that uh wrote the
letter is julia marks martha do you know if the julia marx is
on the webex
yes okay can you elevate her to panelists please
julie the floor is yours hi can you hear me okay
um we cannot hear you very well at all okay is this better much better
okay i'm going to lean in thank you um thank you so much for calling this
meeting today and for coming together to take a look at the process issues that have arisen
in san francisco's redistricting process we at the asia law caucus have been
monitoring this process for fairness and to ensure community members including those who use languages other than
english have a meaningful opportunity to provide input indeed one of the core criteria in
redistricting is to respect communities of interest that can only be achieved by listening to the public and
incorporating their feedback into the maps while we are not calling for the removal
of any task force members we do call on the election commission to assess and analyze the process thus
far and identify needed improvements i appreciate your questions so far and
understand that you are open to identifying those improvements which i can speak to in more detail
first i want to establish some of the concerns we we have and what what's the basis for those concerns
so first is a concern about language access barriers for community members with limited
english proficiency this has come up multiple times for example at yesterday's hearing there
were live interpreters for just four hours of a nine hour meeting so there were multiple limited english speaking
community members who tried to share their perspectives in mandarin cantonese and spanish but they had no live
interpretation support for quite some time we've been urging the task force to make sure they have
full interpretation of meetings for the duration of the meeting so that all residents can participate equally this
continues to be an issue we are also concerned about the compressed timeline the redistricting
task force chose for themselves and raised this repeatedly throughout the process the public does need to respond to draft
maps and does need time to analyze them we recognize how challenging redistricting is and have watched it
across multiple jurisdictions and we know the mapping takes time and we urge
the task force to do as much as they can in the time they have and also see if
they can fit some time in by possibly scheduling additional meetings next week
moreover we are particularly concerned that the task force has not responded adequately to public testimony
especially from marginalized communities of color lgbtq plus communities and low income
tenants these communities have turned out in tremendous numbers to provide information about their communities and
to provide input online drawing yet the task force has proposed cutting some of the city's most vulnerable communities
of interest at multiple stages of map drawing while not every community of interest
can be respected understand that redistricting involves trade-offs it is important that the task
force's decisions are not coming at the expense of marginalized communities
we ask the elections commission to continue to provide oversight through this hearing and possibly future
hearings and to ensure transparency to reiterate to the task force the importance of listening to public
comment and respecting communities of interest especially marginalized communities and to call on the task
force to be very systematic and clear in how it is hearing and weighing the public comment it is receiving
in the final days of this process the task force must reorient and recommit itself to respecting communities voices
and upholding a fair and transparent process thank you very much for your time and your service
uh miss marks i i have a question um you know i'm a long time supporter of your
organization i support much of what you do as i do with the other organizations
who've written their thoughtful letters so i deeply appreciate your work
i understand that you're not taking a position with respect to the removal of task force members
uh but that's what we've been asked here to do so i'm i'm asking let me ask a two-part question one
you're not taking such a position uh ask if i could ask you why not
uh second um what factors should this commission consider
when weighing whether it is wise for us to exercise that authority here today to
remove some or all of the task force members
yes thank you for that and i appreciate your holding this meeting i'll clarify our letter um was
written because we think it's urgent that you all gather and bring some of these issues to light and so we're very
glad that this meeting is happening and we respect that other folks are in the room with a wide range of perspectives
on how you should best proceed um to your question about kind of
asian law caucus's rationale we we understand it's very important to
keep these bodies independent but we also understand it's important
that these bodies are listening to the public and demonstrating to the public that they're hearing the public and
being fair and thoughtful and how they're waiting weighing the trade-offs in this complex
mapping process um so it is really on you all to look closely at the process that's happened
is it is it clear that the task force is listening to the community are there things that you could advise the task
force do in the next week um or a bit longer if they do end up
missing their deadline to ensure that there is
that the public is actually being heard and the public understands that it is being heard because that's important to
the democratic process too thank you miss marks if i may just one more question because you did raise a
concern that's a concern of mine as well and i'll ask uh i'll ask the chair to comment on this as
well so you you've identified language access barriers where live interpreters were made available only four hours on a
nine hour meeting and there was no live interpretation support what what
what would you ask for from the chair to uh to demonstrate his commitment to language access during
the remainder of this process there need to be interpreters available
for the duration of the meetings it's clear that the meetings will be going very long at this stage of the process
i'm not an expert on budgeting but the budget must be found to support full access for all san franciscans even
those who prefer to speak a language other than english thank you
um thank you for um thank you i echo what my colleague said
i wanted to ask a specific question pertaining to incorporation of public
feedback um because this is i think fundamentally the
challenge that is in front of us is whether the test and the members of the public
in the room please keep it quiet otherwise you'll be asked to leave
sorry um interpretation for the seniors i just wanted to voice
out this because the meeting was working behind so some of the seniors are here for room 408 to speak about the big
district so all right can they can i let them
know the public comment is happening right now please please yes anyone who would like
to do public comment at the redistricting task force please well she wants to say it in a language that's not
english
why were they in here why were they in here
hey we're gonna get polo comments
okay i'm gonna continue
do you mind closing the door just thank you
um point of order there has been no translation during all these hours for these
monolingual faces at all
i didn't understand that there wasn't any translation or the monolingual speakers been here for hours just that
you thought it was surprising deputy city attorneys noticed uh we did not receive any requests for
translation services uh so uh we cannot provide translation services if we do not get a request
and and we receive requests usually by uh emailing the clerk of the
clerk of this commission thank you and and if if i may we need to
continue with this meeting so that everyone that wants to get public comment has an opportunity to give public comment so i asked it i'd ask
everyone in attendance to please keep it down and just respect the commission's time and your time and let's move forward
thank you and thanks for your patience ms marx um i wanted to ask to
ask the going back to your feedback regarding the public
uh the public's feedback in the process um that that has been kind of a theme of
concern and so we did hear from the task members this morning as they as it pertained to how
they believe they had incorporated um the public feedback and so and
particularly those members who have historically been disenfranchised by this process and so i
wanted to ask your perspective on what would be an adequate um
an adequate system or procedure or explanation or transparency around
that how that is being the public feedback is being incorporated into the process from your point of view
yeah i really appreciate that question and as i said we recognize no map meets
every single community's needs but that's why it's so important to make sure when decisions are being made
marginalized communities are being kept in mind and any trade-offs that are being made
are being made knowingly and clearly so the public can understand why the
maps are going the way they are and we have seen instances where there's
been an outpouring of public comment regarding certain communities of interest for example
soma and tenderloin and the close connections across socioeconomic and other policy considerations between
those areas or the historic communities between petraro hill and the bayview
and where there will be a significant amount of public testimony about those
communities and then soon thereafter there will be a mapping decision that does not respect those cois and so if
there can be a clear documentation as folks are calling in
what are the public callers saying not just about the districts but the communities too
and that can be clearly documented and easy for the public to locate i think that would give the public more faith in
this process um some of that is out there but it is hard to navigate your table and it is hard
for the public to understand what are the task force members hearing and we recognize in an eight-hour
meeting it's hard to remember the comment that started four hours ago so when that is documented in a summary
form or format or a written format it can help make sure there is no recency bias or other things kind of like
getting in the way of how the task force is taking in and weighing and considering the vast
public comment that they're receiving so i think documentation is part of it
um and then as decisions are being made while mapping stating out that people recognize
what trade-offs are happening and why they're making those choices is really important too um and it can lead to
richer discussion among task force members as well as giving the public more confidence in process
and i don't want to imply that none of this is happening but i think in light of how many
people have gotten involved and how many people are feeling like they are not being heard and their communities are
not being respected it's more important than ever that the task force makes sure it's taking all of those steps
and being very explicit about the choices it's making and checking with themselves what communities are
being impacted by this decision we're making thank you for thank you for sharing that
i think that's actually an incredibly helpful framework um especially
as we look at it in the context of what we heard earlier today so thank you
president bernholtz you know you have a question uh it's more of a comment and i
want to make sure it gets written into our record as well as um this is i'm
addressing this partly to the chairman who i hope is still with us and i
appreciate his time thank you very much julia for that those those suggestions
i've now hear a list of things that strike me as
doable and meaning and i hope meaningful based on what we've heard um
clearly there are certain comments uh and statements that have been made by individual members of the task force
that are inappropriate regarding um their what sounds like their opinion
about certain groups and i think that needs to to be stopped uh the
suggestion just made now builds on the question that was asked of the three task force members of course this
doesn't just go to our appointees but to all the task force members um regarding whether or not they were tracking
the comments from communities of interest and what they were asking for i understood the answer to that question
to be yes i understand ms marx's comment to be but it's not useful to the public
and so i think changes to that process so that that would be useful to the public are
important i think the documentary documentation of trade-offs being made that one community may be being kept
whole other communities being divided against their wishes that should
be very explicitly um documented and stated and justifiable
uh given the task force's um responsibility to free fair and functional elections and its attention
to issues of equity um finally i think there was um
uh the language the language access and i presume also um accessibility for
people with disabilities um i i realize it's very late in the process but those should be fully
available for the entire duration of all meetings if those things are not happening those can be clearly addressed
and seen as um
progress um i may have missed some but i want to thank uh ms marx mesislis and ms
go those those are very useful and um clear and i look forward to hearing
uh more from others thank you as this commissioner die i think the
other one that was really clear was uh uh unfortunately the task force has um
kind of blocked its box itself into a corner with the deadline at this point and so the
additional recommendation i heard from miss marks was actually to schedule more meetings
and i'd love to hear from the chair on what the possibility of of
that may be given that there's very little time left if you're to meet
the charter deadline and as i understood from
member cooper that uh the reason the deadline is now the ninth
is because there wasn't a dead there wasn't a meeting scheduled on the 12th and so is there
and i'd like to give the chair an opportunity to respond to these specific suggestions
um the challenge we face now is that
there is live mapping happening and there's live response happening
and in order to meet the charter deadline
you know basically everyone's going to have to kind of knuckle down and be there in the
final stretch uh because uh it's possible that you might miss something
um if you're not available and i know that's that is really inconvenient to the
public that's the reason at the state level we had to release the draft map
two months beforehand to give the public plenty of time to analyze and respond to
it and then in fact we got so much input that we
you know in our first uh attempt at this actually had to
have to scrap the second draft map and we got plenty of criticism for that
but the reason was that we went to that time to incorporate additional feedback and so we just wanted to be clear that
we we heard everyone in the first round and we were going to do our darndest to incorporate all of that
and so i think that we don't have a lot of flexibility because of the compressed
timeline but if there's an opportunity to schedule more meetings
and and seek the advice of the public uh on solving the problem
you know if when we told the south asian community we were going to have to split them that
we had tried to redraw the bay area three times without crossing the golden gate bridge and we just could not do it
they were going to get split they're just too big and so then we said where do we split you we have to split
you okay help us um and then it's a conversation
with the public it but you know if if the public doesn't understand what the problem is and that because we're trying
to keep this community whole here it has these repercussions
then they can't suggest creative solutions and
one thing that i heard that was a little concerning is that people are talking in terms of existing districts
and perhaps at the state level we had the freedom to ignore everything that had been done
before because everyone knew it was gerrymandered and that actually gave us a ton of freedom to think creatively
about how to re-refashion the maps in a way that really provides fair and
equitable representation for all different kinds of communities that may not resemble what the previous
districts look like and i know there's not a lot of time to do that because there's just not a lot
of time left but there probably still time to have a conversation with the public
about a creative solution that would be acceptable and also meet some of the
other trade-offs if if the public can understand the trade-offs as ms marx pointed out
then they can also be part of the solution and understand the dilemma that the redistricting task force is facing
so a question to the chair is to about more meetings and more time in the time
we have left sir quite a question my name is arnold townsend and i serve as the chair of the
redistricting task force thank you um we got lag map drawing right now our
public testimony sure townsend before you get started and i i we certainly want to hear your i just want to make
sure any other questions for julia no okay julia we're going to oh sorry i
just wanted to make sure miss marks didn't have anything else to say no thank you thank you so much i'll let
you get to the other commenters okay thank you cheer thompson and let me just say in case you didn't
know i understand where you are and what you're doing i served on the elections commission for 12 years
for 12 of the longest years of my life
and we kept i served from three mayors and every new mayor i would offer my resignation so they could get their own
person they give it back so finally uh uh mayor lee was elected
and they told him well you have to get somebody who said who's there now he said well brethren townsend he said oh
well we keep him said no he's turned out you can't keep it thank god i liked it but 12 years was long enough
i didn't mind the job because it had to be done let me say a couple of things i i stayed away from my duty to be here
because i have an intense desire to defend the three people that were
here earlier there are nine people on this
task force we have not as people who attend our meetings no we have not always agreed
i have been amazed at the collegiality and the good humor in which we face our
task we differ but we make sure
that we leave the difference so that if we need to come together on the next issue we still can
and it just so happens that these are the three of the hardest working people we
have when we talked about you know the fact that we don't have interpretations all the way through has angered me
greatly and i speak a form of english but i know
i've been in other countries i know what it's like not to try to get around
i can't imagine trying for example i got a little limited spanish i can't imagine trying to listen to some
election stuff with my spanish and no interpretation that's not our call
that's the clerk's office that's the staff help us people know that
we have cause outreach consoles that would tell us when they're gonna leave with me
i've never had people work for me tell me when they're going home but that's what that's the gun round
there is no redistricting staff after we finish for the next 10 years there are certainly going to be some
recommendations in our final report on how we think this ought to be conducted to help the next
people who are going to do this job won't be me if i've only lived most black men in
america already i'll be 80 next year so if i'm still here
i will have greater concerns than the elections though it's important my concerns will make be making sure i can
start for the bathroom in time so so i i'll have some other things to worry about but i want to tell you
that there are a couple of things i really want to clear up the 3 a.m vote
we did not sneak into city hall and call a vote at 3 a.m
we called the votes when we finished public testimony hungry testimony
some concerned in my thinking i already knew the optics of that
other members knew but my dilemma was i've got a my next meeting is wednesday
and it's going to last just as long so do i wait and do the vote and more talking at the beginning of that meeting
and make it even longer we've agreed to be here but there are people who are testifying
that i know i know they think i don't care about them and all that i know they got families to take care of
they got to get kids ready for school and ready for bed and make sure homework is done and get them celebrated
and so you know we made a call to do it at three in the morning we didn't sneak in here and call it a
three a.m meeting and and and then people people ask what went on in
between i i know what people believe you know they're conspiracy theorists
i'm finding out on both sides of the aisle we didn't get called each i didn't get a
call from the mayor i didn't get a call from any corporate bigwigs i wish i knew something because
we got some no we got non-profits and film won't need help i wish i knew some but i don't
we didn't do that we didn't meet illegally either on phone zoom or otherwise
the change that went on people had their reasons for it i'm the chair i don't generate that but
but but we did it and we got a map that we were going to work with
and even now i got because we were mapping last night
we got out people were saying oh you're so late and we were rejoicing because we got out two
hours early last night we we left it one and we were excited to go home so early
and and and and but now i get letters i got letters on my phone right now saying
people who didn't like our mouth saying you're getting there you're getting which we always knew it
was a process that we're gonna get there and we also know i do not know why
we were not constituted until september we should have been constituted
four months before that to really get this done in in the amount
of time it took in the way we wanted to take and you know people can argue with the process but i knew once we started
drawing maps that all our conversation would be about the map like it is now and i wanted to
hear about communities i know people think we heard ain't gonna do nothing about it we're not through yet
but i certainly couldn't do nothing about the community if i didn't hear nothing about what they wanted
and what they needed and who they were and we had hits and sucks
and yes people may be uh concerned about somebody said something
was a little mr truth and said something about emerging communities they didn't like
try dealing with a dwindling community that no one either on the commission or
in the audience has said hardly anything about i live here i live with and represent
and i am a part of the only community in san francisco that has lost
population and that's the african-american community and no one is interested in
doing a thing or saying a word and when you talked about and thank you but when you talk about legality what they're
screaming about is legality because at one of our meetings i talk too much about black people that went awry of the voting
rights act and then one of our elected officials said i said to hell with the law what i
said was in san francisco when we decided that gay marriage was a demand on gay marriage was a bad law
we said the hell was the law and i agree with that when we said that turning immigrants
into uh ice was a bad law and we decided we're going to be a sanctuary city and i support
that and then i gotta read on twitter the next day that i said the hell with the
law as though i said the hell with love and my final thing was but when it comes to us
african-americans and we try to make a move damn we'd like to help you we know you got a problem but you know we got that
prop 209 we got provisions in the voting rights act the law always works against us
and these are quote unquote allies and we haven't made a move in that
direction you need to get somebody after american on this commission too because we are still here
and so mike and so that's why people were saying the only thing they could pick out that
may be illegal i don't know that it is and what i want to do ain't gonna work anyway so i don't think it'll be an
issue for a lawsuit they may have other issues but i don't think that will be but i'm just trying to tell you
that these people you know what now you're talking about the translation issue
case lee who sits here and miss lily hope on our task force
they interpret well after the interpreters are gone
that's who they don't that that's not their job i suggested only have jokingly that they
ought to put them on staff because they're doing the job somebody else ought to be getting paid
how do you think we feel sitting there talking and knowing our people listening can't understand
we would have people there until the final calm and pay them overtime
but we don't control the budget we don't do the hiring we do none of that so i think the questions are valid
and real important they're just taking them to the wrong place and as people who have these
conspiracy theories on how we're all caucusing with the mayor or the supervisors and big wheels
like i said conspiracy runs on both sides of the aisle and i'm pretty sure if if this doesn't get some people what
they want you'll hear that i'm molesting children in the basement of a pizza father anointing
because that's what we got into in this town i hear people
in front of me disagreeing with each other severely and i'm listening saying if they had to just talk
i talked to people in this room and outside this room about talking to each other and then
come to us but we've gotten so partisan
in san francisco it's not republicans democrats but we don't like each other any better than
they like each other and i've been living in this town 54
years and the sad part of that is i was an adult when i got here so i'm real old
i listen i've been here 54 years and when it comes to dialoguing and
talking with each other we are much worse off especially when it comes to talking to
my community so i sympathize with the work i really
i understand your concern and when people bring things to us we're on commissions and boards and task force
we have to you know we have to listen and deal with it but to even consider
removing i can't believe it
and remember this this has been a newspaper these three people have to carry this with them the rest of their
lives and know telling when and where and how many times
they're gonna have to explain it because some folk see there's a difference between me listening to you
and you're not getting your way i ought to listen but i'll make my decisions based on
what they put what my appointing authority put me in there to do and you know i'm gonna tell you
people believe what you want to believe i know a former mayor that i served under
who when asked about him telling his commissioners what to do and in this case they thought he should have
he said i wouldn't appoint somebody to a position and insult them by calling them
and telling them what to do i may at least when it comes to me is the same way
you appoint reasonably sensible people and they pretty much can do the right
thing i know it's more convenient for people to think i'm a crook
than to try to understand me or come talk to me mr townsend we would like to talk to you
there's a lot you have to be careful with me i'm a preacher
yeah thank you for those comments i appreciated them very much reverend townsend um
i also appreciated the specific comments of the representative from advancing
justice asian law caucus who identified uh certain specific measures uh that
