Redistricting fever! We’ve been talking a lot about the California Citizens Redistricting Commission, which is charged with redrawing the lines of the state’s legislative and Congressional districts to compensate for people moving in and people moving out. “One person, one vote” is a pretty durned important principle in American politics, so it makes sense that political districts have at least rough parity. It’s about fairness, people.

But we have to do these things on the local level, too. Census numbers showed that Humboldt County’s Second and Fifth Supervisorial districts have grown much faster then the rest; the lines, therefore, have to change to reflect that. Tomorrow, right in the middle of a jam-packed meeting of the Humboldt Board of Supervisors, County Clerk-Recorder Carolyn Crnich will present a first stab at new supervisorial boundaries that the county is going to have to approve before the end of the year.

There’s already been quite a bit of discussion of this over at Eric Kirk’s blog, mostly centered around the fact that Crnich’s proposes to divide up SoHum in order to take some population away from the fast-growing Second District and plop it into the slow-growing First. The result is a sort of a “Lost Coast” Supervisorial District that nevertheless has most of its population around Cutten. There are other oddities involved, too; today’s T-S notes that Crnich’s changes would lump Fieldbrook in with the Third, in order to take some pressure of the booming Fifth.

Crinch has presented the board with a list of precincts she proposes to shuffle from one district into another to achieve parity. But she included no maps. So we made some, and you can find them below. One thing that pops out immediately is that the Fieldbrook annexation is even weirder than it sounds on paper — in Crnich’s scheme, it looks like a robotic antenna on the head of the Third. And one thing we noted was that Crnich’s map, here, isn’t even quite legal. There’s a little island of Third District just northwest of Blue Lake surrounded by a sea of Fifth. That’s a no-no; state law says that all districts must be contiguous. Oh well — it’s a draft. We’ve got a whole summer of niggling and line-moving ahead of us. The city of Eureka is gonna have to do this too, given its ward system.

Note anything interesting on the maps below?

CRNICH’S PROPOSED 2010 SUPERVISORIAL DISTRICTS

CURRENT SUPERVISORIAL DISTRICTS