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

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that way? I don’t know. Some where, at some point in time, somebody thought that was a good idea. Maybe it was larger and it got split into pieces. Yeah, there’s some that are very strange shapes. But that’s where again, my main concern there is, I’m looking at it, these strangely shaped blocks, is that they don’t—I don’t end up splitting a community, right? Or I don’t end up cutting off a community from the rest of their district. And that’s where I find the imagery sometimes helpful also to turn on that imagery based map I mentioned. Because sometimes if you’re just looking, you don’t really notice unless you really zoom in. Whoops I just cut off those people from the rest of their district because their road goes down through the neighboring district and that’s one of these guidelines that you need to keep in mind and avoid where practicable. So, yeah I’d be curious to see if you can send it over. KOSSOW: Thank you, Mr. Jones. Any other questions from the Commission? Yeah, Mr. Hustace. HUSTACE: Thank you, Chair. And this kind of, you know, Mr. Jones, you’ve talked about it before and then Ms. Ford brought it up about concerns about blocks and block groups. We’re kind of in a unique location here in Hawaiʻi where we have all of these predesignated corridors of land and tracts from land from our ahupuaʻa’s. That were already divided in kind of these equal divisons of the island but, when we incorporate more modern technology with our road systems, we create different boundaries and sort of things. There doesn’t seem to be this cultural input in some of these blocks and block groups. I have some concern about that. JONES: Yeah, certainly that’s the case. The ahupuaʻa boundaries are not one that’s an available layer to turn on. I don’t know if that’s something of interest. That’s something I could look to see, iff we could somehow add that, I'd have to figure out how. But yeah, certainly the census blocks, from what I’ve seen—yeah sometimes just because they happen to follow a ridge, and that happens to be an ahupuaʻa boundary then yeah, they happen to be the same. But particularly as you get down into the lower areas, the less steep areas, where the ridges are not so well defined, where there really is that community knowledge that knows where that boundary is. And that’s an important role too. Yes, it would be great if the census blocks could follow it. I think that would need to be part of this block boundary review process but, that’s also an area where we found, and when I worked with past Commissions, it’s very helpful to have the public input on that. Because often times, you as Commissioners, we as technical people, we’re drawing these lines but we don’t know every community. Right and that’s where it’s quite helpful if someone sees what they consider a community to either, A) just give public verbal testimony and describe (indiscernible) for where it is, or actually create a login on the online application and show where it is and draw the map differently. But either way that’s valuable input from the public themselves. At least, that’s been my experience in the past work with Commissions. HUSTACE: Thank you, Mr. Jones. I’d just like to say that we as Commissioners rely on each other too. We don’t know those individual communities, so as the 9 Commissioners, we rely on each other. And of course, we are heavily going to rely on the public and 24