that organization believes would increase trust in the hard work of your
task force and so i want to ask you specifically on that so one with respect to language access i
know you don't control the budget you don't control the staff but i have you
made a specific request have you made a specific request and
can you commit here today to make a specific request that for the full duration of your remaining meetings that
there is live interpretation services not we will i will
but also i have and we have been getting translators
later in the night but they're still not going through the end of the meeting which i want to see and i will request
we also have sporadically we're getting better we because it came
up that it doesn't do much good to have the translators who can test who can translate when
people testify if we don't have their translators all the way through the meeting
what are they going to testify about and we're getting some of that now what i i you know i i can't tell you how
much i sympathize with that request and you've got my word that i will continue to press for but i want you to know
these are not things we have a thought and asked about and
some of the members and especially people who have relatives that are monolingual and so forth
they've been really upset about it so and let me add and i'm kind of and we've
done some of that publicly i'm a little sorry that some of the people haven't said to you that
they've heard the task force requested but people do things to bolster their argument i
understand let me ask uh what one more uh question and then see to the rest of um my
colleagues which is uh you know miss marks uh also suggested that it would
improve confidence in the work of your task force if you were explicit about
the trade-offs being made uh and so in other words i heard you
know very clearly that there are over 100 communities of interest and someone's going to be disappointed but i
don't know how you have a conversation maybe you've already done this but i don't know you how you have a conversation if you're not explicit
about what you're doing and why my knowledge and i don't know what
people do when i'm not with them or around them to my knowledge the tradeoffs have been
made right there the discussion on what people are doing and why they're doing i don't know
you know and of course we know it's possible that one or two people talk to each other about where they're going and there's
nothing illegal about that i think they should make it public i will bring it up but i just don't know i haven't done
anything one trait i i want to get i didn't get so
i don't know you know
and then to follow up with that good to see you again reverend jonathan
um when uh
back to can you schedule more meetings so that it with the time that's left
so that you can have these conversations so that when people understand
the trade-off that you're making is going to for example force a split or
force this community to be separated from a similar community
i i all i can tell you is i will go back and check without i don't think we can
but i will go back and check see part of the reason for things happening on the ninth is that
once we get a final map we have to have and though the deadline is the 15th we have to have a certain days for the map
to be made public so people can look at it before the final deadline and it goes to the board of supervisors it goes to
the board of supervisors in my understanding perform in legality but i mean i've worked again it goes
down for them but they can't change anything in it and i know some people probably go there
and ask them to because that's the nature of san francisco but uh but but that i don't think we can for
one reason we've got a meeting today tomorrow
i think we're off sunday monday and tuesday so that's you know there are no more
days before the night and what we can do after the night because we do have meetings scheduled for the 11th to 13th
i will check and i will let you know in some form or fashion exactly you know
what we can do yeah so we were in the same predicament our deadline was august 15th we actually had to post it 14 days
in advance and so we posted it on august 1st and people were extremely disappointed at
our meeting on 15th that there was nothing we could do with any additional comment at that point so what i'm asking
is before the 12th which is when you have to post it you
won't be able to do anything after that i guarantee you i will ask you okay
that's all i can do i will ask as soon as i get back and and i think it it
might be helpful uh because i've done live mapping before and you think you've been talking about
it and people should understand the trade-offs that it would be good just as a practice to summarize
we've landed on this district here because we decided to keep this community hole
this community whole and unfortunately it's resulted in a split of x community you know
and i really and and i know how important people's communities are to them that's one of
the reasons this process is so difficult you know you all know the story of the temperament
i'm sorry v6 it's 60 points over or 30 points
and in every community there's been somebody has who come to us
wanting to stay in sick yeah i understand that we can't do that right so but but nobody comes
saying what they could do without and i understand that very little of that we have we've
had a little thank god so we have to do something knowing that we're going to anger i knew when i
took this it would there would be more people probably unhappy than happy
and that the people who were unhappy would be really unhappy
i'm still hoping i don't lose any long time friends but maybe some short time friends yeah we have time to regather
it's just a suggestion anything else uh
yep uh president burnholtz thank you reverend townsend both for your service on the task force and prior
on the elections commission and yes i absolutely agree that this commission uh needs to better represent the people of
san francisco um and thank you very much to my colleagues uh commissioners diane
chong for going through the list of five suggestions and for making your best effort recognizing their great limits on
you my question to you is are there other um
procedural measures or changes having sat through all of what you've
heard this afternoon that you think would be useful in addressing
um this co this core issue of public trust in the process uh that you
feel uh you should and can make in the limited time available to you
i i would uh i would like to i would like it if there are
but i think part of the problem is is that the distrust was built in
just by who's appointing us the authorities that appoint if you don't like one of them then you
suspect that everyone their point is a crook and is in league with them to destroy
uh poor people or whoever you feel you represent you know if you don't like the board of supervisors or certain members if
they're involved in appointing you don't trust that and some of them don't like y'all they don't trust you know so i i
think that's part of what we do in this town and i think it's really tragic because i
think it has become far worse than it used to be in terms of you know people said who we shouldn't talk to for
example my door and phone has been open to everyone who wanted to call me
for everyone and i met with a whole lot of people most of them turned out to be really
great conversation and i learned things one of the things when you've been around a long time the two people who
think they know everything are very young and very old so i i really learned some stuff about communities that i
didn't even know that i thought of communities i thought i knew so i but but you know people don't want to talk to you there's not much you can tell
them about why you think they can trust you tell them you know what why you why i think
they can trust me with the press yeah thank you for that i appreciate
those those insights as well and i think uh precisely some of what you're saying
is uh feeds into why this was brought to the elections commission um however uh
so i'm grateful that you will take under um careful consideration the suggestions
that have been made um i and uh thank you again for your
service and for spending the time with us this afternoon further cutting into your limited time thank you and i hear
you and i'm really grateful for the opportunity because i think even this late in the process there's still a lot
of people probably don't know how we work or why we work and so i appreciate this opportunity but
my real reason uh for being here was to defend my three colleagues and the amazing work that
they have put in and it would be real hard to do this job without raynelle cooper because believe
me he is a great great great computer wall and you can imagine my age my phone
is a challenge i got an eight plus because i know how to work it chair towns and i won't have to learn
thank you so much on that point i have one more question for you logistically procedurally what does the
task force look like for you in these final days if you lose one two or three
people and i'm not talking about projected votes i'm talking about the process of getting it done how does
losing people impact you well i don't know if we lose two or three people
we're working with less we're voting with a different maker and depending on what that makeup looks
like when those two or three people are gone there will probably be a move to undo
everything that's been done and start all over and try to do that in one day so
you know i i i can't tell you what to well i can't tell you what you ought to do but
i i uh i can't tell you what to do you have to make up your own mind but it's clear to me what you want to do because i always
thought recall had to do with suspected malfeasance and illegalities
and i know absolutely none of that has occurred absolutely absolutely
and it doesn't have anything to do with who likes if it matter on who i like who got recall
there's a bunch of people in this town i agree paul but they haven't done anything wrong i just don't like them
any further questions for chair townsend i gotta get back thank you all so much
sorry let's see again some of them they need to pick up their
grandkids after school so they've been sitting here and they wanted to some of us have all the
commitments to it i understand okay so i just want to you know check in with you
how far out it's the public issue i think we're going to have a little bit more discussion
amongst the commission and then we will move to public comment and we're going to start with public comments for the
in-person attendees so i can't project a specific time but i
i know we are moving in that direction in the next steps
um
we want to give a voice to everyone that's here
reference public comment and then discuss what would you like mikes are on just fyi
the mics are on it i prefer to move the public comment all right uh
the commission has decided that we're going to move to public comment i do we
are going to take a 10 minute recess
we're going to go we need a break we're sorry it's very hot up here we're going to return at 5
25 on the dot and we're going to start with public comment with the people in person
i'm 25 we're gonna get
uh settled you everyone for your patience we are now getting to public comment comment everyone's going to be
limited to two minutes uh and i understand we have a a
member of the public that's requested an accommodation so we're going to let her go first uh please come to the podium you have
two minutes hello my name is lana tonka
district five i am a disabled director in san francisco i've lived
here since 1988 and i'm currently undergoing intense chemotherapy for cancer but i have to
come out to this meeting because i feel like this is so important
so i'm gonna do the best they can but i was very alarmed to look at the original maps that the
rdtf put forward to the public and that uh when suffering had created this
unity map which really you know included the population adjustments and didn't fracture
the uh districts very much at all and the rdtf just flatly denied it and
they haven't provided a reason to the public at all that's an organization that has over 80
community groups that put input into this and what's deeply concerning to me and i'm not trying to get into any
like uh um you know theories about what's going on but
one journalist did a map of the initial map that they created and put it
over a map of the progressive voter population in san francisco and i submitted that to
you in writing earlier this morning see it but if you couldn't have designed a
better map to fracture the progressive vote and the progressive vote is a community of interest in and of itself
that represents people that are you know most marginalized people like renters who really you know
are having a problem with housing prices i live in district five and some very
alarming things are you know part of what's going on and
math 4b has a total deviation of only 1.53
and it but eliminate 57 of the current population of district five it's not necessary why are they and they're not
explaining why at all and so it is deeply concerning about what is going on there and the process
should be more apparent to the public and their reasons for doing certain things should we should be explaining
that especially when people did so much work to put into this meeting app and it does
represent so many people and they just flat out denied it and then they gave us something that is you know a lesser of
evils and people have said oh there's overwhelming support about 4d but that's because it's only what they would allow
us to have it isn't what people wanted in the first place and i think that should be noted
um as far as the task force goes um
i personally believe that this whole process should be delayed you should not try to make the 15th yeah
as a disabled person a few weeks you know to try to educate ourselves on the
issues and to try to make accommodations to be part of the conversation and to
get involved and to write letters and to be able to come out is not really doable in such a short
time frame and to have the mapping so close to when the deadline is is really unfair to us
a lot of people have um you know registered complaints about that i forgot to remember i'm a contributing
member of senior disability action you're at two minutes okay thank you for
for your work next speaker
good afternoon i'm alex ash i have appeared for this commission and here
and create your information as many times without open source code and voting machines but i'm here today
as a former city planner i've worked for the city and the court for 30 years
they've raised you multiple awards local and national level for the work
that i did i've also worked as a grassroots political activist for national issues
where i have likewise received multiple awards and just to present my bona fides i've
tried to be impartial in the work i do and i am a numbers guy i have been i was
in the room when it happened on monday night at 3am i was in the room at 3am on
wednesday night i left about midnight last night i was in the room on the prior saturday so i've been
following this process very very carefully and i know what people have been trying to do
your members you can be proud of the people you appointed they have been listening
assiduously to all the public comments and they have been of course for amnesty and
commenting on the task force they are all working together
having their hard conversations being very respectfully of each other
um not even accepting each other's apologies when it does not go their way because
they recognize that people have to pursue what is important to them and a lot of that is listening to people
but there are certain things that they cannot change the law
requires that the population deviations within each district be within certain
bounds in order that people's votes are fairly represented and no one has a huge advantage like wyoming
does over california and the united states
i'm a mom a small business owner and a native san franciscan out in the sunset district
i'm here to express my gratitude for the work of the redistricting task force and
my disappointment that this hearing is even taking place democracy is under attack nationwide and
it's extraordinarily concerning to see the same extremist and ideologically driven tactics used here to question the
motivation of these public servants i realize you called this meeting due to letters from watchdog groups i read
those letters carefully i listened to their testimony today none of them have called for removal of
a single task member none of them have given a single allegation let alone a shred of evidence
of misconduct rising to the level of removal other than allegations related
to proper listening hearing and respecting the translation issues they
mentioned are uh salient to the entire body of the task force not to your appointees
and another one mentioned outpouring of comments related to soma and tenderloin
and then actions following by the task force that don't reflect that
we've all heard allegations about impropriety now from certain politically entrenched fortune forces and it seems
some of them some of these so-called watchdog orgs have fallen victim to advocacy by these
partisan forces because they all want a map that preserves the status quo unfortunately for them that's neither
legal nor tenable given the rebalancing necessitated by major population changes
to the contrary those of us who have followed the hearings have senior appointees go above and beyond to make
sure public input from communities of interest is meaningfully heard respected considered and deliberated upon
this 11th hour attempt to impugn them and their motivations is a shocking attack on our democratic norms and i
think holding this hearing and scheduling a second hearing has given credence to that thank you
all right all right can you hear us okay um let me call
or email whatever please begin hi thank you my name is
patrick wolf i'm here to support you don't worry i'm here to support your appointed
redistricting task force members but more importantly i'm here to support our democracy
there is no credible allegation of corruption and malfeasance against any of these task force members
after this time okay politicians do not like the results
so far of their work they can't hear me in the uh in the room when i talk
pause your time please yes please
there is no credible allegation of corruption or malfeasance against any of these task force members what is
happening is plain politicians do not like the results so far of their work
they are therefore pressuring you to replace your appointments in the hope of getting the final result that they want
and let's be clear it's an old political trick to make a stink about a process
and then complain that something smells bad we saw something similar after the 2020
presidential election what that demonstrated is that honest courageous election officials are the
backbone of our democracy if you break our democracy will be crippled
the health of our democracy requires you to be strong we all deeply appreciate your efforts to
give voice to people's concerns and to seek any feasible improvements in process
but do not allow yourselves to be diverted from that properly narrow goal it is not your role to substitute your
judgment for the judgment of the people you appointed act with the integrity your duty
requires let the redistricting task force members finish their work without manipulation
or interfere thank you speaker um sorry if you don't mind
um we're gonna have all the seniors go up right now together and read their joint statements just so that they can
get home because they've been here for a while i'm trying to interrupt at the regular city is that okay
right
yes let me know when you want to start make sure you're speaking about mike because
the internet people can only hear it all the time okay
um
so um so they're using their hands and echo of what jackie just spoke so jackie said
my name is jackie i live in the uh east west side uh i
i hope um visitation valley and patola can can combine and i think the three
members of the task force are have been very working hard and should not be replaced
they should remain in state so they can finish their work and time
so so uh he wants
everyone here all the seniors here they're here to represent um you know to
tell you because most of them are coming from visitation valley and potola valley
and they were over there in the other meeting um you know voicing out so i appreciate
you guys actually having this public uh public comment time sooner because i i
do hear the concerns of safety and some of them are you know
have health conditions i cannot sit for a while so thank you so much
thank you
oh
[Music]
actually a request to the speakers can you please say your name at the start would be helpful thank you
just let me know when you're ready i think i think we're good let's quiet it down
all right you can begin uh good evening elections commission um marie corrabiel here i'm here to show my
solidarian support for the redistricting task force there's a couple key points i want to make one i have been at probably
80 of the meetings i have seen them work collegially and work with all these
groups there was a quote that was attributed to dick carriner i'm not sure if she made that quote or
not but actually when they read it i what i understood her to be saying is i don't want to have to choose among these
groups that are both deserving that's what i heard her say and that that is very consistent with the way they have
presented themselves daily in these meetings they have listened they have absorbed they worked
really hard to make 4g work and it went until as you know three in the morning and they weren't able to make it work
the numbers just didn't work so i think what happened then and i'm just gonna call a fake a fig as they say in ancient
greece that this some people decided they weren't getting their way and so they have gone behind
the scenes and tried to make you remove validly
appointed people for their own political gain i'm going to read something to you disgusted you
used to stand with us before you decided to abandon your district in your first term thought that wasn't a betrayal because
honey mahogany was going to win not with these gerrymandered districts you're standing up for truly disgusting
today a tweet from hillary ronan i think that says it all right there
they are looking to influence and manipulate this group the three people
that you saw coming here today weren't the only people that voted the way that they didn't like but
they're only going after these people because they are trying to manipulate you they know they can't manipulate the
mayor i'm disappointed that you have allowed this to get to this point and you violated the brown act by the way
that notice 24 hours but incomplete information about how to dial in so
it is a brown act violation thank you thank you so much
my name is nathan ruffstein i'm with the better house policies
first question what time it is it is time to do the right thing commission members ladies and gentlemen
any attempt to remove anybody in the task force an egregious violation of democracy it would lead a
blood on this commission's record he think he was hard resistant temptation and do the right
thing do not remove any member of the task force thank you that's my two cents
thank you thank you
and thank you for this hearing i really appreciate your response to the gravity of the situation
um and if you need a video day 10 time stamp or or whatnot
vice chair said i will be glad to provide it and uh here's a statement from
member elite
and like uh member pierce who has her heel to die on this is my hill to die on
because you don't forsake the people who raised you now does that suggest that
redistricting goals take priority over his
relationships of his upbringing his family so i will have three quick buckets if i
can leadership transparency clear decision making process prioritizing
the vulnerable and the marginalized leadership the vice chair brought up
the subject of having simultaneous translation back in january i don't know what requests were made for
money but we got it a week ago less than a week ago so something's wrong with that
and the leadership in the task force relates to having a clear decision-making process
this is these are the criteria we're going to use which of course includes the bra and the city charter
but maybe some other factors too like what do you do if there's two coins
what do you do if there's a cbd and a koi what do you do if there's three
neighborhood or organizations that want to work together a lot um
what we have seen is that there's been a lot of cutting and dicing uh with no discernible reason um
for personal reasons i believe even the vice chair and or the chair said that
two minutes so start with d6 get second your
expert to the task force
well hi again um i was here on wednesday a couple nights
ago um and i i do think it's interesting all the ideas that have grown up about why
me and some other folks who were here to actually get public comment at the other meeting came on over to chat with y'all
uh not instead in addition um and i think it's really clear to me i'm the
executive director of a non-profit folsom street some of y'all's been there um and
i uh before that i worked in accountability processes for nonprofits
the accountability and how to hold folks accountable who are appointed and not elected is a really hard thing to access
as a member of the public um there is no way for us to know
who to ask for that accountability so i think the focus on those three members was simply because
you are right there and the folks knew that they could come to a public meeting and talk to your body um
and they're right we didn't know how to go talk to the mayor or necessarily who appoints who for the board of
supervisors but we knew that you were here and we knew that you were a non-partisan body so i think in asking
for that kind of accountability from your body um folks were looking for some sort of
redress when it seems there was none um our district our cultural district is getting
chopped in half if they go with a map that will not just change our power to organizing
coalition but change the way that our everyday culture and interactions work because it'll change our funding because it'll
change our relationships with our uh whoever our supervisor is then
and i know we've talked a lot about like is it politics is it not politics all of this is politics the personal is
political we're living the politics and if the two groups that are often the two
neighborhoods are often housing the most marginalized are split apart we lose a lot um i know there's other stuff with
the map i don't understand all of it but uh that part i'm there so thank you for your time
good afternoon my name is jose andre and i'm currently a d8 resident at 15th and sanchez i did through the task force
many public meetings participated several meetings specifically dedicated to dates boundaries and communities of interest within dba but today i'm not
here to express whatever disagreements i may have with the task force and its visualizations instead i'm here to ask
you to uphold your own oath of office i would challenge this commission if you have issues with the task force process
why is it only now that the issues are being raised and as i understand it you are charged with oversight and i would
ask that the last minute removal of task force members not the admission of failure of oversight
as also as i understand it members of the appoint the members who appointed the restricting task force
have violated no law not the city charter not the federal voting rights act and certainly not the constitution
