2021-09-09 Redistricting Commission minutes (2nd Session)

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There is a learn tab with some help on how to use the application. Again, we’ve created this video for people in Hawaiʻi, but ESRI does have very extensive help online for all the different tools and you’ll have access to that from this learn tab. The next tab is the view tab. So this is an imporant one because this is where you can configure what you’re going to see in the map window, and also what you’re going to see in the districts window. So we see right now our district boundary, CD1, Congressional District 1, is most of southern Oʻahu. Congressional District 2, is the rest of Oʻahu and the other basic island units in Hawaiʻi. The plan itself zooms into the area where there actually is a boundary where we might be making changes. Now again, you can move to other areas and propose other changes, but the starting point, this is the current district boundary. So one thing I find quite useful right away in this view window, I like to see my target because this based on the 2020 census information, the Federal population base, the P.L. 94-171 data, and the ideal population would be each of these two districts at 727,636 people. Using the 2020 data, in the total it shows us how many are actually in each district. Again, based on that 2020, you can see how it has changed now. They’ve grown to where there’s 2,000 additional people in Congressional District 1, and 2,000 fewer in Congressional District 2, meaning Congressional District 1 has grown slightly faster than Congressional District 2. Showing the target values is something I find handy to do. I like to see those down in the districts window. You don’t have to do it but it’s something I find useful so I pointed it out to you. The other one down in the districts window is to look at your total deviation is the difference between the largest and the smallest. So here we see for the existing current district boundaries with the 2020 population, we have a total deviation of 0.6 percent, the difference between our highest and the lowest. Now interestingly, that’s lower than the one percent threshold that courts have upheld for a Federal plan. So in theory, no changes need to be made but in practice, generally, we try to get those as low as possible. And so that’s what we’re going to do in this exercise. I’m just going to try some things, try some census blocks. I’m going to show you how the tools work to see if we can get that deviation down below 0.6 percent. Interesting to compare, this was the plan from 10 years ago, the Congressional plan. At that time, based on the population at that time, the ideal was 608,151. Quite a bit below, right? Our new target is higher because we’ve had population growth. But they did get their plan deviation down to 0.1 percent. So ours is 0.6 percent. We’re quite a ways above that so let’s see if we can get that down a little bit. In doing so, I’ll share with you some of the different tools available in Hawaiʻi Redistricting Online. That moves us to the create tab. This is the main tab where we can change district assignments, move around on our map, do different things. So we’re going to spend quite a bit of time here on the create tab and the different tools on the create tab. So first is the map window itself and a set of tools from managing the map window. There is a little hand there, that’s the pan tool. So if you have that as your active tool, and you can see the little orange halo around it, the little box around it, shows that it’s active. And you click and drag on your map. You can move the map around. So you want to see an area a little bit north or south, east/west, mauka/makai, you can use that pan and drag your map to different areas. So that’s a useful tool. Another one that’s useful is this zoom tool. If I 18