Cleveland Plain Dealer...
Redistricting gets rolling in Ohio with Republicans holding the pen
By Aaron Marshall, The Plain Dealer
Sunday, August 07, 2011 

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Once a decade, all eyes in Ohio’s political world turn to a pair of maps. 

Not just any old pair of maps, but rather the process of drawing a fresh pair outlining the road to electoral power -- the new state legislative and congressional district maps showing the terrain where Ohio’s political campaigns are fought over the next decade. 

The process of drawing up the new state legislative districts kicked off Thursday when the state Apportionment Board met for the first time as it seeks to meet an Oct. 5 deadline. 

The power of the pen rests firmly in Republican hands where they hold a 4-1 advantage on the Apportionment Board in the form of Gov. John Kasich, Secretary of State Jon Husted, Auditor Dave Yost and Senate President Tom Niehaus. House Minority Leader Armond Budish of Beachwood is the lone Democrat rounding out the panel. A majority of board members must vote to approve a new legislative map. 

Separately, an effort to draw a new congressional map is slowly gearing up following a handful of public hearings across the state. It must complete its work before early February, when congressional candidates must file for the newly drawn seats. The process should be particularly contentious as map-makers squeeze Ohio’s 18 current districts down to 16, as a result of Ohio’s fourth-slowest population growth rate in the country. 

The population shifts within Ohio will mean less clout for Cuyahoga County, where losses of 8 percent will trigger the loss of an Ohio House seat and likely a congressional district as well. 

At Thursday’s hearing, Secretary of State Husted and others on the panel talked a lot about “transparency” and “openness” as they agreed to nearly a dozen public hearings across the state on the line-drawing process and touted easy-to-use map-making software the public can use. Husted plugged a draw-your-own-maps website -- reshapeohio.org -- that his office is hosting that will “give the public unprecedented input into the process.” 

It sounds good in theory, but the reality is that most of the real work will be done out of public view, as has been the case previously. 

Because as those public hearings are taking place, GOP legislative staffers Ray DiRossi and Heather Mann will begin to work on drawing up the maps that the Apportionment Board and state lawmakers will consider. They were tapped as co-secretaries of the board, but their titles should read “co-map-makers.” 

On Thursday, the GOP apportionment majority rejected a series of Democratic amendments offered by Budish, including one that would have ensured the public had a chance to offer input on actual maps instead of just the process. 

That left Budish on the outside tapping against the glass. “I’m afraid that will lead to the same kind of partisan gerrymandering that we have seen over and over and over again, and the public wants more and deserves better,” Budish said. 

Good government types like the League of Women Voters and Ohio Citizen Action agreed. 

“I’m always hopeful that it’s not going to be a dog and pony show,” said Catherine Turcer of Ohio Citizen Action. “But what they have done is create this kind of veil of transparency without creating any real access to the decisions that get made. It’s much easier to have substantive conversations about redistricting if you have maps.” 

DiRossi and Mann have a tall order to come up with maps that satisfy the Republican legislative leadership, Gov. Kasich as well as other prominent Republicans like U.S. House Speaker John Boehner. Just ask Scott Borgemenke, the man who drew the maps for GOP leaders in 2001 and currently serves as Husted’s chief of staff. (DiRossi served as Borgemenke’s assistant during the process in 2001.) 

“It’s a hard puzzle to put together and you have a bunch of cooks in the kitchen and a lot of them have never cooked before,” Borgemenke said. “I don’t envy anyone who does that job. Your friends call you incompetent and your enemies call you racist -- that’s what happens to the person drawing those lines.”

Borgemenke said term limits have brought added pressure to the equation because state lawmakers who may have cared only about their current district now want to see the most favorable lines drawn for House, Senate and congressional districts they may run in over the coming decade. 

When drawing the legislative map, the Ohio Constitution gives some marching orders, such as showing a preference for single-county districts when a county’s population is near the 116,000 mark. It’s also likely that the Borgemenke-drawn map of 2001 will serve as a starting point for GOP map-makers this go-round. 

The real rub will come when the congressional map gets drawn up, Borgemenke predicted. “The congressional is the hard one because two people are going to lose their jobs,” he said. “And it’s just like a bill -- so you have to count votes on it.” 

Speculation has focused on outspoken Cleveland Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich losing his seat in the redistricting shuffle. He’s made multiple visits in recent weeks to Washington state where he is weighing a move to run for Congress. 

Republican Congressman Jim Jordan’s recent vote to buck Speaker Boehner on the federal debt-ceiling vote has brought a report that his Urbana-area seat is in jeopardy. However, Boehner released a statement that said “retribution is not in my vocabulary,” seeking to squash the talk. 

GOP Congressman Steve LaTourette of Bainbridge Township said he’s been tapped by Boehner to put together the map that Ohio’s Republican delegation will seek to see enacted by state lawmakers. 

He said one Democratic district and one Republican district will be eliminated in the Ohio delegation’s proposal. He acknowledged that “Cuyahoga County can’t support all those congressional districts,” but wouldn’t say if Kucinich’s district was the one headed for the junk yard. 

No matter what the GOP-drawn map ends up looking like this go-round, it will undoubtedly face court challenges, which could focus on how the new lines divide up Ohio’s African-American population. Federal elections law says that minority groups may not be “packed” into districts designed to minimize their numbers nor “cracked” and spread across many districts, thereby diluting their voting strength. 

Ohio State University elections law expert Daniel Tokaji said the squeeze play will likely mean that Republicans look to shore up margins in the districts they already control. 

“I’m not expecting any new Republican districts, I’d look for a lot of safer Republicans districts and by extension safer Democratic districts,” he said. “They will likely all be less competitive.” 

Cleveland Plain Dealer