there is no legitimate cause for the removal even guests who invited to speak here today refuse to speak on any
illegality i want to stress though no matter the final district boundaries there will not be unanimity among san franciscans there
will not be unanimity and if you're concerned about backlash surely you must know that any blame you might receive to
the districts that are ultimately approved will be muted but if you take the unprecedented step of removing members of the task force
that you appointed who have upheld their oath in the thoughts of this monumental task it is you who will bear the blame
not for the lies they could draw but for undermining the san francisco's faith in their government amidst pay-to-play
scandals federal investigations and long-standing colors of our public institutions your action where you
remove these task force members serves only before their work in public trust and i might add there's no more
important institution to maintain public trust in the very institution charged with administering and overseeing our elections
and you may now very well cannibalize public trust from the inside causing long-term damage to the very institution
that you're going to owe both of office to protect i strongly discourage you from removing any of your appointments
from the restricting task force thank you
good evening commissioners um my name is stephen buss i'm part of grow
isaf an organization that believes that san francisco should grow and prosper
and be involved altogether more welcoming city i'd like to thank you for your hard work
the serving on any appointed body is very difficult you bear the brunt of a
lot of criticism and you get very little thanks so thank you
for dedicating your lives to public service and giving your time generously i'd also like to thank the
redistricting task force members for their hard work in dealing with this impossible task
as has been evidenced it's impossible to please everyone and all we can do is our best and follow the wall
i'd also like to give a special shout out to supervisor dean preston and the league of pissed off voters for showing
everyone that they are more interested in partisan interference than protecting democracy you know it's their first
amendment right to mobilize their supporters to get in the way and and
tear down the fundamental institutions of our of our great city
and it's my constitutional right to extend them a hearty you um
so um i know you're gonna do the right thing that was never a question in my mind you're all people of integrity and
the task forces are full of people of integrity as well so just thank you again for all of your
hard work and i know that you will not violate the spirit of the nonpartisan
independent registry commission by removing your commissioners thank you
good evening commissioners my name is alan buradel the i'm a 30-year resident castro
and commissioner your comment earlier today you mentioned that there are some things
that we have a right to do but that aren't very wise to do
and i think this is one of them this is a good example of something that wasn't wise to do
i'm sorry i'm here today for this because i think it's it's a disgrace
it's a very very much a disgrace i listen very carefully to to what the
task force member his name is lee mr lee listen very carefully and i hope you all do because he laid it out perfectly he
said our primary job is to lift up the voices of those who are unheard
that's what mr lee said the primary job of the task force is to lift up voices
that aren't that are unheard all we hear today is talking about voices that have been heard
and those voices have been heard and listened to but when it's not acted on when they
don't get action on what they say you get a letter
you get an irate letter the better response to that letter would be that there's a process and you need to obey it and
uh and that should have been the end of it but you entertained that you had them come we have this meeting it's it's it's
not right there are 875 000 san franciscans out
there that are unheard and that task force is listening to the
unheard or lifting up the voices of the unheard maybe you don't see it but they've been
put there for their judgment or their wisdom those task force members and they will make decisions based on
what they've heard this map won't be fair people won't understand it
i keep hearing that it needs to be fair and understood it's going to be legal map will be legal
but it will be two minutes viewed as unfair thank you
my name is martha imanconti and uh thank you so much for being here
and listening i first wanted to give some context why i'm here why i came at
1 30 instead of coming to the redistricting task force meeting that was supposed to start at three o'clock
that's happening in another room now um i came straight from an organization
that is trying to build a network of people to combat the big lie candidates that are running for election
administration positions across this country to try to steal the election the
way trump tried to in 2020 and intends fully to try to do
again 2024 and i'm very disappointed that
the same thing is happening on the opposite end of the spectrum here that people are trying to use a political
process to take over something that is supposed to be non-partisan i appreciate the transparency with which
you've addressed their concerns because that will leave them with no more complaints to make this process i know
some people think it's shameful to have this process but i think transparency is how you save yourself from those kinds
of comments and accusations i've been on over 15 hours of redistrict
redistricting task force committee calls a commission call excuse me and heard
really egregious language and accusatory commentary coming from a
number of people calling in to doubt the good faith and the hard work of those
commission members um i think that that as someone said earlier the comment made by one of their
commission members um is really probably since i heard so many of those things i
didn't hear that directly and she could own it directly but um it's probably to say that uh
people were really um overstepping their bounds of the things that they were saying and it's not
supposed to be a partisan processing pushing that your tongue is up nope
stick with what you're doing please have faith
good afternoon elections commission i'd rather be at the giants game but some things are a lot more important than sports and i can't believe i'm saying
that you know me i would never say that my name is madison tam i'm here representing the chinese american
democratic club and we're deeply concerned about the events of uh the wednesday night meeting that led to
this uh meeting being called the elections commission and the redistricting task force are supposed to
be a fair non-partisan body and the consideration of removing the task force members is both unprecedented and it
undermines the legitimacy of both your commission and their task force the task force's job is to draw districts that
are compact contiguous and consider communities of interest not to consider the specific desires of any politicians
or any hyper-political groups the cyber-political paragraph's an insult to the job of the task force and it
ultimately harms the voters of san francisco both your commission and the task force are served with representing
and serving if the commission works with a pressure that has no basis as we've
heard even the groups that submitted letters did not actively call for you to remove them this would be irresponsible and blatant
disregard for the many community members that have found this process to be incredibly fair and thorough
so we call on the elections commission to maintain all three members reiner cooper and leave to the redistricting
task force thank you
good evening committee my name is chelsea waite i am here to show my solidarity and support to the
redistricting task force these dedicated public servants have been working tirelessly for months to hear from
everyday san franciscans there has been so much erosion or trust in the public process disintegrated
during the redistricting process why are all of us here in support of the task force today what's discouraging in public discourse
is the fact that we have to be here and that none of these so-called watch groups can give us a clear explanation
as to this quote-unquote illegal mapping that's been going on and as others have stated the agenda for
today's special meeting provided only a vague description of its proposed discussion in action which violates the
brown act in the same way that a court found that the board of ed's lowell discussion did last year to pressure the elections commission
which is supposed to be nonpartisan to recall the appointees just because a group of people are unhappy with the
task force members doing their job is a direct violation of the federal voting rights act
i've been watching this redistricting task force for months i am continually impressed with their integrity and
ability to have thoughtful conversations especially with the most vulnerable communities your job as the elections
commission is to be non-partisan and not bend to political tactics the elections commission spent months electing three
qualified candidates with integrity ethics and intellect through a grueling application and interview process of a
full nearly 3 000 applicants this last minute attempt to derail the task force through unfounded and exaggerated claims
completely compromises the integrity of the whole redistricting process which is supposed to be deliberate and
nonpartisan and not last minute and subject to mob rule and intimidation i yield my time thank you
uh good afternoon election commission my name is rich chang i'm a long time 10-year resident of d6 and i was
actually one of the candidates that we were looking at during identification process but redistricting task force and
i can tell you that i walked away from that process really inspired by the choices that you made i felt like they
were truly the best candidates for the jobs so i'm here to voice my support for all three of the task force members at
uf2 i personally sat through almost every single mapping meeting during this process and throughout each of these
meetings all the way up until 3am in some cases i have seen members cooper lee and raynor demonstrating the utmost
respect objectivity and integrity they have spent hundreds if not thousands of hours hearing from every single
everyday san franciscans and even more time working with their fellow task force members to make hard choices in
order to comply with federal state and local law all while trying to account for community employment
even when some of the public comment turns highly offensive aggressive even downright threatening these three
members continue to listen and show the utmost respect it is outrageous to me for you to
consider removing them at the 11th hour just because certain people don't like certain draft maps drawn by the task
force during the process this last minute attempt to derail the task force is completely completely
compromises the integrity of the process which is supposed to be deliberative and nonpartisan
your job as election commission is to be non-partisan and not bend to political tactics and tricks
please don't discredit the hard work that you all did to appoint your task force members please don't do the citizens of san
francisco this huge disservice by interrupting the critical democratic process at the final hour please uphold
your oath of office and do your part to defend democracy by standing up for the hard-working appointees upholding the
independence of the redistricting task force thank you for your time
hello election commission thank you so much for letting us speak um my name is jody crawford i'm a
native san franciscan i've raised my family here i've lived in the richmond district for the last 20 years
and i really care about this i'm not used to coming down here and i haven't come down
i came down once 20 years ago to speak and this is the second time that i'm speaking live
um and i'm speaking here because i'm kind of surprised actually and came down here to show support for the task
force because i love this city and i really respect democracy but i'm going to leave here
feeling so proud of our democracy because of the people that we heard speak about their dedication and passion
and caring for all citizens of san francisco and i just think it would be incredibly
egregious at this point to pull them off i know that reverend townsend said
there's a difference between me not listening to you and you not getting your way
how can we say that thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of comments both online by phone by webex
and um in person are not listening giving a chance to all constituencies to
speak please please keep them in their place i
also just want to make one more comment which is if you were to pull them and this whole process would be thrown
into disarray then are we really um as you said
uh commissioner died making sure that this is a fair election because everything will turn into chaos
and they're legally bound to get this map done so thank you
my name is tap buckner um i think it's important to uh think about what the task force is for
it's to keep communities of interest together make adjustments for necessary population changes and receive input
from the community well i'm afraid that i see the task force has gone to spray on this
um we all understand that we have to give and take in each district despite the fact that only two districts
actually have an increased population um but uh we have seen draconian
butchering around the city where a district like mine five is now chopped into five different pieces
58 of our of our current district we would no longer be in five um it means
that district two would be across the street from where i live in the panhandle of being district two and i'm
sure people in district two don't want to be in the paid ashbray just as they ashley doesn't wanna be in district two i understand that these are specifics we
don't ask you to take sides on but the point is there's been a huge amount of liberty the 11 districts as they are of course
need to be tweaked on a decade basis but there's a reason why they exist now because of communities of interest that
have been together for a long time we will give and take but to just cut in pieces to the point that you don't even
recognize particular districts especially like five that virtually has no change at all anyway it does not make
any sense at all so that's a process a component that i really ask you to acquire and i think that's why the civil
liberties groups are really on alert about this so please um
take this into account uh the communities of interest like the tenderloin and the southern market that so badly want to stay together and have
been the older components of that district for so long really want to stay together and being
the most vulnerable of you know economically socially i think they deserve that special note and it seems
that they've been put on hold once again there's been constant input from the community on behalf of them and other
pieces of the community that still are not being taken account before i appreciate your time
good evening uh it was afternoon when i came here my name is dina aslania williams and
i've been here in this room about four times um in the last since redistricting
happened and before i didn't know anything about redistricting this is a brand new
process to me and when i first came on the first four meetings that we came i represented my
west of twin peaks uh uh central council and i just want to make it clear that today i'm here only
as myself i'm not representing the organization because this thing happens so quickly we haven't even had a time to
meet or get consensus even have any you know zoom meeting so i'm here representing myself
um during this process i was very impressed about
the um basically the listening because i've been in this room when the line went out
and there was another group there and they listened people repeated the same thing over and over again and they
listened at no time did i feel that they had taken their attention away or they
were dismissive and that went for everyone across the board um i also
uh didn't feel that i'm also i was impressed with that i'm also impressed
with today's meeting this actually gives me hope in democracy because i was very dismayed when i thought that you were
convening to basically take away your appointments of people that you have vetted and trusted and they're doing a
job which is not done apart i saw a couple of mapping sessions
this is a very complicated thing as you all know and um so i'm very impressed with this meeting
i'm very impressed with the redistricting task force and everything that they've done
particularly with both the chair and vice chair and
i took what mr jeremy lee said in the beginning of each meeting and to heart that he talked about making
this homework so thank you very much appreciate uh everything thank you thank you
and please keep them in place
good evening my name is marina roach and i'm here because um i'm not a political person at all
this is all very new to me but i'm here because of a letter that you received from the league of the women
of san francisco and i didn't even know who they were so i looked them up and it says they're about democracy empowering
voters defended democracy well democracy is not removing members
just because you don't like what they're doing and they're trying to remove even though they
did not come out and say it today in fact they couldn't really tell you what they wanted but they really want you to
remove three members that you chose that went through a process to be picked
and i believe there were like 3 000 applications and you chose them um and then it's like i read
dean preston's twitter feed on his twitter feed saying that the commission schedules special
meeting this sunday regarding possible removal of regis in the task force members that's why we're here because
the likes of dean preston want him gone too and it's really upsetting because
i listen to those three members and they are working
their asses off to do what you chose them to do and the fact that they even had to come
here in front of this board this commission and the people in this room to defend their work is disgraceful
and i really wish in fact i was confused when i first came i'm like okay we're here because you're
trying to remove them and then i'm listening to you i'm like well are you really trying to remove them um so i i really don't know if that's
your goal or not but i would hope that you would keep them and um
there's nine members on that task force at this point thank you
good evening commissioners my name is john mccormick i am here this evening um because
i just wanted to point out real fast the asian law caucus earlier today said that they have deep concerns with
the way that public marginalized communities were being represented throughout this process
and that was really interesting to me because we heard earlier from the commissioners that the reason that the
vote went so late on wednesday night was because they wanted to take public comment first to hear from the public
before they actually uh drew their maps and made their votes um as you know the
uh the commissioner said that they were keeping track of the tallies of everyone's accounts and uh so so was
everybody else we're also keeping track and of the 150 public commenters that evening
117 of those public commenters asked that math 4d
move forward through the process map 4d keeps the marginalized communities in the tenderloin and so much together in
district 6. it keeps potrero hill in bayview uh and it takes sea cliff out of
the richmond district all of which are marginalized communities these are the least that um have great blessings uh
that have heard of great interest uh in the in in san francisco and um
yet that evening at 3 a.m they they switched from map 4d to map 4b
which actually does not represent the needs and interest of those most marginalized i just want to point that
out because i think i told you the other night like like i hope that this body represents those that uh are most marginalized and
it sounds like there's some legal concerns about that um and finally i'd like to just put forward too that after
last night um they're still not moving forward with maps that reflect the needs of those
most marginalized in san francisco and i think that that is a great concern to me after um spending the last week here
that you know hundreds of people come out to express their need for the marginalized communities um thank you for your work and thank you for your
time yeah thank you for your time
hi commission members my name is colleen rebecca um thank you for hearing my comment a few days ago about my concerns
about um this process and how the process has uh
had a dampening effect on democracy have a dampening effect on
electoral and civic participation among our most marginalized community members
for almost 20 years i've worked in the tenderloin my job is to help community members to
participate in the civic process and also to participate in the electoral process um nonpartisan voter
registration voter information all that kind of stuff i registered thousands of marginalized homeless formerly homeless
people with histories of mental health trauma um people with extremely low incomes to
vote in the tenderloin and as i've done that over the 20 years that i've been working i've talked to people what is it
that um what is it that's a barrier for you from voting and they say it's because we're poor or we used to be
homeless or we're currently homeless or we're eating in a food line and nobody wants to listen to us no one takes us
seriously and the process isn't for us it's for it's for other people it's not for us
and so help helping people to participate in a process like this and having them not be
heard what i've been hearing consistently from folks in the tenderloin the lowest income marginalized folks
is that we keep saying the same thing and we keep getting told that we're not saying what we're saying that that's
been their process with the task force and that is very concerning because what people are saying is what's the point of
me showing up at all what's the point of me voting what's i i never listen to and i'm not
listened to here and i don't trust the process and that is what the election commission i think is supposed to be
looking out for is a fair and democratic process that's accessible to all people including the lowest income the homeless
people it's pretty much your two minutes now so thank you
and i just want to make one point i have a background in stats statistics and i did employ research and
surveys for quite a few years and um data that is not representative of the
entire population has to be thrown out for whatever reason or wherever wherever that incompetency occurred
but when uh miss uh bernholes um was uh was asking about keeping
quantitative track of district input that was a question that she asked but was not answered because i listened
very carefully to that part because that's the only thing i know about and i didn't understand mr lee's answer
of emphasizing qualitative data over quantitative data i'm very familiar with these two things
qualitative is your telling a story quantitative is actually representative of everybody
and so that should be a red flag to anybody and i don't know i'm not going to make any emotional appeal or any sites but um
your data is not good and if there are the the numbers that ms sperm will ask for i think they'd be um
very helpful in deciding how to move forward with this all right thank you
thank you
hey there i'm ramon iglesias um this process started in june 2021
i know because i was there applying to be part of a task force the selection process was
open transparent and the criteria was pretty clear there was even a spreadsheet where we were being ranked
on this criteria this was about 300 days ago there are
only seven days left to finish the restrict with districting plan my fellow citizens have concerns about
the process the criteria or the members where have they been these last 300 days
if the outcome is what they don't like then i'm so sorry about it but there is a process in place there that we're
supposed to follow we have seven days to to finish the task force
to the registration if we change the members we will derail the process and
we will undermine the trust in these institutions commissioners they are pressuring you to take an
unprecedented step that they are not even able to explicitly endorse
let's focus on getting the job done and stop wasting our time with preposterous and undemocratic sabotage reject this
removal attempt and let's get back to work thank you for coming
hello members of the elections commission this is the first time for me never been before the elections commission my name is bob atkisfandiari
i am actually for once representing myself in my capacity as the president of the united democratic club because we
co-signed a letter uh along with several other democratic clubs the eastern neighborhoods democratic club the chinese american democratic club the
allison told us democratic club and a couple of others i'll send it to you so you have it for your records uh
denouncing this attempt and denouncing what you're considering today in fact even denouncing the notion of convening
this meeting today because even convening this meeting is sending a signal in my mind that you're willing to
entertain undemocratic power grabs and and and nonsense when someone look i
can't even take the words out of arnold townsend's mouth he's reverend towns about he said it better than i could which is that you might not like
the outcome but we listened to you or actually you reversed it but you get my point um and i cannot stop i was so
furious on wednesday night when i heard that you would decide to agenda this meeting and walked all the way home from
this hall city hall all the way to la fly where i live because i just had to vent an event
invented i kept calling people inventing this reminded me of the nonsense the republicans pulled with the stop the
steel stuff this last year two years ago this reminds me of when you don't like the outcome of an election you just go
after the secretary of state and you demand them to invalidate the results i'm not saying i know what the right
maps should be i'm not here to talk about maps i'm here to talk about the fact that my friend ramon just said
there was a process a well thought out process for applications i was asked to reply and i said hell no i don't want
everyone hating me but these people apparently wanted to be hated by a lot of people because they have an impossible math problem in front
of them and i don't envy them but i'm telling you right now if you go through with even considering removing any of
these people you are sending a strong signal that this city does not value expertise the city does not want
qualified appointees because they only care about getting their way and if you
deliver on this you're setting yourself up and you're setting everyone else up thank you so
much canadian commissioners uh my name is mike chen speaking as myself i am not a lawyer but i'm playing one for public
comment uh you have received a letter from jesse menardi addressing brown act
concerns about the item that has been agenda before you today uh a brief refresher the donek requires a brief
description uh clearly specifying the actions that that could be taken in the scope uh at the meeting uh what uh the
public and across judicial rulings have said that the public should not need to guess at what
