TheBakersfieldCalifornian.com

As the statewide redistricting countdown to June 10 -- when the first official stab at California state Senate and Assembly, and U.S. Congressional boundary lines is released by the California Citizens Redistricting Commission -- rolls on, groups are beginning to offer their own version of political maps, hoping commissioners will adopt them.

This week the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund presented their proposed maps to the commission.

According to an email report from redistricting observer Paul Mitchell of consulting firm Redistricting Partners, the maps create 16 additional state Senate, Assembly and Congressional districts where Latinos are a majority of the population.

In Kern County, much of the impact on state Senate and Assembly districts is minimal, as Kern County was already split along Latino-caucasian lines during the last redistricting process 10 years ago.

But the MALDEF maps propose some interesting reality shifts for local politicians because they drastically alter the territory represented by Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Bakersfield.

McCarthy's current district covers most of Kern County -- except for heavily Latino areas in Arvin, Lamont, east Bakersfield and Delano -- and runs west through San Luis Obispo county, stopping just short of the coast. It is a heavily Republican district that McCarthy defended with little effort -- his was the only name on the ballot -- in November 2010.

The MALDEF map shifts McCarthy dramatically to the east, taking him out of San Luis Obispo County and running the new district east to the California-Nevada border and north into Tulare County.

The district remains mainly Republican, but is more competitive.

And shifting McCarthy east and Rep. Jim Costa, D-Fresno, north out of Kern County -- another effect of the maps -- opens up a majority Latino and Democratic district along the west side of the Central Valley that extends fingers east to grab Arvin, Lamont and east Bakersfield as well as diverse communities in Kings and Tulare counties.

REPRESENTATION

Labor icon Dolores Huerta's nonprofit foundation has taken a strong stand in advocating for a larger political voice for Latinos of Mexican and Central American descent and the workers who power the valley's agricultural industry.

Huerta said the effort to draw Latino political districts was an attempt to translate the strong growth in California's Latino population into a corresponding level of political representation.

While Costa's district was drawn to support a Latino candidate 10 years ago, she said, Costa has a European background -- he's Portuguese -- and has often sided with agribusiness over the worker.

"It's all extremely important because the people we elect to office have a huge impact on our lives," Huerta said. "It's especially important now because there is a huge campaign against the Latino community. It's supposedly to be about the undocumented, but it impacts every one of our lives no matter how many generations our families have been there."

MORE MAPS

Local political consultant Gene Tackett said he hadn't yet seen the MALDEF maps but they are just another in a long line of groups seeking to sway the redistricting commission, which was created by California voters to take the power of drawing political boundaries out of the hands of politicians.

He said it may be too early to draw conclusions from what is being made public now.

"We're just in totally new territory (with the commission) and right now there is a lot of action, reaction and posturing," he said.

Yolo County Supervisor and statewide Republican redistricting guru Matt Rexroad -- who has drawn his own conceptual maps and presented them to the commission -- said he thought MALDEF's Henry Ochoa did an amazing job of delivering his ideas to the commission this week.

But the MALDEF maps achieve their end by crafting a wild jigsaw of lines in the Central Valley and, Rexroad said, largely ignore the goal of drawing compact districts that keep areas whole.

"Their objective was not to keep cities and counties together," he said, arguing that his maps are more likely to pass muster with the non-partisan commission.

Cal State Bakersfield political science Professor Stanley Clark said that while the general public would like to have politics taken out of redistricting and to see more compact, competitive political districts, neither is guaranteed in the current commission process.

For the Central Valley, he said, the huge question will be whether the commission tries to draw cities and counties into the same districts -- as Republicans like Rexroad have suggested -- or allow the creation of strong Latino districts through carefully crafted jigsaw cuts similar to the those MALDEF has mapped.

The stakes are certainly high, Clark said.

Because of McCarthy's place as majority whip in the House of Representatives, the Republican Party's third highest-ranking leader in the House, Clark said the map of McCarthy's district has national significance.

His supporters and supporters of the House Republicans, Clark said, "have every reason to take seriously anything that would put his reelection in jeopardy."

COMPETITION

One of the quirky bits of the story, according to the Redistricting Partner analysis of the McCarthy district, is that the home of current Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Visalia, is located in the same district as McCarthy. If the redistricting commission were to adopt the MALDEF map, it could set the two conservative powerhouses up for a head-to-head fight for the election seat in 2012.

Bakersfield political observer Stan Harper, a Republican, didn't think it likely that the commission would support that map. Even if it did, Harper said, it is unlikely the two Republicans would duel for the Congressional seat.

Nunes, Harper said, would relocate to the new district to avoid the conflict.

And the creation of Latino districts does not necessarily create political power for Democrats.

"Some people are trying to carve Hispanics into Democratic districts, but not all Hispanics are Democrats," he said.

But Huerta said the focus of drawing Latino districts is to create a stronger political voice for a minority group that has grown to become a major population power in California.

It's about, she said, the bedrock American idea of equal representation.