Mea maxima culpa.

Yesterday’s post on Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors public hearing on local redistricting waxed snarky about some Supe-directed changes to the draft map the board requested. Specifically, your Lost Coast Outpost wondered whether revisions to the border between the First and Fourth districts might have been intended to accomodate Rex Bohn, a declared 2012 candidate for First District Supervisor who, under the board’s preferred plan, finds himself redistricted into the Fourth.

I talked with Supervisor Mark Lovelace about this last night. This morning I went back to the tape of the meeting. The conclusion I reached was this: The Board did indeed ask County Clerk-Recorder Carolyn Crnich to look at various options for how the line between the First and Fourth might be adjusted, and it is conceivable that one or more of those options might include moving Bohn Manor back into the First. But nothing in the meeting pointed specifically to adjusting the border near Bohn’s neighborhood.

Let’s look at the tape. Keep your finger on the slider, here: There’s gonna be some jumping around to do.

The first bit we want to look at is Brian Mitchell’s testimony, which begins at about minute marker 55:30. This is the first and only public testimony reference to moving the lines in question.

Now, note that Mitchell is not, in fact, talking about the Pill Hill neighborhood that Bohn calls home. Rather, he’s talking about a few precincts on the south side of Harris, running from behind the Eureka Mall and stretching east to F Street.

Here:

My error was in misunderstanding Mitchell’s testimony. (Mitchell makes a tiny flub, here, too: His suggested change, he says, “allow[s] the Fourth Ward of to remain in one Supervisorial district.” It seems that he’s actually talking about the Fifth Ward.)

Now, fast forward to minute marker 1:22:00. Supervisor Jimmy Smith makes a motion to go with Draft Map 2A, and asks Crnich to “look at possibilities to move around Weott, and maybe alternative lines through the city of Eureka — First District, Fourth District.” It would be reasonable to infer that Smith was referring, specifically, to Mitchell’s ideas.

There is some more discussion about the other changes requested. Then, at minute marker 1:34:40, Lovelace restates the motion thusly:

So just to clarify: I think the motion is just to have this come back to us on the 13th with variations on Plan 2A. The specific content of those variations, I think, doesn’t need to be so much in the motion as just what Carolyn has picked up from our coversation here. 

The motion then passed unanimously.

So is Bohn out of luck? There is at least one path by which his precinct might yet be put back into the First. The board has signaled that it is willing to accept some variation around the border between the First and the Fourth. At the same time, the board has stated definitively that it wants the First to lose a good bit of population in and around Weott. If that’s the case, the First needs to grow in another direction. Could be that it grows north, deeper into its traditional territory in outer Eureka.

But that’s a big maybe.