the body is will think consider doing or maybe taking action on and so i'm here to
bring up legal concerns about about what the body may or may not
do or discuss in the future about about the removal of members because the removal of members is nowhere discussing
the agenda the only way that we know if we knew it was from if you were at the meeting on wednesday or if you saw the many articles that were published about
that it is no it is nowhere discussing the agenda about the removal of numbers uh i also have a second uh process
question about uh proper notice uh the first agenda that came up for this meeting 24 hours ago not have a proper
dialing code or uh for the for the public meeting which would in which would unfairly uh stop people from being
able to call and give public comment to this meeting uh and so that may also be another
process open meeting issue that may prevent the body from
from taking action at this meeting thank you
good evening uh commissioners my name is emily lee i'm the director of san francisco rising um and we are a
alliance of organizations community organizations made up of low-income communities of color
latinx filipino chinese and black grassroots organizations across san
francisco and we've actually been involved with redistricting since last june when outreach applications and the
appointment process began um and you know we're not here because we think this is so fun and we want to be in
another hearing and you know like it's actually because there was serious concerns and we were hoping that the election commission would look into them
and i think you all have done that today i think you've asked very thoughtful questions um you know i think the aclu
and the league of women voters and asian law caucus also gave some very good and compelling examples of their concerns um
so it's not about personal attacks on the task force members it's really about you know are we ensuring that this process which impacts the city for 10
years is given the due weight and the due consideration for public input and i feel that you all have asked um really
good questions to the task force members as well and so we appreciate you all taking this seriously actually because
there are serious concerns um and in many ways i just want to share two examples i know that people say you
know you can't make everyone happy we understand that we know because we're an alliance it's like you cannot make everyone happy through the redistricting
process but we do think there are some really obvious examples where public comment was flat out ignored and that
was the concern for us why we've decided to come here um for example between january and march there were 80 public
comments in support of keeping the tenderloin and south of market together and cultural district hole in district
six and there was very almost maybe one comment saying just the tenderloin
should move to a different district but on march 25th the task force adopted map 3b which split the tl from the soma and
from the cultural districts and that had very minimal little support from the public
and so i think it's a great question to ask people well why did you do that can you justify the rationale because we know there's hard choices to make but
honestly the public felt that there was
district in san francisco um i've been working in district 6 for over 25 years
my three kids went to bessie palmetto school and um was active in like the fight to rebuild bessie carmichael the
real school before that it was world war ii bungalows we fought to actually build the first um
to a swager park um the terminology park before that there were no amenities in
the south market you know for families um we've been working with certain seniors in the timberline um
so manteo has been a gateway movie for for our community for over 120 years when we were first starting manila town
this is where we made home full 70s and in the last um in the last 10 years we have hundreds of
families were pushed out in christ of district 6 and at the same time
you have a growth of over 20 000 um in district 6 so as soon as we heard
about the consensus in the redistricting process we knew it was really important for us to participate we started
convening committee meetings weekly we the task force told us we want to hear
your queries of interest and we want you to define it we met every we had 14 different filipino organizations
actually map out over 50 our residents and places of worship and um
in restaurants and landmarks that was important for our community between the temple and the south of market submitted
that we um that we would participate in public comment we not only worked within the
filipino community but api communities um we reached out to other um community
members in throughout soma in the tl black communities southeast asian arab
we met weekly to to really define these lgbtq communities transgender cultural
districts another district and we actually work to put together a community unity map it's not
mathematically impossible if you're actually trying to protect communities and not provide them thank you very much
for your comment your time
the commissioners uh david district five resident we have trapped every public
comments as the task force began community engagement meetings in january and i'd like to share an example with
you um not to judge what the match should be but on how members of the task
force have disregarded public uh input of poor and working class communities of color
between january and yesterday there were 164 public comments that spoke to
keeping the tl and soma in the cultural districts and d6 together in addition there were 146 comments in
support of the community unity map which keeps these boys together in district 6
and there were 193 comments in support of map 4d which had the defining
characteristic of being the only draft map that kept these communities together in district 6. there have been only 15
comments asking for the tl the tenderloin to move out of district 6. yet on march 25th the task force voted
with the votes of member facebook and vice chair rayner to move forward with just one map that moved the tenderloin
to district five uh which virtually nobody in district five maybe one person asked for from district five
self-identified at their next uh meeting on saturday april 2nd 200 people
waited hours to testify before the task force to urge the support for map4d
which would keep the tenderloin and summit together in district 6. according to the tally
118 public comments advocated for map 4d while only 23 advocated for 4b um and
then they did vote that day to move forward with matt 4d and this was the vote they reversed at their next 3 a.m
meeting and we've just seen systematically uh as they cut through the mat um
prioritizing emerging with it you know wealthier neighborhoods
and disregarding specifically public comm employees submissions from working class low-income
neighborhoods immigrants people of color thank you so much thank you
good evening charging my phone here so they still have my votes
uh good evening my name is john wong and i am a resident of district 5 and
lavona street prior to that i have i'm also
just about 70 years old and i got born in stockton for 69 and a half of those years i lived in san
francisco starting in chinatown in a single room occupancy moving to the mission
district moving to the richmond district to the mission district to the mission district
and right now to the sunset so i've had a sense of different communities also since i am 70 years old
i have experienced seven census and while all many of them have involved
redistricting this is the first time i've been actively engaged in seeing what happens
the real question is are the individuals appointed by this independent body
in another independent task force doing their job i have never met any of the individuals
who spoke today who are on the task force but i was very impressed it was deliberative they sought input they
received the input they processed the input and then it was included in their discussions with their
final decisions so when i see on the agenda item
it doesn't say decide whether or not to remove them it's a discussion of possible actions regarding elections
commission appointees to the san francisco redistricting task force i originally came up to implore you to
not remove them when i realized this i urge you to applaud them for the work that they
have done because it's clear from your process today
which is very basic and got information that was needed to help make your
decisions if through that process you selected these three individuals thank you so
much well thank you very much for the chance to make comments
hello good evening my name is jessica ho and i'm here on behalf of my individual person um i am a resident of district
four and i also i think john actually said a lot of what i wanted to say which
is that i originally came here because i had thought that this meeting was about the removal of the three registered
commission task force members but in fact i do think that there's merit on both sides i do think that there needs
to be a booking process where everyone can improve or we can do better in listening to each other and even in this
meeting there was no interpretation for seniors or the non-legal seniors and i understand that's something that we can
all learn from that in the future myself or other people if we see that we should say something and just like that i think
in the future we see that there's always improvement to be made but that's not any reason to
be removed from a commission when they're just trying to do their job and so i do agree that there should be you
know a dialogue of how we can all improve to be better public servants but i don't
think that it should result in the removal and in fact this is maybe something that we can think about for
the future that because we have to go through all of these questions and decide what does it mean for someone to
be a good redistributing task member this maybe will help inform the election
commission in the future on how you can select the future it is for that
thank you
um the first thing i want to say is the voters the voters rights act of 1965.
they that came into play because black people were being suppressed in this
country i'm really appalled today that even on this commission there's not one black
person there to hear and understand me racism is real and san francisco is one
of the most racist cities in the nation i am i am a public worker i work for the
health department and i have experienced the racism and the other night i have been going to
these these task force meetings since the very beginning and i have not missed one
i have been holding mapping meetings information sessions in the community
there was no outreach done in district 10 i requested that 1889 2019 there's a template we sent out
by this commission i asked for the uh to be sent out to all the people so that they can know that this is going on
the other night tesla lee and michelle ho said they were put on that task force
and you should listen to the tape to remove betrayal hill from district 10.
they are gerrymandering they want to suppress the blacks both you shouldn't be rolling your ass
so um i really hope you guys excuse me i'm thinking about what you're saying i'm not ruling my eyes
i'm just really concerned that there's a lot of white privilege going on in this room and people are
saying keep these people but there was a twitter today that said tessa lee was at a party and we can't
confirm it in 2018 saying he was going to gerrymander so
he proved it because he came and said on the task force meeting the other night
that he was put on the commission i mean the task force to take out the churro hill
my father thank you much for your comment okay thank you
hello um my name is brenda barros and i i actually have been you know staying up
at night listening to and even if i wasn't physically here to the whole thing and and i will say that
one of the things i've talked to my friends about it too is that when i heard one of the commissioners say uh quote unquote
that um i'm gonna take care of my people for tola i grew up in that area and i'm
gonna take care of my people when you hear comments like that he's
not talking about all of us you know what i mean he's talking about
his people and based on what i see on this map that's exactly what he's done
so um that's all i will say on that there the comments
are coming out of their mouths that's not me saying that he said that in an open
meeting when he got upset so uh you guys really need to
when people take these positions they take they should be taking an oath
to maintain themselves a certain way they should not be discriminating they
should not be making comments like that because that that that shows their bias
because i'm you know i'm pushing the city hard on equity and bias and what i've been hearing coming out of
the mouths of some of the people in that commission is clearly fights
you can't call it anything else because that's what it is so i hope you take that into consideration and i know there are going
to be people that support them and i'm sure most of the people that support them are going to be you know my
people that he was talking about so i just want to
let you know what i'm like thank you
hello commissioners thank you for taking public comment took a while that we got there
um you know there's been a lot of folks saying a lot of things in this meeting we can talk pretty or we can speak plain
you know this is about politics plain and simple you know we know uh uh commissioner
shapiro that the d.a gave you a call we know commissioner jerdonek that supervisor peskin gave you a call and
that's what led to the formation of this meeting i'd add two not within the traditional bounds of the brown act
okay every faction every public body leaks the truth gets out
all right we know what this is about i'm in kind of a unique position and that a lot of the folks who have been
calling in to question this maybe uh you know there's not been much interest in the tl
i've been going out to these meetings and saying you've got to keep the tl mid-market western soma together
um you know they made a decision uh that i don't think is the right one but
they did give reasons you know they going into 4b uh if you're going to keep treasure
island the tl and parts of soma together you need to cut into western selma to 7th street
um again you know this is a tough process but they did give justifications i i
don't think that makes it right but they can't be accused of doing it without having a reason now these folks the
three that you're considering removing are independent civil servants they've served with the highest moral standards
the highest ethical standards and with an empathy and a candor and a care for
public input and what that means in this city all right
you have the votes you can remove them we all know it no one's saying it you can you can go for
it i mean by all means i don't think you've considered that that would be a national spectacle i
don't think you've considered that all the folks myself included who were abhorred on january 6th are also going to be bored
about this so i hope you made the right decision thank you very much
good evening commissioners uh my name is jaime viloria i'm a resident and i also work as organizing the
tenderloin most of my work is around voter turnout um and i think like just a lot of things
today that seems to be twisted right i do like that people have these stickers that says defend democracy that's
exactly what we're trying to do in the redistricting we're ensuring that people or
marginalized who always have barriers in voting are able to be represented that's
why i was in support of keeping those uh tl and soma together
when when the changes happen in the middle of the night the optics of that looks very suspicious i don't have any
evidence that they did anything shady but the optics of it look suspicious and this process in itself that we're doing
this is democracy right we asked you that we saw something
you all voted to have this hearing it's not a sham it's not a january 6
insurrection it's not so there's this kind of twistedness that i'm hearing and also it's really
interesting that as soon as this came up it became a political opportunity for a lot of people i heard dean preston's
name a lot of this this meeting even kanye chan's name was involved
that's kind of interesting to me right it's supposed to be nonpartisan but then there's this rhetoric that came out of
this right and we're hearing people talking about the reason the problem with redistricting is because of housing
policies well that's true but that's not the space for it it's about who gets represented
equity and representation and that's what we're fighting for is to keep these communities to have a voice but then
it's been twisted we've been turning to numbers and that's the whole point of redistricting force is to listen to the
communities of interest and if they didn't listen and change it in the last minute the optics are that suspicious and maybe
they didn't mean to do it it's been a long night maybe there was being irresponsible but that's worth a hearing thank you so
much for your comment
commissioners thank you for your time and efforts to try and listen to both sides
my name is jade and i am i'm a resident of d4 and i am in support of the
redistricting task force members to even entertain the idea of removing these
task force members is absolutely outrageous just because one group got us a god
upset and through a literal temper tantrum you held this meeting you need to be nonpartisan and not be
pushed over by those who close up when you have supervisors
excuse me excuse me
the webex has lost the audio um
oh my goodness
let me call them again lucy i'm sorry
you

BREAK

PART 2: all right all right everyone we're going to get restarted our audio is online
this new camera view too oh
um yeah so my my my problem is kind of with the
process you know march 25th we had some statements that were made by some of the task force members it was it was
a real concern by the community because this map came out of nowhere and i think that's what started this whole snowball that's turned into where we're
at today was coming come out and statements there was advice from the city's attorney's office that it was a
violation of the voting rights act you know those task force members were saying we broke the law probably but
we're gonna do it anyway and it turned into a whole thing and i think that's where the whole legal women voters think came from honestly i think that was at
the core of what started this snowball but i have to say that for me the real problem has just been the process as a
whole and so i i think this is an opportunity that maybe we can start talking about what was wrong with the process
um because it's been kind of a mess and the community has been
it's been like this back and forth and it's just it's we have to be better as a city and we
have to figure this out so that we don't do this again and also i think that this deadline is
sort of an artificial deadline and now we're rushing to a deadline with this messed up process and we started late
and i'm going to kind of ask that maybe the thing we need to do is more time let's
not rush to this deadline thank you so much for your comment your time let's get it right
hey members of the commission my name is john dunbar i'm an eighth year resident district five and what brings me here is a concern
that there was this 48-hour u-turn um a district that was recognizable became
like a jigsaw puzzle communities that have been you know whole for their existence like japan
town but in behalf and i think people want to look at this
moderate or progressive prism but for representation um knowing where
your district is knowing the neighbors you can reach out to to affect issues that affect your
community is very important and i think the fact that this task force waited so late in this process
because they have been meeting for months i think that is what has been most unsettling it's not like
they just discovered it was hard a week ago but they only disclosed these to the public you know at the last minute and
on the core issues of whether they you should be with pateral hill which it should be if we're interested in
african-american representation supported supervisors they're making very critical decisions
very late in the process and they're not disclosing why that is so i hope that you know that somehow we can
get through this and people are happy with the lines there's been some adjustments to district five
but i don't see the community interest between the tenderloin and the film or neighborhood or they hate i think that's
what's happened to district five is terrible and you know i i think
these lines will not have legitimacy going forward given how this particular task force has
you know that it's its charge or not right thanks
hi there my name is david brockman i'm a political science professor at uc berkeley live in san francisco although
i'm speaking here in my personal capacity although also thinking about my training as a political scientist and as a political science professor
i oppose removing members of the commission and i'd like you to kind of zoom out from this particular hearing to
think about i think some of the important reasons why that is um in particular think about what this would mean for the future of the redistricting
commission in the future of this commission in particular i'd like you to think about if you do decide to remove
the commissioners ten years from now a supervisor comes to members of the commission tries to do something they're
not supposed to do try to lobby them to change their district and that member of the independent commission knows they're not supposed to
listen to what that supervisor is saying if it's especially rooted in just purely political motives but then they have to think what about happened a decade ago
what if i don't do what the supervisor wants because i know i'm not supposed to but this supervisor works with their
allies to try to get the um this commission to try to remove me it will create a mechanism by which all of a
sudden members of this independent commission will be essentially de facto accountable to supervisors and
accountable to all of you which brings me to this body um i think this body doesn't want to become a de facto second
redistricting commission but in practice i think if you remove these commissioners that is what you are inviting 10 years from now there will be
a playbook um if this vote is not unanimous to reject this today there will be a playbook and a pathway people
see to come before this body and treat it like a second redistricting commission i don't think that would be healthy for this body i think in part
because if you think about this body long term there's a lot of other decisions that people might be tempted to come before this body to say for
example there's a close supervisor election we think that's because there was a polling place that opened an hour too late by mistake now we want to come
before this commission and ask you to put pressure on for example doe staff to try to not count certain votes or
change things i don't think you want to invite that kind of middling in the process of redistricting or in this commission and i think you have to send
a strong signal that you won't stand for today or you will invite that for the future of the city thank you
thank you
good evening commissioners i'm calling in opposition to this frantic 11th hour recall attempt the task force has been doing an admiral job on possible
circumstances and accusations of bias in these new maps of having false population growth in district 6 has created a giant geographic vacuum and i
don't think most of the political establishment in the city including those have been commenting every meeting have really internalized this i've been
listening to the meetings and frankly i don't think most of the task force really internalized this uh or else they wouldn't have spent so many hours this
close to the deadline trying to make map 4d work the task force has learned the hard way that a lot of change needs to happen and it's time to political
establishment in the city except that instead of working referees at the 11th hour one of the commissioners hours ago suggested that it looks like only one
side of the political divide is bearing the brunt of this change this is misleading that side just happens to benefit the most from the status quo
because they have more income as this cycle the task force is legally prohibited from considering this
many people poured their hearts out electing the current district 5 supervisor yes it seems strange and unfortunate that this district needs to
change so much just because the districts of the east need to shrink and the districts of the north and west need to grow they're entirely justified to be
heartbroken that all of their hard work will be for naught because the new supervisor will most likely not win the new strategic fight
however before accusing the task force of bias please consider that had his opponent won that mayoral race in 2019
she too would also not be able to win in this new district buy even if she lived in the bronx on the other side can anyone here
honestly say that the district 2 supervisor is happy to lose seacliff and russian ill but gain part of nopa
political establishments everywhere benefit the most from the status quo unequal population growth means that big changes are unavoidable and that is why
you see this frantic lashing out by organized political interests the task force is required by law to ignore them so should you shame on the commission
for undermining the important work of this voluntary task force by elevating these naked establishment smears in a formal medium thank you for your time
thank you
hello i'm here uh to support the task force in its ability to work
independently without interference uh we've heard a lot from uh
from people who have their specific complaints with the map and as many of the commissioners have said we all know that there is
no way of making a map that everybody is happy with to the extent that factions and interest
groups use advocacy and argument to promote their own interests that is all right and good to the extent that
factions are using strong armed tactics and outsized power to try to
influence the political decisions of the task force that is illegitimate and that
is shameful uh i'd like to echo mr wong's earlier comment that if this
commission does find that the task force has been acting appropriately that it issue a positive
statement to that effect thank you
hi my name is jeremy linden and i've lived here for uh 16 years mostly in western soma
and honestly i've been pretty unhappy with a lot of the maps that i've seen many of them like literally split my
neighborhood in two sometimes i'm looking at them and i'm like i'm not sure what these guys were thinking
uh but that all being said like as i'm sure that you will understand this is a process where inevitably there
will be some areas that get split from each other you know that's there have to be boundaries that change and that's
really just what happens when one district grows dramatically more than the others and that's the whole reason why we've
designed this process like this to insulate it from the from political influence because
what to do otherwise would just capture the process to uh would open it up to regulatory
capture by you know political narrow specific interests and while i think the process hasn't
always been pretty i do think it's been working as it was designed to with different stakeholders appointed by
