What makes a community?  Is it proximity? Is it culture? Is it interests in common?  Start thinking folk and start communicating by bulletin board or by broadcast.  Cause it is redistricting time.  That means that Humboldt County is going to draw some lines deciding which group of folks get to vote together on each county supervisor.  For us here in SoHum, we’ve had a continuing problem that Fortuna folk vote with us but they don’t have the same culture (whew, is that an understatement or what?)  So as Ernie Branscomb recently put it in an email to me,

We have absolutely nothing in common with Fortuna, yet it has been the very powerful tail that wags the dog for a very long time. Fortuna precludes us from having any true representation for our end of the county. We need a supervisor that can represent our rural lifestyle. I don’t think, that at this point, we can get a supervisor elected who advocates rural living, as the last election strongly suggested.

I have nothing against Fortuna or the people in it, I have many fast friends that live there, but Fortuna has Nothing in common with the far south end of the county, as they themselves would be quick to point out. … Just about anybody with an open mind will agree that we are NOT Fortuna. It’s high time that we represent ourselves.

Currently, there are three plans for redrawing the districts.  The county has done an excellent job of putting together maps of this.  Please take a look.  The red lines are the current districts.  To the right are bubbles for the three plans which if clicked change the map to show the options. (Hank and Eric Kirk have good posts on what is happening.)

I asked Estelle Fennell, a candidate for supervisor last time what she thought of these plans. Her response,

Of the three new proposals, 2A, 3A and 6A, only two keep Southern Humboldt intact.  2A splits Weott off from Southern Humboldt and I’ve heard from some Weott area residents that they’re not happy with that.  It may be possible to correct that and still have a workable plan. Both remaining proposals, 3A and 6A keep us intact and the reactions I’ve been hearing favor 3A just because 6A seems to be too radical and to create a fairly unwieldy district.

The bottom line for me is that we do have a couple of choices that keep Southern Humboldt intact and that makes me very happy. Now all we need is support for a united Southern Humboldt at the Board of Supervisors.

 

Now 3A throws us and Ferndale together which might be whole new ball of wax.  6A is a big checkmark of unknown linking SoHum with rural districts up north. We have a few months to gather information and speak out before a decision is made.  Gather your information and make a decision because this is going to affect us for years to come.

PS to those of you in SoHum who did not fill out the census forms, if we had more people on the books here in SoHum then we would have our own district.  And to the census folk, next time, please, if you really are serious about getting accurate accounts, hire folks from within their own watershed to do the count.  We had so many wide-eyed folk wandering around our neighborhood for days that I thought someone might be filming a new reality TV show called “Fear and Failure: Trying to Locate the Lost Tribes in the Dangerous Hills of Humboldt.”

UPDATE: See Hank’s excellent analysis of the Board’s decision to put their eggs in the 2A basket.