different groups to in order to take all perspectives into account uh they've
heard hours and hours of public comment every day this week so i urge you to
reject this frankly kind of dangerous call to harm our democratic institutions here thank you
uh good evening commission um my name is christian i'm from district four and i just wanted to come up and say really
quickly first of all thank you all for taking all the time here today to listen to everyone's complaints and i just want to remind everyone what this meeting is
actually about which is the removal of three members and a few of you on the board here said that um
if you could listen to the other side to hear what they had to say about the removal of those members and i want to remind all of you that all three of them
said that they do not support the removal they have no comment on it they have no
no actual stance so after that i feel like that should have been enough i know everyone here has public comment
but at the end of the day this particular meeting isn't about maps it's about the removal of three members
who have just been doing their job thank you all for taking the time i appreciate it
thank you and good evening i was going to say good afternoon but here we are right now um my name is mick del rosario
and i am the resident of district six i'm filipino american i grew up in south market went to bessie carmichael
elementary school and lived in the city here for 28 years where i'm still in south market to this day
and i'm here before you to employ not to remove your own vetted members of the
appointed redistributed task force these are appointees that have been working tirelessly for months to hear
from everyone and your appointees have been through a public and thorough vetting
process the elections commission spent months selecting these three qualified
candidates and with through a drilling application processing interview and out of a pool
of 30 000 applicants that's a that's a lot of you know vetting that needs to be done and this isn't as other speakers have
mentioned before this isn't about what map works or doesn't work it's about raising the concern and pushing it back
against the attacks of the character of these three members based on what i've heard from some of the folks based on
you know this meeting and previous meetings as well it makes it sound like they're some kind of disney super villain or something like that but but
they're not the fact is that these are three volunteers who gave months days
and hours of their time and are people of good character they're doing their best given with the kind of
work that they they're working with and i agree with several speakers here today that the process and accessibility to
these meetings needs to be done better but when we vilify the people instead of the process that's when we
start losing confidence in the institution we're concerned about this last minute
change to you know overturn the work that task force has done over these past couple of
months but we want to make sure that this task force is still independent as it is
to this day because i'm sure no one is really choosing to stay up until three in the morning so please um you
know thank you please please keep them on board
good evening my name is anderson i'm president of district 1. i want to tell you that i am very
disappointed and quite concerned about three organizations who
have spent decades building a reputation for being a
fair and open watchdog or a fair election and they've allowed arrested judgment
to call before you questions that they really basically didn't even investigate
and you as the election commission decided that you too were going to rush to judgment to call into question three
extraordinarily competent considerate and and dedicated san francisco citizens
it's unheard of for you to have done that if you were concerned about redistricting you should have held
an informational hearing maybe three weeks ago to make certain that the process was moving along but instead you
led yourself to be called upon by three organizations one of which i supported
since its infancy to call into question the integrity of three competent and extraordinarily
considered individuals i find that to be appalling i don't believe that you should have held this on the on on the
integrity of these individuals but the other night the commit the rtv voted
eight to one to move forward with a map eight to one because they gave up certain kinds of
areas they have listened to the community they've considered the community they've worked endless hours
to make certain that the marginalized communities and the districts were whole but they were given an un
incredible hand where 30 of the population in new housing was in district 6 and they needed to move it
and people have made sacrifices the calling to question the integrity of the individuals that you vetted and you
put in into that task force is unconscionable and you should not do
that thank you very much
good evening commissioners i have a difference in opinion i actually hi my name is sandov
and i want to thank you for hosting this movie i do think it has been helpful and i do think it lends for a more
transparent process in this very contentious subject what this hearing did show was that the
elections commission takes integrity and its duty seriously to ensure a fair
election as you are sworn to do for those of us who requested this
meeting i think we wanted to have your insurance that you're indeed paying attention to
the actions of your appointees as a past elected official i know that hearings
should be held and this is the power of a commission that you're able to hold hearings while requested by the public
in order to add and lend transparency to a process that people are having difficulty with and it is your job to do
so and so i commend you for doing that um what i want to say is that we have heard a lot about people being
disenfranchised by this process what i think you're hearing from letters and from other in these organizations to
to vilify these organizations that have been stewards on our community is just simply wrong
i just want to say that it is not about just being disenfranchised from this this process currently or in the past it
is about being marginalized community being disenfranchised in the history of
our society here in san francisco and this is why comments are so personal this is why comments are taken so
seriously and i think it is right that you ask your appointees and hold them accountable as when i was a supervisor
we held city departments accountable too to serve the public because actually you are the ones that are supposed to ensure
that what i hope never to see again is in your in your commission room
50 senior citizens that are chinese monolingual speaking they've been organized to come and speak here and yet
no one asked for translation i think and yet you they wear it thank you so much for the sticker that says
stand for democracy for whom we are people
ladies and gentlemen the elections commission my god it's been a long day thank you
for being our captive audience thank you for hearing us out really appreciate it my name is forrest and i
unlike our last speaker and a person who lives in san francisco i live
in dubose triangle i'm an asian community activist and
for me stopping asian hate comes with many solutions but one of them is fair
asian representation i am so grateful that we have lily ho jeremy lee and
casey lee on the redistricting task force and i have had the pleasure
of getting to know kesel personally standing by his side at community events
that were designed to stop asian hate i've met casey after a long
session had been districting and seeing the blood sweat and tears he pushed into his work
i'm here today to tell you that any attempt to silence
queso lee is an attempt to silence me for queso lee represents me and he
represents my community and ditka represents her community
and raynelle represents his community and together
we make san francisco they have put months of work into a job
that is thankless and as difficult as a job that you have before you today
any emergency meeting haphazardly put together
lack of process to remove them it's a direct violation
to the rights we have san franciscan to the rights we have
as democrats to have people represent us ladies and gentlemen of the elections
commission please do not so much for this time remove case cut and wait thank you
members of the commission president bernholds i'm angela calvillo i'm the clerk of the board of supervisors hello
um there were two questions that were asked earlier one i think was by the president she asked if there was an opportunity to
be able to track the members of the public and their comments and i would like to
say yes the clerk of the redistricting task force is john carroll he is uh
pretty amazing and uh he is tracking uh comments um
one way or the other uh if there's a map that somebody is supporting or what their specific comments were so we can
say yes there was also the question about additional meetings the possibility
aside from the time frame obviously that dca can talk to you about more fully
i would like to say the specific question about whether or not we can meet on tuesday that would not be
possible because as you know i'm the clerk for the board of supervisors and they meet on tuesdays and it is that
team that is uh helping the redistricting task force so that would not be our team
that could support a tuesday meeting and then i also want to just add very quickly that
more broadly support for the redistricting task force we actually do need to have a
conversation around that to future-proof it we are creating a report as you'll hear
from the redistricting task force itself and the clerk's office will have a chapter um in in terms of how how to not
only better clerk the task force how outreach should be
run and how a language access is which obviously is a major component of of
your your thoughts around how to future proof the task force but we will also have some recommendations i just want to
say we have a very good partnership with adrian pond the director of osea that's
the office of community engagement at immigrant affairs in addition to john arts so the three of us
probably uh you might hear from the three of us together at a future meeting because
there's a a lot of work that went into the existing task force and the production of the
video i'm sorry to cut you off um you may elevate her as a panelist
because she's um representing a city department trying to provide you information of the questions that you asked
uh so if you wish to do that uh you can extend her time this will elevate you to panelists finish my statement thank you
so much welcome um just to indicate that there there is a huge chasm to gap
uh to bridge but it's not because there weren't great actors who were all helping to assist
with that i think that we will be creating with the task force and with your assistance
to assess the campaign and governmental conduct code which is the authorizing legislation that involved the clerk's
office so that we can assist you with your report to future proof this from these kinds of concerns
so look forward to that conversation thank you go ahead please yeah um i have a question thank you for
coming to answer questions it's really unfortunate that the board of supervisors meets on tuesday and that
just coincides with the 72-hour deadline so that sounds like that's an issue with
the redistricting task force not having independent staff and reliant of course on resources that they
don't control um i also heard i wonder if you can verify
that um we are out of contract with the line dryers and has exceeded the contractual
number of meetings that that were agreed to uh through the chair i am not familiar
with the specifics of the uh q2 contract provisions thank you
and madame clerk i i have a uh a question and you may or may not be able to answer it so there's no pressure
to one way or the other but uh since you're here uh
it's been stated to us in public comment that
that the deadline stated in the san francisco charter it's
13.110 i believe i probably have that wrong which states that this process needs to
be completed before april 15 that that is just the deadline and why
why you know uh you know there have been questions as to whether that deadline needs to be met
does your office or the board of supervisors take a position that that deadline does not need to be abided by
through the chair uh the clerk's office would not take a position
uh we would refer those legal questions obviously to the city attorney's office
thank you of course we would work diligently to meet that deadline say
thank you to the members thank you thank you
we have any other in-person uh commenters
no okay then uh martha i believe we are now switching to our webex
members of the public okay we have 23 persons with their hands up
and i will unmute the first caller the name on on the introduction is grant
i will unmute you now and you have two minutes to comment
hello hi this is grant ingram i'm a district one resident with my wife and two daughters commissioners and fellow
san franciscans this hearing was a huge mistake we love to accuse the right wing
of not respecting the democratic process but it seems that san francisco is not immune from that behavior either
many of our leaders including sadly today the local aclu and the league of women voters have
tried to pander to their constituents instead of telling the truth which is that the primary mandate in this
redistricting process is creating equal representation above all other considerations that
means making each district as even in population as possible within a small accepted range
responsible leaders including the local aclu and league of women and voters should have done more to educate san
francisco is that given the huge imbalance due to population growth on the east side
major changes to the map were inevitable and necessary but rest assured all citizens would be represented and that
change is good because we all want san franciscans to have equal representation apparently that kind of civic duty to
educate the public is not prioritized over maintaining power and influence check out the league of women voters
website it has a it has a redistricting explained web page but it doesn't contain any information about the
significant challenge facing this task force to rectify the imbalance
yes preserving communities of interest is a goal in the redistricting process but maintaining a community of interest
cannot equal and certainly not outweigh the mandate to create contiguous districts equal in size
even the league of women voters website concedes that the term communities of interest is not defined in the san
francisco charter and the definition in the california constitution is vague and very open to interpretation
and of course there's no consensus on which community of interest is more important than the other
just because a proposed map is not lining up in a way agreeable to certain residents or a proposed map is perceived
to negatively impact a community of interest that does not mean that commissioners are biased or unethical
listing you have reached your two minute limit okay thanks for listening to me
thank you also if i can remind all uh callers if
if you've already commented if you could lower your hand so i'm not confused about who has and hasn't thank you
i am now unmuting david elliott lewis you have two minutes to comment
um thank you thank you very much uh commission so david elliott lewis for
nearly a four decade san francisco resident uh sorry let me um
turn that down and i um i'd like you to really look at the facts
of the situation regarding this task force the the three commissioners you appointed to the redistricting task
force the they're all fine upstanding individuals but they've really failed in
their duty their duty to listen to the community to listen to especially vulnerable communities and to consider
the needs of our residents it's not just one person one vote that's
the bare minimum standard we also need to prevent gerrymandering and the maps that they've been considering have
increasingly been just that favoring conservatives supervisor voting
districts disadvant disadvantaging progressive ones
and when the community came out in support of their own plan they called it the uh the community unity map
this task force including your appointees really rejected it without seriously considering it they mentioned
it in discussion they didn't bring it up on the screen they didn't look at the districts 80 organizations representing thousands
of residents came together to create the community unity unity map and yet the
task force with a wave of a hand dismissed it without if they if they're going to dismiss it because it for cause
that's fine but they didn't dismiss it for cause their excuse was that they didn't invent it themselves but rather
they just use the suggestions of their q2 consultants which create which
offered them this gerrymandered map and when people spoke against it the majority spoke against it they
ignored them and your appointees ignored the majority who spoke against it so
those are the facts i'd like you to consider when you consider whether to retain or not your commissioners thank
you very much okay
next caller all i see is the phone number you are being unmuted you have two minutes to comment
hi my name is george wooding please don't recall the three did redistricting task force members
in the future there needs to be a means test for redistricting
applicants as it was often said today that the current
appointees were quick learners redistricting members were initially
supplied with great public publicly developed city-wide redistricting maps
from the coalition for san francisco neighborhoods 41
neighborhood groups and the city-wide community unity maps which at least have input from over 70.
if either of these maps were adopted ninety plus percent of the commission's
fab work would have been done without the problems you now face
what is the task force thinking it would be a disaster if you recall the
task force as this would be a symbol that sf is rotten to the core on a local
and national level sf currently ranks 149
out of the 150 worst metropolitan places to live in the united states
if you vote to recall welcome to number 150
thank you
okay i will unmute the next caller it's uh four one five six zero one number
caller you're unmuted you have two minutes to comment okay sarah elections commission uh thank you
for convening this meeting my name is tiffany ing and my family lives in san francisco since 1979 on the border of d8
and d11 which gets redistricted back and forth back in 2020 i took part in census
outreach uh making sure that there's a fair and full count and i'm now i'm protesting in redistricting i know the
task force has a tremendous responsibility to listen to public input and reform map changes be neutral and
non-partisan and yet task force members election commission appointees vice chair dictat ranger and member casa lee
are not representing this role fully we urge elections commission provide oversight ensure that employees are
accountable transparent in this process please urge the registered task force be more systematic in documenting public
input and tracking that preferences publicly deka is here right here because
reiner is in position of leadership and yet this task force has no consistent system tracking and that's why they're
voting in ways that are ignoring overwhelming public input and i already expressed it a lot of people expressed
it earlier that despite hundreds of public comments to support draft maps that kept tenderloin and soma together
and in d6 vice chair rainer and members casely supported maps that split these
communities especially there were three out of eight recognized culture districts in san francisco that said they want to stay together in d6 and
they wanted and they voted to split them up um so that's very appalling to me and
i'm hoping that the elections commission will take this seriously and hold their your appointees accountable
thank you yield my time
okay i'm going to unmute the next caller it's a 794 number
paula you have two minutes to comment hi my name is paulina thayer uh the
elections commission has been put in a partisan position by dean preston and his allies you've also been put in the
position to violate the brown act by holding this meeting the letter writers have been grasping at
straws to point out non-existent violations of process by the redistricting task force
the 3am vote isn't a violation of crosses the meetings are public people had the opportunity to stay on public
comment occurred before and after the alleged illegality of map 4b has
been brought up by at least a couple of the letter writers when asked what's illegal the commenters
weren't able to answer reasonably or at all of course 4d advocates don't seem to
appreciate that their preferred map is illegal and that the task force tried late into the night to make that map
work a language interpretation complaint has been brought up anyone who has participated in public
hearings knows that interpreters are generally available for a limited amount of time
this isn't specific to the redistricting task force there has been a call to quote listen
especially to the marginalized communities translation especially to dean preston or the impressions of the
process the main wrong-headed assumption is that marginalized communities are solely and
best supported by the dsa another big backwards assumption is that the mapping process is to bend over
backwards and every which way to favor the far left legal legality be damned
so let's be real the extreme left is foaming at the mouth because population shifts and contiguous neighborhoods are
being properly acknowledged and they're trying to arm twist to gerrymander i think the election commission owes the
task force and the reasonable public an apology for holding this meeting and you should strongly consider issuing a
statement in support of democracy thank you
okay i am unmuting the next caller it's a 6-0 tune
prefix caller you have two minutes to comment uh yes um good evening um i'm daphne
alden i'm a san francisco resident i'm calling to show my strong support for the three members of the
redistricting task force called under to question this afternoon i can tell you
that these dedicated public servants have been working tirelessly for months to hear from everyday san franciscans
this meeting should have never happened for many reasons for one the agenda for today's special meeting provided only a
vague description of its proposed discussion which violates the brown act and public commentary information on the
original agenda was wrong maybe because this meeting was so rushed also i've lost a tremendous amount of
respect for the aclu and the league of women voters today which is super sad neither group could come up with a
coherent argument about why this meeting is even necessary to pressure the election commission
which is supposed to be nonpartisan to recall their appointees just because a group of people are unhappy with the
task force members who are doing their actual job is in direct violation of the federal
voting rights act furthermore i have been attending task force meetings for months i was
listening live to the infamous meeting at 3 1 30 a.m i'm continually impressed with the
members integrity and ability to have thoughtful conversations and they absolutely are explaining their decision
as they make them you spend months selecting these qualified candidates with integrity
ethics and intellect through a grueling application and interview process out of the pool of nearly 3 000 applicants you
need to stand by them and democracy right now thank you
okay next caller uh nicholas doyle
you have two minutes to comment hi thank you my name is nicholas doyle
and i live in the mission district and this is my first time speaking at a public meeting so bear with me i speak
on the importance of keeping the redistrict being task force independent firing three members of an independent
commission would by definition make it a dependent commission those who have a problem with the proposed maps are using
process as a facade to push partisan view of these maps one can always disagree with a process but the time for
changing a process is before selecting a task force not at the 11th hour if you look around the country redistricting
maps from the 2020 census the states and the cities that have the most fair maps
are the ones that do not have independent commissions which do not have interference from committees or legislative bodies to remove three
independent members now would make sf no better than for example the michigan republican-led state legislator which
override their independent commission earlier this year last year supreme court justice sortie mario questioned
how the supreme court could go forward with the stench of partisanship due to recent decisions i submit that if this
commission removes these members this election commission would be forever staying for years with the stench of
partisanship as well thank you for your time
next caller is eight four six prefix you are underwater
hello can you hear me hello
hi commenter you have two minutes
do you hear me yes we can okay sorry it sounds like you have some other
device turned on oh okay it's stopped it was echo sorry um i'm glad we found this bearing today
we were hearing this call because uh
she needs to turn down her um her speaker
caller are you still there we have a suggestion that you turn down your speaker
all right so let's let's move on to the next one and then we'll come back to her okay um i'm also going to ask again if
you've already made a comment please lower your hand because i see a long list and i see all the hands up still
and uh it's kind of hard for me to keep track when the hands aren't being lowered
okay seven nine four number you are you have two minutes to comment
hello okay we're going to move on
jean bearish you have two minutes to comment please good evening i'm jean barrish richmond
district d1 resident thank you for calling this hearing today i'm here to express my concern that the
hundreds of public comments which your appointees on the redistricting commission were obligated to consider
fell on deaf ears appointees to the commission must be neutral and nonpartisan but yours
consistently voted in ways that violated that pledge i urge you to review the conduct of your
appointees and assure public input is given the weight it deserves i've sat through countless
meetings stretching into the early hours of the morning never have i seen appointees sworn to
represent the city's voters strained to rationalize decisions at times i thought i felt as though i
was experiencing or well experiencing an orwellian fever dream
no matter how often your appointees heard residents of g1 and throughout the city state that the redistricting cannot
disenfranchise the underserved vulnerable communities and black and brown residents these comments were
ignored instead the districts were carefully redrawn to give disproportionate representation to the wealthy and take
it from everyone else the flip-flopping of your appointees raises serious questions about why they
abruptly changed their minds these questions will undermine the confidence of voters in the years to
come and will cast a shadow of doubt over the validity of every election that will be held in the next 10 years
voting rights are the bedrock of our democracy anything that taints these voting rights
is unacceptable today is your chance to take action that will store we that will restore our
confidence that each of our votes counts please take this corrective action
thank you next caller derek lee you have two
minutes to comment hi hello derek lee lifelong north beach resident i urge you against removing the
three task force members well i think it's terrible that we have to have this meeting in the first place um and it's a
distraction um you know for already really complicated process i do want to thank the commission for your excellent
questions in particular to the three organizations that submit letters um the reason i say that is because what i saw
was that none of those organizations could really give a straight answer on what they um what could have been different in terms of the process
um that had anything to do with the three task force members specifically um the asian law caucus brought up
lack of language access and compressed timelines issues have nothing to do with the three members in addition the the
speaker from the league of women voters mentioned concerns about legal issues and could not uh identify them
uh the speeding has revealed that there isn't really an argument that the members have done anything illegal or
that there was anything wrong to process the critics of the members must only disagree with certain outcomes
it would be inappropriate to remove these three members this late in the process resulting in an even numbered commission even if you could replace
them such replacements would not have sat through the hours of commentary and done zero the outreach
the the existing members have done thank you
okay next caller uh 314 prefix you have two minutes to comment
good evening honorable commissioners my name is simon timoney i'm a third generation san franciscan community
organizer with advocates 11 and a died in the wool progressive activist i say that last part because i
volunteered on some of the campaigns for the people who support removing members of the redistricting task force and
my god i am nothing but embarrassed at this attempt i'm disgusted at certain
elected officials who are trying to undermine our redistricting process it's undemocratic it's trump-esque my
organization has been thoroughly involved in the redistricting process from the beginning if there were anything suspicious or illegal going on
we would call for removal immediately but no such activity exists
this is all being purported for political purposes only certain organizations are losing their
minds over lines moving but here's the thing district six is at 30 over deviation when you block housing in
your district some balancing has to happen and a 3 a.m vote do you know how many 3am votes there
have been in the history of san francisco task forces like both happen after public comments how it works get
over yourself uh a task force can't bend over backwards for your bedtime
uh and here's the thing about map 4d is in delta we endorsed that map for a short time until it showed that that map
had areas 15 to 20 percent over population that map was actually illegal
and if that map were being brought forth by the redistricting task force then yes perhaps members should be removed so we
changed endorsements to map four b is in bravo everything we've seen is an
earnest transparent and legal effort by the rdtf please retain these members retain
democracy we support them keep it going thank you so much simon timoney out
okay next caller the 264 prefix you now have two minutes to come
hi my name is edward wright i'm the president of the harvey milk lgbtq democratic club our club was founded 46
years ago for the purpose of queer political self-determination by harvey milk who was only able to become the
first openly queer elected official in california because of district elections these lines matter this process matters
and this hearing matters thank you for holding it last week we joined the transgender district the leather and lgbtq cultural
district the glbtq asian pacific alliance equality california and the alice b toculis lgbtq democratic club to
condemn the task force's efforts to divide queer and trans communities and dilute our voting power as a minority
those groups are not all political and those of us that are have wildly different politics our call was not
partisan it was to protect our voting rights as a minority there's only one lgbtq county legislator in the entire
bay area san francisco has never elected a trans person in the city office and queer and trans people face legal
assault across the country our public input was never even acknowledged by the task force until last night after this
meeting was called and our communities remain divided and our votes diluted in the current draft maps against the clear
majority of public input i don't think these members are bad people i do think this has been a bad process they started
mapping too late and we don't know how they use public input because there's no system in place for how they count it
weigh it or prioritize it they have not set clear priorities to decide trade-offs and the trade-offs they make
seem to consistently favor whiter wealthier and less queer communities and just as a matter of public record
viceroy reiner did say the remarkable question discounting vulnerable communities and despite her testimony she's donated a local candidate
campaigns while acting as the vice chair of the commission those are public records and frankly i'm disturbed that she was less than honest with you today
bad processes lead to bad outcomes or in this case potentially unfair elections if you're concerned about people
questioning the independence of this process we already are i can't tell you what to do but i just want to thank you again for your time
and your oversight
next caller five zero four nine four nine two you have
two minutes to comment hello elections commission my name is jonathan mead and i've lived in san
francisco since 1979. i want to talk to you about how listening is one thing and being
responsive is another i will give you but one example and that is the disregard of the voices who live in the
tenderloin and central suma on 321 or 323 the task force released maps 3a and
3b we had three or four days to digest these maps and respond and respond we did
especially to map 3b because 3b was not a good map not for the tenderloin not for d6 not for central soma and not for
the city on 325 the task force heard from over 70 people and the vast
majority of commenters many of them from the tl and central soma were passionately
and cogently explaining how map 3b would be a disaster for their communities and was the wrong way to go but then the
task force unbelievably or maybe not voted five to four to go to map 3b
this was the day we began to feel like our voices didn't matter at the next meeting on 326 some task force members
requested a map that put the tenderloin back into d6 this was map 4d
on 4-2 the task force met again and the response was overwhelming with 117 commenters practically begging the task
force to reverse course and go with math 4d and for a brief moment we felt like we were being heard because the task
force voted 8 to 1 to move forward with math 4d but that feeling was short-lived
on 4-4 the task force worked until 2 30 in the morning somehow managed to make zero progress threw up their hands
through map 4d into the trash and voted to go in a different direction again
when hundreds of low and middle income residents and our most vulnerable our most vulnerable communities are asking
the task force not to tear our communities apart and a smaller number of wealthy residents are saying the
process is going great going great that right there should tell you something is wrong thank you
okay next caller is a 415305 number you are unmuted and you have two minutes
to comment thank you commissioners and president bernholtz for holding this hearing
there is nothing to fear from sunshine and transparency it is regrettable that the redistricting
process has become so toxic so many of us members of the public
have like the task force lost sleep spent many exhausting hours engaged in
this process those of us who are disturbed and who have spoken up about glaring in equities
in the late night vote and the disconnect between a majority of public commenters not being heard
as reflected in these votes are not paid professionals i am a landscaper and a 40-year resident
of san francisco i'm not a paid shill i volunteer in my local community and i
care deeply about my neighbors we always knew this process would be difficult and challenging we understood
that all residents all would have to make concessions and compromises
my concerns the rushed process and now impossible deadline
uh of april 14th midnight seems almost it seems moot
because of the task force is wasting of time on u-turn vote
and nowhere in the city charter does it state what exactly will happen if the deadline is missed so that's kind of a
false that's that's a false thing to be looked at also chairman townsend and the three
department of election task force members when questioned about keeping a tally a public comment we're not
responsive it's not a difficult task controls should be in place to keep track of public comment i also think
that reverend thompson should get an oscar for his performance tonight thank you
okay four zero eight two three zero you are unmuted and you have two months to
comment hi can you hear me this is adam in d6 i've lived in san
francisco on the street since just after the turn of the century one of the commissioners asked earlier
about the root cause of the mapping disagreements the root cause is the sheer size of d6
and that's had the direct result of disenfranchising most of us in d6 over the past decade with our votes being
worth 40 percent less than those on the west side of the city this has also meant that communities in
d6 have had to focus on helping each other because we don't get as much attention from the city hall
those of us south of i-80 south soma mission bay et cetera are ignored by the communities north of 80
both groups feel strongly about staying together which is only possible if the task force puts us into separate districts
we're happy to do that but we've heard from many commenters in other districts such as d5 that they don't want that to
happen that leaves the option of either destroying our community of interest or splitting the
tenderloin and central soma community of interest population challenges like this cosmetics and other districts again
especially those in the center of the city like d5 which we know is gerrymandered in the past a reminder a
district is not a cli d5 residents can't speak for d6
the change that we've been seeing is the voices in d6 have started speaking
up for ourselves because we don't want to be split apart we have our own communities there are two large communities in d6
trying to keep those together is causing this tension the task force has done the best they
can with really a very untenable situation
i certainly do not like all the decisions they made but moving to 4b was not done in bad faith it was done after
community feedback i think you have a choice you can either support the independent process
or you can go ahead and
next caller uh danielle d diebler i'm sorry if i'm mispronouncing it you have two minutes
to comment i will say that's amazing you actually pronounced my name correctly so thank you so i want to thank the
registering task force and the election commission for their commitment to public service and also fair
representation in elections i have a couple of small comments um so a couple of callers have said that we had 3 000
applicants for the registering task force that's actually not correct it was 35. um so i just want to under give
people some perspective um i agree on the characterization of qualitative versus quantitative that a few other
callers have talked about so you need both of them to be able to do this process so the quantitative helps you
understand kind of the input of the community at a a very unbiased
perspective qualitative it helps you understand the narrative of the community right what's the community of interest that people are trying to talk
about and i also want to make a shout out to john carroll i have actually been in every registering task force meeting
either in the meeting or listening to the meetings afterwards and he has done an incredible job dealing with a very
very hard problem there are a few other things i like to call out uh so i think the registering
task force members they received inadequate training um in the late part of march they were asking a lot about
the vra requirements and asking for the city clerk to give them a memo on that that took a little bit of time to get
back to them it was it meant that they did not have the education i think that they needed to be able to understand how they were
going to actually produce these maps the community training for the mapping tool
was not adequate you need to be someone who understands how to use mapping tools to be able to use this tool it doesn't work on mobile it doesn't work on
tablets it's it's not adequate for the public to give input uh so something
better on terms of paper maps uh the community outreach not adequate as well uh the language access for each of the
meetings early times we had many times where it was obvious that a particular district had a language preference or
some type of language that was required in that particular district and maybe somebody didn't ask for it but it wasn't provided um and we i saw it many times
in d1 uh thank you
next is an 826 prefix you have two minutes to comment
hello this is anastacio binopolis i'm a tenant in district 8. i thank you for calling this
meeting to call the task force members to task
they were listening but they weren't hearing what we were
saying and so that's why they were called to task
[Music] it seems like they were tone deaf they're catching on a little bit now
but it's too late they're not they don't have their heart in the process
i don't know how it's going to turn out but it's it's still a mess
and anything you can do to help with this process
would would be i'd be grateful for thank you
okay next caller four one five two six zero you are unmuted you have two
minutes to comment hi uh can you hear me
yes we can yeah my name is dr theresa palmer i'm a retired doc in d5
i am not a robotic member of dean preston's minions i just live here and i care about my
community and even more i worry about d6
and it's there seems to be an extremely flawed
even if it isn't technically illegal there's something terribly wrong with the process
where the task force took forever to listen and then put out maps that destroyed um
communities especially underserved communities i live north of panhandle i've always
considered myself to be living in the western addition to this for this to be part of the haight ashbury
um my uh my uh immediate area is divided within
blocks into five different districts it's nuts and there's no justification for it and
this was done so d6 could be broken up it doesn't make any sense
there's something wrong they may have been physically the task force may have been physically present
at some of these meetings but they did not listen and
it wreaks to me of undue influence there's something going on it needs to
be fixed what i ask you to do at this late stage is keep the task force on as short a
rope as you can do it they need each member needs to represent all the people
of san francisco and not their people that is the the nature and the mission
of their task um please do your best um to um help the
people you have hit the two minute limit i'm sorry
next caller uh 305 586 you have two minutes
hi my name is jessica paula um i want to say that i think the task
force are doing like an incredible job given that they have to do
listen to so many people and try to consider as many things as possible but they're trying to fix
something that was created 10 years before them 20 years before them and i don't envy the task that they had to
they have to like undo what's been done and try to make it better for the next 10 years for the next 20 years
and that's what i wanted to say i don't think they should be taken off the task at all thank you very much
okay next caller dana bouchelle you have two music on it
hi my name is dana and i live in d6 and i'm calling in support
of all three task force members this area represents san francisco politics at its absolute worst
instead of acknowledging that decades of policies have locked us into an array of tough choices we just impugn the
character of those charged with actually making those decisions pretend that if they were not there everything would
continue to be magic happy unicorns you need to stop doing that it's it's a really bad habit and it's
really bad for democracy the fact is the city's population has grown over the past decade but not in a
geographic equitable way so that means that districts have to change a lot
there's never going to be a perfect map because human relationships are complex and overlapping at the end of the day we're just going to have to accept that
district lines are somewhat arbitrary at the end i know this i live on a border of two
districts myself um it's fine you'll live thank you
okay next caller uh selena you have two minutes to come
hello hi um can you hear me yes we can hi my name is selina um i wanted to um i
wanted to call in to support the three members of the task force i've been to
several of the meetings um and i i see how they work and i
i wanted to say they've been doing amazing job um listening to everyone and there
um each meeting there was so many people calling in and they were patiently listening and then looking at the map
and i i i myself is also um you know i'm am non-native english speaker i do
speak a different uh i speak cantonese and mandarin so um each time
doing these meetings there were non-english speakers that were calling
in and um they were being listened and uh informations were
taken down and listened to um so i i'm not quite sure you know when
when it comes to not listening where is that coming from especially i was there earlier and i have to leave
the meeting uh the in-person meeting um there were so many um seniors there and i was speaking to them and they they
wanted to let you know that they've been hurt um and they are in strong support of the
three members um they wanted to let you know um you know let them do their job
because they should not um they they should be independent they should not be pushed just because someone is not happy
we should provide the feedback but we should not remove someone in the process of and restart the whole thing over
again if that's a waste of time that's a waste of money so we should we should provide feedback
but we should not remove the members um from this task force let them do the job
and this is this is why they have meetings um in person meeting in different districts
your two-minute max oh thank you thank you
next caller is five zero five five seven zero you have two minutes
hi i'm keith mosher i'm currently representative of d6 which means i'm underrepresented i'm a future resident
of who knows apparently i'm the lamash that gets moved every single draft but i don't actually care about that because i
trust these commissioners um and then your comment mr brockman he alluded to what present is the set if
you were to give in to this overt meddling campaign remove these commissioners you know would they would future pushers be more open to
persuasion but i have a simpler question who would want to do this job already there's so much damage done to like
this is a thankless job these are volunteers who have been working late in the hours of the night every night
trying to do what is frankly impossible um and i'm so happy that they found three people who are so dedicated and
caring to getting this very important thing somewhat right you try to point me i would say no
because i like to clock off before 10 pm um
i listened to other comments that i heard was that they have been given almost no resources there's a little pandemic no procedure no process had to learn
everything from scratch and i think they've done an amazing job and i'm just mad that they have to put up with it but they have to have their
names dragged in the newspaper for all the time they sacrificed trying to help the city to get a fair
and balanced map as best it can it's i'm very upset that we have to be here i am
upset that you gave into the pressure to hold this meeting um and i really hope that you put the
foot down now and don't let this go any further and let them do the job that they have volunteered
their time so gratefully to do for our city thank you commissioners
next caller you are unmuted and you have two minutes to comment
thank you my name is stephanie and as an elected delegate to the california democratic party and a san francisco
resident who has been watching and participating in the month-long process of redistricting i am shocked and
dismayed that this commission would take the unprecedented step of scheduling a meeting to discuss the possible removal
of three members of the task force that the commission itself appointed after a lengthy open and transparent selection
process make no mistake what you are doing and even scheduling this meeting is a blatant corruption of an otherwise
fair and non-political process and the fallout will reverberate throughout the entire political community
the last few months have been full of the impressive committed professional compassion and intellectual efforts of
these task force members who brought the highest integrity to the challenge and enormity of the job they endured hours
long sessions of public comments as well as verbal and written harassment yet they showed up and brought an impartial
non-political ethic to their task your actions leave the public and me with no choice but to conclude that
this decision to consider removal of three of them is purely political a move of the at the
behest of supervisors peskin preston and chan that not only undermines our democracy and violates our voting rights
but also taints the integrity of the commission the redistricting process and the already solid reputations of those
supervisors should you remove any one of these members of this late stage after all the solid and impartial work they
have done it will correctly be perceived by the public as a threat to our right to representative government and you
will have knowingly caused damage to the fabric and foundation of political life in this city for years to come i urge
you to take a page from your own task force members and do not kowtow to the corrosive political influence of
supervisors chan peskin and preston i implore you to engage in the level of integrity honesty and responsibility
your commission is bound to uphold and that the task force has valiantly displayed to this point thank you
leilani you have two minutes to comment you're unmuted thank you
i just wanted to say that thank you for holding this meeting i know a lot of people didn't want it but it's good for
transparency that is what democracy is the issue is that some commissioners
make comments that sometimes seemed biased that sometimes seemed that they
were protecting their own districts some one commissioner complained about
if i keep hearing about redlining i mean this is why the hearing was called for
today i was one of the speakers who brought up that after seven o'clock there was no
translation and many people kept calling from seven till three a.m
and they didn't have a translator and then after that the commissioner would start drawing maps how could you draw
maps if you didn't even know what they said so i was sort of confused like where's the organization
they weren't showing maps that other people had drawn they were stating that they just
couldn't make d6 whole which i've seen other maps that have
um to me it felt like the vp was trying to really protect russian hill
and it just came across and so you know this pairing is being held today because i think people need
to go back watch and listen to the video and hear that a lot of personal political
statements were made by the commissioners and instead of just focusing on mapping they started talking
about supervisors being upset and their commission in the and their constituents being upset just focus on the maps just
get to it the best way you can and they made it political the commissioners um vp commissioner she
made it political and so did others on the panel and i know it's very
tense right now but as residents we have a right to call in and say how we feel about our district
and it's up for them to have tough skin and to keep on um making the maps work
and they i'm sorry you've hit your two minutes thank you thank you
zay lat you are next you have two minutes to comment oh thank you so much um hi commissioners
my name is a david latt i am calling in today to express my strong support for the
three dedicated public seven appointed by this very own commission to the
redistricting task force i'm supporting and standing with queso lee dicta raynor
rayner copper these commissioners have listened to people um so much up until three am in the
morning which is now being called into question and accused of for not listening to the public
i will also like to remind the commissioners for the lack of proper notice that
no to no specific actions being taken to the public to give the public a chance to
give proper input i think it's mostly because it is being rushed the three organization which i admire
tremendously today registered their complaint but did not make recommendation to remove the members
actually they were asked repeatedly to whether they have a position and they
did not
okay i i did not mute that call i don't know how that happened
next caller six five zero five i'm sorry six five zero seven six six you have two
minutes to comment hello commissioners my name is jonathan
booneman i'm a resident of district 2. and i'm calling in because i'm very angry that we even have this meeting
tonight i think just by having the meeting we have already did so much damage to volunteer efforts
in san francisco to participate in our political process i'm a recent resident and i'm starting
to become engaged even though i'm not even a citizen yet but becoming engaged in the neighborhood because i'm learning
that i love this city and i care so much about it i think by efforts like this one by even having a meeting to discuss
the potential to remove people at the 11th hour we are showing that this is about power
play that this is about partisan politics and we're setting a terrible example and i'm really disappointed by this this
is a complete waste of time and that's a bad example in san francisco
please refrain from any such efforts in the future thank you
nathan smith you are unmuted and you have two minutes to comment
thank you commission um i want to be clear the aclu and the league of women voters are engaged in an
overtly politically partisan attack on the task force and the existence of this meeting is an extension of that attack
and a direct threat to the task force members who have worked for eight months to resist gerrymandering
they want you to put your finger on the scales of a specific map and many of the commenters today have said exactly that
the task force must consider every need expressed at every meeting over the last eight months whether it is in person via
phone or by email they must also consider all of the individuals who never make comment just
because you can't make public comment doesn't mean you don't count the idea that a relatively small number of people
of politically partisan actors who have the luxury of coming in person should be prioritized in a city of over 880 000 is
an absolute travesty as the chair pointed out the concern over the 3m activity and the
threat of illegality quote unquote illegality were outright lies there's been a lot of talk about process
today making false accusation is in fact a corruption on that process and indulging those politically partisan
false accusations is an extension of that corruption scheduling a surprise meeting on top of a previously scheduled
redistricting task force meeting and preventing four task members from conducting their business is a further
corruption of that process i urge you to end this now put an end to putting
additional restrictions on the task force is an unprecedented attack on quote the process that everyone here
claims to care about so much members lee cooper and reiner have served honorably in the face of threats harassment and
stalking the only meeting you should have you should hold is to commend them thank you
okay william walker you have two minutes to
comment hi commissioners uh and staff i'm former secretary of this body my name is
william walker i live in d11 hope you're all doing well all right um
i made a map today and after the tool crashed about seven times
i was able to get d6 with tenderloin soma and um
uh the leather district all in one one it didn't have treasure island i was also
able to get the western edition in district five um i was able to do a district 10 that
respects the wishes of the african-american community as well as the district 11. it's on twitter will clancal is my
twitter um i've also emailed it to you all to your commission address i remember that
um what i will say is i don't think you should remove these members but
they've been saying for the past three meetings that i've been at and i've been there till 3am too and i don't have the
pleasure of being a member of the task force they say that it's impossible to make this map with those districts whole well
i've done it um and i don't have consultants drawing the maps for me um
and i also was told by the vice chair that like i shouldn't um bring my anger and i don't think i've
been angry um but i am upset that that a chair of a body would tell someone a
vice chair would tell someone how they should appear it's really important as public servants that we listen to folks
and and and try to let them say what they need and 180 people ask for d6 to
be whole and for d5 and d10 and d11 and if those districts split they'll dilute
the vote of the african-american community so i hope you consider that and i appreciate you for calling the
meeting i don't think the members should be removed but i think you should be aware of their their what they're doing and and be aware of
the process and make sure that the the will of the people is heard thank you and good to talk to you
okay next caller uh six five zero two two two you have two minutes to comment
hi my name is jennifer yan i'm a resident in district 2. i'm here to show my solidarity and support to the
redistricting task force these dedicated public servants have been working tirelessly for months to
hear from everyday san franciscans i have myself called him many times and i'm actually quite upset that i we have
to call in be in front of the election commission about the possibility of removal this is
completely partisan published political play and
the agenda of today's meeting provides only a vague description of its proposed discussion and action which violates the
brown act in the same way that accord from the board of education over the discussion the last year
to pressure the elections commission which is supposed to be nonpartisan to recall their appointees just because a
group of people are unhappy with the tax board members during their job is in direct violation of the federal voting
rights act i've been watching the redistricting task force for months i'm continuously
impressed with their integrity and ability to have thoughtful conversations your job as the election commission is
to be non-partisan and not then to political tactics i've been listening to the calls this
evening and many people have expressed the concern this meeting should not take place from the first place
i'm an immigrant myself and i take pride in my american citizenship and i voting
rights very very carefully and uh and i strongly urge the election
commission not to consider removing the task force members thank you
thank you okay phone number four one two seven zero
eight you have two minutes to comment right you hear me
yes all right well hey commissioner um i just want to say that you know just
because we have a bunch of angry whining political insiders you know they're just annoyed that they
might not be getting exactly what they want and to be districting and so you know they want to derail many months
of work by the task force i'm not sure why we're elevating their illegitimate complaints by even holding
this meeting uh but because this meeting is there i do want to call in and say well
i'm disappointed and disgusted at some of the elected supervisors involving themselves in the redistricting process
i believe that it's highly inappropriate and i wish that they'd stop and i also want to express my support
for the members of the task force who've worked really hard for many months and
especially so over the last couple of weeks thank you thank you
next caller uh 847 phone number you have two minutes to comment
hello commissioners thank you for taking your time tonight my name is theo gordon and i'm a long time resident of san
francisco i'd like to encourage you to affirm the independence of the task force and let them finish their job
reject these partisan calls to remove them from their roles and let them make the maps as they have sworn to do
if you look at the opposition of the task force we have folks like dean preston who's scared about losing the
wealthy homeowners that are apart they are his uh support base from his district sanderly fewer wants to pick
voters for her handpicked successor and hillary ronan on twitter today in a in a
fight that was not becoming of a public servant with matt haney said that she was disgusted to matt hainey you used to
stand with us before you decided to abandon your district thought that wasn't a betrayal because honey mahogany
was going to win so the tlcr on that is that hillary rodham is upset because she thinks the new lines or the possible
lines are not doing enough to benefit her chosen candidate for the district the next section sixth
election these are all political considerations from political operatives they are
exactly the things that the task force is not allowed to consider it is the things that task force are not considering and they were for not to do
that and they are doing it doing their job as as they're supposed to
please dismiss these concerns and let them finish that job finally in an even more egregious
display of the utter hackery of this complaint the league of pissed off voters this morning boosted an
accusation by scott feeney that amounted to hey i was at a party four years ago i
don't really remember what happened but i heard someone say something about redistricting and maybe case lee was
there but probably wasn't but i think he's friends with somebody who might have been at that party give me a break
this is partisan hackery at its worst it san francisco uh it's a bunch of samsung
politico operatives trying to undermine our commitment to democracy
please ignore there please please ignore the pressure
thank you [Music] i don't see any other i don't see
anyone's hands raised i see a lot of hands that were not put down
so i'm going to clear all the hands if i miss someone please
star three again okay so you can be included dwight crow
you have two minutes of comment all right hey can you hear me
yes phenomenal uh dwight crow here so i'm a resident uh my father grandmother and
great-grandmother all called san francisco home i am actually uh calling in from nepal so i'm really glad you can
hear me and i've been lying for six hours because i did not know how to time this directly in short i'm
calling it in solidarity of the redistricting task force these task members were selected for their capability their partisanship and their
love of san francisco when i heard about the desire to pull them from the task force i was horrified this strikes me as
nothing but some groups in sf trying to subvert our independent process in their favor if
there were complaints about our task force members or the process it should have emerged earlier and i think some of
the suggestions for greater transparency are worthwhile however the fact that this only emerged after the maps were
shelved shows to me that it is not about the process but about the outcome i'm profoundly grateful for this
independent commission please do not set the perfect precedent of breaking the integrity and independence of our fair
elections in sl thank you thank you
todd berman you have two minutes to comment thank you um
and thank you for uh putting in the work today and and doing this
um i've been following the uh the redistricting process and
something to note i think is that you know since the last redistricting process
the san francisco has created cultural districts which if these are not
these official cultural districts are not um communities of interest that should be
have the top priority i don't know what would be i think that's where the uh the lines in the sand should be
uh but then when we see the task force here an overwhelming public comment to
keep uh these cultural districts intact uh when districts are drawn seeing that
that um those comments be ignored uh in favor of put keeping together other areas
i don't i see that and i just think the only inclusion i can see is that is
that some members have a desired result a map
in mind and their reverse engineering arguments and a process to get to those maps
which happen to favor wealthier voters and you know wealthier areas
and commissioner reiner told you today that she is considering all input but the task force has refused to
consider the community unity map that came from a genuine collaborative process
i heard you ask commissioner cooper if he was contacted by elected officials between the big d4
u-turn vote um and i did not hear you ask that of
commissioners reiner and chase lee so i think that's something to consider so really ask them you know have they
talked to public officials you know get them on record let's find out like
um do they have an end goal in mind um and also i think you should stand up
you have reached your two minute limit i'm sorry thank you
and the last caller you are unmuted oops no you're not you're unmuted you have
two minutes can you hear me now yes it is david pilpel so uh could i get
a 30-second uh warning uh before the end thank you uh this is a tough issue and
there is not much time here to speak i served as an appointee on the task force
uh from the elections commission 10 years ago there are still people who hate me for
the work that i did then and they always will i have attended some many of the
meetings this year i applied to serve on the task force again last year
by this commission i was not appointed there is much that i could say on all this last june i spoke in support of
your three appointees and the record properly reflects those comments much has been said and written about the task
force and its work especially in the last few days and hours i am not happy about the current map and i hope that
all task force members work to improve it today and tomorrow having however having weighed a possible
bad map versus the considerable uncertainty from removing one or more
members i oppose removal right now we all bear some responsibility here the
appointment vetting process needs to be upgraded for next time the work plan outreach and timeline all of those need
review and changes in the future no question clerk calvio spoke to some of that earlier while some very heavy
politics are at work here thanks i'll speed up appreciate it i may
not agree with all of your appointees and my views are not intended to be popular i conclude that it would
be worse for the city to remove anyone at this point i repeat my request that all task force members including chair
townsend reconsider what makes sense for the city over the weekend i respect different views on the issue here but i
ask each of you to decide what's best for the city overall i think it is too late for better or different members but
it's not too late for a better map thank you for listening thank you
next we have 415 987 you have two minutes to comment
good evening uh commissioners my name is carol ito i have been voting for 70 years in san
francisco and d7 and i've been listening i was at your hearing for five hours this afternoon
and now i'm home on the internet listening to the proceedings and i strongly want to urge you
to retain the three members of the task force i have watched since september the
deliberations that you went through in your vetting to appoint these three members and i don't
and i hope they haven't disappointed you i know there's been some questions and some quotes from the legal women voters
and you commissioners had questioned some of miss reiner's quotes which i believe you
need to ask for the tapes because i think it was taken out of context and also the accusation against chase lee
about portola district i heard him last night that he was protecting that area and responding to some of the
comments in the portola area was retained in district 10 i believe and i
don't think you've been hearing from the other districts like my district 7 where the task force has done a lot of
listening have appropriately brought back the omi into d11 as they wanted and
taken them out of my d7 and also district five they've done a lot of back and forth
trying to keep japan town a 115 year old community in the western addition to in
the same district because they've been working together for probably over 80 years as smaller communities in this
city and i think that the three appointments that you had vetted very well have been very
impressive uh linnell cooper as you know walked every precinct before he was even
appointed to understand what this task was going to involve tessa lee is calling you
you have uh hit the two minute okay thank you thank you thank you
they can hear you last caller three one five five six zero you have two minutes
hi commissioners thank you for staying this long i i really appreciate that you
guys are holding this hearing today and and are doing performing this oversight function i know it's a touchy subject
um i've been observing this process under resident d5 i just wanted to say that i think you're asking the right
question in today's meeting which is what happened between the saturday meeting which was voted on 8-1 and
monday to justify such a radical change in the maps that was really what upset me and a lot of other people i believe
is that such a radical was cha change was made this late in the process and and one question you know i listened
to the public comments on both days and they were substantially similar and so that begs the question to me like
what what happened outside of the public hearing to effectuate this change it wasn't the public comments and i think
like the question i would really want to have asked of all of the task force members not just yours is if parties like the
mayor weighed in specifically with them and and communicated with them during
this time period i also wanted to highlight specific integrity concerns that were made by another comment letter
that you guys received today which i hope you can find it made by scott
ceni that specifically recalled eyewitness his own eyewitness
testimony of chazel lee just at the sfumby
election night party discussing gerrymandering and specifically discussing
moving the tenderloin out of d6 in order to improve their election chances in the
future and i think like this this is kind of a new allegation and it's a bit you know
it's a bit of a bombshell and i really wish you guys would take that seriously and you know i think for that reason
like that that's another piece of you know something worth considering
that that uh does you know disqualified chasel in my mind and i appreciate the work that
that question remembers thank you thank you
that was the last caller oh
let me see if that's the same person hi i'm sorry is this the person who commented already oh sorry i didn't hang up sorry
thank you all right
all right uh thank you to all of the commenters in person and
on the phone i think now it's time for the commission to to talk so i i open it up to my fellow
commissioners who would like to make
i i have some preliminary thoughts um which is that uh
you know reflecting on that meeting on wednesday
um but i i think that you know without a lot of
background information we gave a lot of credence to concerns raised by public commenters
um you know you know some of them may be legitimate i don't know
um and then a lot of credence to [Music]
letters issued by some of the speakers you know and those letters are from institutions
that i personally respect very much like the legal women voters or asian law caucus
or aclu san francisco and i think that
i think that credence and you know the lack of background led this commission i'm not sure it was
the commission actually because i don't think we took a vote on it uh to improvidently
set and you know and propose an agenda i would say um
i don't necessarily think it's wrong that we we heard from the public and uh invited
the redistricting task force members that we appointed to appear here and to
address concerns i do question whether it was the right move
for this commission to
uh suggests that we would take a remedy as drastic as removal
without a fact finding or without understanding or contemplating or discussing what the standard should be
you know i have so much sympathy for those three members of the task force
and that's that's what i feel the worst about here and that's what i i feel like we should all be embarrassed
about to be honest i think i think this commission should be embarrassed that we
put them in a position where we suggested that that that they had um
impliedly engaged in some kind of malfeasance
where even the authors of those letters given the opportunity to state on the
record whether there was an illegality uh whether those members should be any or
all of them should be removed whether even what the standards are that we
should contemplate for discussing and thinking about whether they should be removed
that somehow that we can accomplish anything that drastic
in one session days away from [Music] their when their maps are due and taking
them away from their work when we took months and months in this process that was a grave grave mistake and it was
we i don't personally i don't think it's enough for us to just say okay well we invited and we listened and that's good
enough because one we've damaged these people we've damaged them and i feel very very
badly that that i'm any part of this
where the these volunteers these volunteers who've stayed up so late and
you know done their best you know are artillery like this it's it's embarrassing
it's embarrassing and i don't think i personally don't think it's enough for us to just say oh well you know uh you
know you know no malfeasance found and and walk away i mean there needs to be
something more than that in my personal opinion in my personal opinion i think
at a minimum we need to find what has been so apparent here which is that there is
no malfeasance and we need to affirm the work and the
independence of the task force because to do otherwise would be to
undermine what they're there for
and i think we need to applaud their hard work we haven't been there we can't say that
some some words were in artfully said i don't know but i do know that they're
working hard and that's apparent so that would be that would be my motion
i think at the meeting and in the letters there were serious
allegations and we took them seriously and i think we wanted an opportunity to
understand what was going on because we are not an oversight body for the
task force i can't speak for the rest of you i had no clue what was going on and i in fact didn't know of any of the
issues with the task force until tuesday so i think there was a lot of value in
us understanding what happened i do think at the meeting on wednesday i
don't believe any of our commissioners talked about removal i know removal was
brought up and i don't think we've redirected and that was a mistake on our end because
certainly in my mind removal was not on the table
i wholeheartedly agree with you that i see no reason after this meeting
especially that we should be removing our three task force members
i think we did identify that there are some shortcomings of the process
but the remedy is not removing our three top our three appointees nor taking any
other action other than potentially participating in i think the task force is putting
together recommendations for the next one and perhaps we have comments on that i think you're right i
i similarly am i think i it was heartening to see how committed
and dedicated these three individuals were to the process which is what we saw in them when we appointed them
and what we were hoping for and any
anything that i think i potentially would disagree with them on
if i were in their shoes would be decisions and i'm not in their shoes and i haven't been through that process so i
don't feel comfortable saying that that there's anything
other than uh that they have done anything other than earn our kind of gratitude and respect
and i similarly would uh
i think there is value to what we did here today but i don't necessarily think that having this meeting was necessary
or the right course of action or the commission uh president bernhardt
thank you vice president chapel i want to um agree with both of your comments i think
there was a fundamental there's a fundamental misunderstanding uh clearly expressed by
many of the i counted 50 some odd comments
um and us as to whether or not we are an oversight body for the task
force um i have been unable to find
that documented anywhere and i think
that is one of the first things that will need to be clarified i have taken extensive notes
um on all of the public comment in person and online as well as the letters and
emails and whatnot um i have at least eight recommendations that were
very specifically um put forward for the task force um
i too feel like um the there is a statement necessary from
this commission both appreciating the work of the task force
um and calling for uh process improvements both for the task force and also i think
there needs to be some clarity this may be a question to the city attorney's office over
who is oversight for a task force um we we are an appointing authority
of one of three and frankly i believe that was where our authority ended
um so i think there's a lot of um information that needs to be clarified
both for ourselves and for the public i'm not quite sure if commissioner jung was making a formal motion for a
statement um of support or a statement of a statement
i would make a motion that we would um let me just find it i drafted it
earlier um
sorry to hold you up um that
uh that we make a resolution that after hearing extensive public comment
that the elections commission finds that the work of the redistricting task force uh
may be imperfect it could certainly benefit from a series of recommendations which we might either
list out here or elsewhere but there's been no information to suggest that either the our
appointees or the task force writ large have committed any misconduct that
undermines the integrity of their work we appreciate and thank them
uh for their service and we move on um whether or not we should
continue to as has been suggested by members of the public
um we should claim some oversight role for
the task force i i don't see where that role is given to us i think the public has
with many motivations turned to this commission we called this hearing for information
but i do not believe we are i do not know where it is stated that we are the oversight body for the task force
the question for dca4 is the agenda item for this meeting was
somewhat intentionally oblique are we able to make
a motion for a resolution like president bernholtz has just described or is some
that something that we should agendize for our next meeting which we have not
canceled the general april meeting or whichever one becomes the next meeting
what is more appropriate for my process point i want to thank you for the question
uh vice president um i believe that your agenda item stated that your hearing was
uh regarding your appointees to the redistricting task force so any sort of
resolution um that you'd like to make in support of uh appointees
uh will be within what the agenda states um
great helpful to know um i do want to let the other commissioners
speak now before we gonna move forward with motions
yeah so i um i echo some of the um you know comments both of you have shared so far um i i do
disagree though on the on the point that we should feel embarrassed today i think that um
given the circumstances um i think having the hearing today was valuable on wednesday we heard
so many public comments like by far more public comments than we've ever heard in any commission meeting in my eight years
and we really didn't have an opportunity at that meeting to really um
discuss them or determine the merits of any of any of the comments that were being made
because that that was taking place during the um agenda item for future meetings
so we we were given this information um
and due to the compressed timeline there's very little very little um we could do to kind of
know whether we should have this meeting so i think if we didn't have the meeting it could have been viewed as negligent
because if these concerns were valid then um we just don't know but also i think by
having this hearing we also gave a chance for the three appointees to
to speak for themselves and to defend themselves and to speak about their work and we also let the chair speak
and we let um the people that are in support of them speak so i feel
like this was a healthy discussion this is an activity that happens only once every 10 years so i think it's okay to
have one long meeting you know for that for that event
but um and we we i don't think we as a commission we have hillary'd any of the
any of the um appointees for certain but we did ask them questions to kind of
probe some of the comments that were made on wednesday night and um i think it was a healthy discussion even though it it takes a lot
of time from all of you and the appointees and also ourselves so
um and again i do want to thank everyone all of you for being here and for everyone that's listening in a home
for um you know taking the time to listen and to comment
so i would like to agree with all of the comments my fellow commissioners have made i
i really want to echo commissioner gerdonic's point i this is democracy
we we were asked by the public to have a hearing uh we provided a forum
for everyone to hear directly from our appointees
uh i agree with uh
president bernhard's i i don't believe we're an oversight body i i don't think that makes sense
because the whole point of the redistricting task force is that they're an independent
uh body so uh but we do have responsibility
as an appointing authority to make sure that our appointees are
living up to their mandates and i think this hearing was an attempt
to ascertain that um i
think that we were very respectful toward our appointees i i was not part of the
appointing process but i i trust that my fellow commissioners didn't go through a thorough vetting process i have no
reason to believe that it wasn't a completely open and transparent process and you did
not you know go through all the due diligence that i expect you would have
um to find the best candidates uh having said that some serious
allegations were made um from very respected organizations
and when that happens and there's a compressed timeline and it was an agenda for our meeting on
wednesday i feel like we had no choice except to call a special meeting
and to do it as quickly as possible to try to get to the bottom of things
i feel like even though this meeting has taken a very long time um it has given us the opportunity to
hear a lot of different perspectives uh you know as president bernhard said
there there clearly a number of recommendations that that probably will
emerge from our discussions and um
you know it's an opportunity to uh to discuss those and
to see you know what can be done at this point so uh i am not at all embarrassed i
think it's exactly what we should have done uh we did it we were respectful they had an opportunity to
explain uh and everyone got to hear it that that is
transparency um what i did hear uh
was that there are concerns about transparency uh
certainly the optics of the middle of the morning early morning meeting is terrible which it sounds like they were
aware of but it sounds like they have no had no
choice my assessment having been through a breakneck speed kind of redistricting
myself for the entire state is that they did not allow themselves time
uh to have a um a a public input process
um that would allow them to have enough time to have the kind of conversation
you need to to come up with creative solutions and unfortunately their their back is
against the wall right now uh there are a number of people who said that this this
deadline is meaningless and that's not true it is the law it is in our charter
um there's also a state law that requires all municipalities to turn in their
districts by the 17th i think it gives a couple of additional days so while people think there's no penalty
um there is and the penalty would actually be for the department we have oversight over which is the department of
elections so so i think there there are clearly
um opportunities to improve what's in the charter
you know when i think back at our process at the state level when we
had no agency and we had to create an agency from scratch and hire people and do the mapping
and all the public outreach in the same amount of time uh for four different statewide maps we
at least had the advantage that in the constitution it said we had to have a draft map
by june 15. and i also remember we were proud of
ourselves and congratulated ourselves that we had made that deadline we thought we had such a great map and then the tomatoes started
being hurled and so it is just unrealistic to think
that you're going to get much meaningful public input before the public has something to react
to and i think that was a miscalculation by the redistricting task force
[Music] maybe a lack of training as the member of the public alluded to i
personally have trained local redistricting task force from san jose
santa clara berkeley i mean all throughout the bay area and elsewhere and the first thing i told
them is get a draft map out as early as you can because you won't get reaction you won't
have meaningful public input you won't be able to start to work with the public on what the solutions might be to um
to understand the trade-offs in a really deep way unless you give the public time to react to analyze those maps and to
come up with alternatives um that that might be within uh
the law so uh
i'm happy we have this meeting i hope everyone in the public is happy as well
um i
personally believe that uh [Music] we do not want to be in a position of of
blowing up the independent redistricting process we have in san francisco
i think removing any of our appointees at this late of
the day risks doing that because we cannot possibly replace them
and even if we did i'm not sure what the new people would be able to
contribute unless they've been following every single meeting up up to this point um
i think it was i took it as a positive sign that mr
cooper told us that they are not done that reverend townsend told us they are not done they are working hard
to make the map better um i think that they have a communication
issue i i do think that if we're going to do a resolution that
that we might make some recommendations uh not only to our appointees but to the redistricting task force about um
explaining the rationale for their decisions uh because while you will not make
anyone happy in a redistricting process at least you can help them understand
and and by giving them your rationale you give them an ability to provide
alternatives uh you can't unlock the creativity of the public unless they understand why
and so those are my thoughts right now
um i just wanted to say thank you to all of you and to the public and to people who
called in who tuned in for this long and just participated in this
i understand they were very strong opinions in many directions um but i think it's important to show
grace to all those who participated um i
echo several sentiments i would like to speak for myself on um
a few of them uh specifically the intention of the meeting today because i i'd like to elevate
what you had said as it pertains to the agenda and the titling of the meeting
because um i don't think anyone on this sitting up here
intended for this to be some sort of judicial process of oversight where we then would vote to
remove i don't think that that was my intention um and that was not the conversation
that i was privy to on wednesday um and so i want to just clarify
for the record but my intention was not to
have that type of meeting today i will say that
i was disturbed by some of the things that i heard on wednesday
that were disappointing as a citizen um
but they and they required they required us to listen
and i think that the importance of this conversation today which i expressed to
also the wonderful folks who who participated is that
um and i echo this statement i think someone else said which is giving people
a forum to express and defend themselves um i think the people who came to the
meeting on wednesday expressed that they felt there was a lack of clarity on why
decisions were made and so this was a space for those
folks to come forward and say what why they made the choices they made and
to explain themselves which they did um and i think that i i am not
embarrassed by that um i have a wise friend uh who shared no
matter what you do and this wasn't this is in a different context but what you do
at any point you just have to be able to sleep at night and i feel like i can go home and sleep at night knowing that
we were listening to the public in every capacity that we could and we are not
here to um be a judicial body
that makes a choice of removal it is just to provide information
um i will say i i i think they were also in a very tough position with covid and the census data
being released the way that it was and omicron and i think we probably didn't even give enough attention to that
component um and i think
there are three last things i want to mention which is i agree any decision or conversation
around removal would be worse for the city and less democratic um
i think that there are significant recommendations that should be discussed potentially not
during this meeting but in the next conversation um pertaining to how we can improve
transparency uh in that process generally and i will say i also think that
incorporating the voices from the communities that expressed that they had
not been listened to um is important and
you know specifically that our body doesn't even reflect san francisco i
think that is a completely fair point that we should be taking very seriously
and we should listen to that and have a conversation about that um and so
yeah i just i think that there was a lot of good that came out of today despite it not
being popular or um and making anyone happy so
that's all there was uh i actually was making a motion uh i do appreciate uh uh
president bernholtz's um uh you know motion herself the only
challenge i have with that is one it's not enough because i think we have heard from the appointees we've
heard from the witnesses we've heard taken countless hours of public testimony and there is a finding of no
malfeasance and that's what this was this was not just a meeting right you called witnesses
and it is not enough for us you know yes the suggestion from you
know about removal that came from the audience on wednesday and also came you know from
council uh that i i didn't hear anyone here affirm that although that's the way it was interpreted by the public
we can't just leave it at that because it's inappropriate and what we're saying is inconsistent because we're saying
both that the charter is silent on oversight and yet we want to keep a short leash
and oversee these task force members that is inconsistent so i think
i you know with respect my motion and incorporating some of um
the language from the president is that after uh hearing from the appointees
witnesses and public commenters we we find as a commission no malfeasance
we applaud our appointees for their hard work and we as a commission affirm the
independence of the redistricting task force that's my motion i second it
okay so i think now we have to take public comment
before a vote no no we already took public that's the motion now we can decide
so so on the question of whether we we have
oversight over the task force i think my reading of the laws are that
our appointees serve at our pleasure but we don't have oversight over the task force
so i'm not sure if we have how much jurisdiction we have over like
dictating the process of the task force as a whole but my reading was that we do have um
you know some level of responsibility in terms of our own appointees but um that's just the one comment i
wanted to make yeah i i agree with commissioner jurdonk i i
think that um the way that i read it is that we are an appointing authority just like the mayor's an appointing authority
just like the board of supervisors in appointing 30. and as an appointing authority we appoint and we can withdraw and our
appointees serve at our pleasure it's not actually necessary for us to find malfeasance
um so you know kind of in keeping with this this wasn't intended to be
a tribunal it was intended to address the public's concerns and allow
our appointees to address those concerns in a public forum uh because
some members of public felt like they weren't getting that at the re at the redistricting task force
and to address our oversight piece as our oversight over our free teeth
to you know make sure that we're still happy with our appointees because they serve at our
pleasure so i don't want to mix things that you know if we agree that we're just an
appointing authority then i don't want it to make it seem like we're more you know
just say one thing where i want to affirm their independence as well i don't
i feel that i don't i can't i am not a judge
i'm not here to like evaluate their misconduct or
not i am here to be independent and
if there is concern about whether or not there is misconduct i don't think that that is
our [Music] i don't think that's our i read the charter i read through
oh actually i even read through the history of the commission earlier today as well and and how the task force
operates i just don't feel that we should be making uh positions about what act
they've not i don't know i i heard i affirm their independence i
affirm they work extremely hard and that they should not be removed
i don't want to make a statement about something that i don't i i don't know any enough about i just
it isn't to say that i don't respect their integrity and trust their
integrity it is yeah president bernholtz i think he raised
your hand i'm not sure if this is where we're crossing wires or not but um
as i hear commissioner jung's motion um
it is a statement of what was learned today and a statement of
affirmation for our appointees in the task force given
what is legitimate confusion on my part and i sense others as well as the
publics on oversight as an activity
what i'm wondering about is there are there was a great deal of very good ideas and information put forward here
about how the task force uh could run for its duration and also considerations
both that directly uh go to our appointing authority 10 years from now but also
recommendations to the task force i don't want to lose those now they're on the public record
members of the public and members of the task force have full access to them for the remainder of their
uh period now um i actually feel that's sufficient i do think we should somehow document
those and i would suggest that we just do that at another meeting put that on the agenda and do that at
another meeting as a way of responding to the extraordinary input
we've gotten from the public making sure it's available 10 years from now and
perhaps given the participation in our this meeting of the clerk um
it can join with the work that they're doing about the task force that i think
in my mind decouples um
us giving active or or someone said holding a tight leash on the task force
members or the task force when we're not clear we're in a position to do so um
it simply documents what was learned and makes a better chance that it the
process will improve a decade from now is am i am i is that how others
understand this or are i'm further muddling different things
if i may um i i that is i i agree with that um i think
the tight leash comment i just want to be very clear was a color yeah um and no
one on this commission ever suggested anything to that effect
okay let me just sorry go ahead president bernal well i think that's that's where i heard
just now the confusion about well we can't offer guidance or
you know recommendations if we're not the oversight body and i agree with that i i don't think we
that's why i wouldn't i'm i'm strongly saying we don't modify the motion in any
way but there is a body of information that's been gathered that i that i feel strongly should be documented archived
and passed on so but i think that's a separate thing separate from this very
unclear question one of the recommendations is it should be clear to the public and the task force
who oversees them if anybody that's that's an uh that's an unanswered
question in mind but yeah i completely agree with that and also
with some of the comments here which is that uh i do think that this process would benefit from some process
improvement recommendations for sure absolutely uh but that that is not clearly within our authority right so i
suggest that we take that up at a subsequent meeting uh write those out but
i i you know we have a motion in a second and let me just read what malfeasance is malfeasance is
intentional conduct that is wrongful or unlawful intentional conduct that is wrongful or
unlawful yes nowhere in the charter does it set out the standard of what removal
should be but what we are saying here is that we may have unintentionally caused a little bit
of harm and we cannot just walk away without a finding and we have heard from witnesses we've heard from the parties
involved and taken countless hours of public comment
what we can say affirmatively is that based on those three things
we we find that there is no intentional conduct that is wrongful or unlawful
that is malfeasance and i think we need to make that affirmative statement because intentionally or not we have
done harm and not just to the public which we have but also to the
three members of the task force we should i mean
i'll just speak for myself i'm embarrassed and none of you need to be but i am personally embarrassed and this
is we need to correct that harm
hi so can i i just want to prove that
probe that a little a little more what are you is it what exactly are you embarrassed about
is it the fact that we held the meeting up at all or is it clearly around the meeting's purpose or
is it the way we conducted the meeting or what exactly are you embarrassed about
uh
i'm embarrassed that it was suggested by the public and then by by the advice
that we got and we didn't do anything to clear up this notion that this was
a meeting to potentially remove our
appoint appointees none of you did none of you did so you can't just sit silent and say
that oh it wasn't you know we actually we had something different in mind because you didn't you
didn't say it and so you know you know i i'm guilty too i sat there
and all all i did is said i'm not available you know what i should have said what i should have said is that
this is wrong and that there's no way that without a fact finding
that we're going to remove uh our appointees that took months and
months to a point that's wrong i'm sorry that's wrong and uh i'm not gonna say any of you
should be embarrassed but i'm saying i'm embarrassed that's what i'm embarrassed about
i think he did say that we should be all be embarrassed okay well maybe i was telling the truth then
i'm just saying like for the record you did say that
i i i think we should have clarified it and it was an error
and it uh there were there was a lot of collateral damage from that
and i think you're right that we need to not just find that we are not removing
them but that we need to make an affirmative statement correcting that
i maybe saying there was no malfeasance is the right way to do that
i certainly feel that we did not find anything that warrants
removal period and i think
again i agree we are affirming the independence of
the task force and i
i guess i think if if we as a commission feel that saying those two things is enough
to kind of correct what went wrong and i'm
comfortable doing that i'm just i guess i posed to the is that
is that what we think would be the right action to correct what went wrong
i think mr jung your that's my suggestion yes okay
i'm comfortable with that i'm comfortable with that commissioners uh there's a live motion
uh so we're discussing it you should um just remember that also um but uh the
chair um the chair the clerk of the board um angela
pointed out that there there is a very minor oversight part that the department
of elections does play uh for the redistricting task force
um and so the fair oversight
aspect of the department plays is on behalf of the task force director of election shall subject to the charters
budgetary and fiscal provisions retain any necessary technical consultants to assist the task force and his duties
so but you know that is how the department of elections is involved
and you know by extension this is within your jurisdiction
uh because um some of the commenters did make statements about
the technical consultants that were hired so i i just wanted to point that out to
you and i think that point goes to potentially making our
recommendations at a future meeting and not to this motion okay
i guess i'm just comfortable uncomfortable with talking about malfeasance because that
implies that we're considering that and you know the way it's stated in the charter is
they serve at our pleasure it is not necessary to find malfeasance i think just a simple statement that
we didn't find you know any um uh
you know actions or behavior that rose to the level of removal we affirm
the independence of the redistricting task force it's probably sufficient i guess i'm
just uncomfortable inserting malfeasance into there because i don't think that was our goal
i think for me the goal was to give the public an opportunity to have their concerns
addressed and to give our appointees an opportunity to address them and i think
we accomplished that how about this as a compromise then um after hearing from the appointees
witnesses and public commenters uh we affirmatively find uh that uh the
appointees took no actions or engaged in behavior that would call for removal so we avoid the word
malfeasance i guess i'm also uncomfortable with the word witnesses i mean i feel like
you know we've had a lot of public comments we had invited some speakers but this is not a court proceeding and
you know a lot of the as is often true a lot of public comment was not totally accurate you know we did
not have three thousand candidates for our appointees so i think they're not
so i'm uncomfortable with using court language i guess i know you're an attorney but
but i think we can say the same thing without using that if you're comfortable
after hearing from the public and watchdog organizations well can i
ask the deputy city attorney when uh guests have been invited before
and when i've testified uh you know i've been referred to as a witness were these not witnesses
i know there was no swearing under oath but that's i don't think that's necessary
i believe that this is a policy decision for the commission to decide on um
if you want to take the technical legal sense of this
i would imagine and i may have to do some research on what witnesses means but just off the
top of my head from uh being an attorney in the criminal world and also in the civil world
usually witnesses are sworn um and nobody here was sworn and so
um you know we i can take a further research time in the future that's necessary i don't think we need
that why don't we replace witnesses with invited speakers there we go
can you re-read it yeah happy too so um
uh this is the resolution after hearing from uh
the the elections commission's appointees to the redistricting task force uh comma invited speakers comma
and public commenters the commission affirmatively finds that the appointees
took no actions or engaged in behavior that would call for removal period we applaud our appointees for
their hard work period and we affirm the independence of the redistricting task force
so i i have a slight tweak to your language that i'd like to suggest and um
and you've made similar comments on this in the past about other topics when the commission has had to make findings
but um like if we if we
find that find that such and such you know
blank that that makes it sound as if we can affirm that that's actually the truth
whereas just so the tweak to the wording i would say is
we did not find that the commissioners in other words in what we heard today
we didn't we didn't find that but we're not because the thing is i was not exhaustedly questioning about
things that might might have happened and you know i don't know what what
they did for these weeks you know i'm just doing it based on what i've learned here
yes and uh you know that was an early comment that's evolved over time and for that that same reason over time for the
seven years that i've been on this commission over time what that has evolved into is us making affirmative
findings of free fair and functional elections my discomfort was i don't know everything that's going on out there how
can i make such a finding but that's what we've become comfortable with as a commission because we are as a
commission are entitled to make judgments based on what's in front of us that's exactly analogous to the
situation here we heard we heard from our invited guests we heard from the invited speakers
and we took days of extensive time the difference is that that determination is something that's spelled out in our
charter but in this case only now am i hearing that
that that was the purpose of questioning these people because i was not
asking them questions with the intent of making a later finding you know i think
if that were the case i would have been probably
you know asked more questions or different questions so i do not know going into this hearing
that that the intent was to create a finding to this to the effect that you're stating right now
how would you suggest alternative language i would can you read the sentence that contains the word find
i can suggest what i was as an alternative
uh resolved after hearing from the elections
commission's appointees invited speakers and public commenters the commission affirmatively finds
that the appointees took no actions or engaged in behavior that would call for removal
so i would rephrase that to say that the commission did not find
that the the commissioners and then continue
i would be okay with that weasel language and you know that's a technical term it's not a derogatory term it's a
technical term that lawyers use but it's weasel language i i would be okay with that if this meeting had been conducted
differently but what my personal view is that we've done harm
we've done harm to these people and we've done harm to this process and we need to remedy that harm
and engaging in weasel language is not the way to do it well can i make a suggestion when i when i do
harm to someone the way what i do in response is i apologize to them you want to apologize
i think if that's i think we could yeah i think we could apologize for the lack of clarity around
the meeting i think that would be one way of doing it but okay here's i'm gonna amend the
motion then okay after hearing from the appointees invited speakers public commenters uh we
uh make no finding of any action or behavior that
would call for removal we applaud our appointees for their hard work and apologize as a commission
for our contribution to their suffering and affirm the independence of the
redistricting task force
well
so i would the way i would if i were to apologize for something i'm not the one that
set the agenda but i would maybe
um you know apologize for it being an
uncomfortable being being i'm invited to an uncomfortable setting or maybe apologize for
you know lack of clarity around the purpose of the hearing maybe i wanted to remove them
so i'm not
i mean i mean i'd like to hear what other people
i i think i would suggest reverting the resolution
and then we can think about how i don't think i think the resolution
needs to be done immediately to say that we might have we have found there is no reason for
removal that is immediate i think the
how we show contrition to these three individuals is something that maybe we should think
about a little bit more as to what is appropriate and that to me could be something we
address at a future meeting at the next meeting then let me suggest a modification then
to the motion then after hearing from the elections commission appointees invited speakers and public commenters
the elections commission uh finds no reason for removal and then keep the other step
shall i repeat it one more time please okay resolved uh after hearing from the
uh election commission's appointees to the redistricting task
force uh comma invited speakers comma and public commenters the commission finds
no reason for removal period we applaud our appointees for their hard work period we affirm the
independence of the redistricting task force yes so moved question do you want to say that of hard
work just say their public service do you want to no i don't i think hard work's appropriate okay
i don't know second adam ended emotion okay i think
we've talked this out we're agreed on language dca floor is what's the next step is this the yeah
do we need public comment uh no you already heard from the public on the motion though we're either
oh well however
you already heard from the public on this agenda item so you do not need to hear from the public again on this if
they wanted okay then i'm going to ask secretary delgadillo to call a vote
okay president bernhard how do you vote yes vice president chapel
yes commissioner uh dye aye commissioner gerdonic
yes commissioner jung yes and commissioner shapiro
yes with six of the affirmative the motion passes
okay with that i think my fellow commissioners i think the members of the public and i especially
thank the redistricting task force and our three appointees uh this mission is adjourned for this
mission of order do you have to take general public no no not at a special meeting
no this meeting is adjourned thank you
thank you all