Given this article is posted for the Mountain View Voice, too bad its focus is really on just San Jose. For our city, there is an important point that the map draws a line between Mountain View and Sunnyvale. Local readers should be made aware of this through the Voice.

Whenever in a districting map you see long, skinny districts, like the brown one, or districts with very weird shapes that resemble a salamander, like the red one, you can be sure that gerrymandering is going on.

I think ALL the coverage of this issue lacks reasonable perspective. The truth that's especially relevant to us is that our District 5 rep Simitian has become the one with the LARGEST population. We have GROWN the most in population of all the districts. That's an important local perspective!!! According to the county's web site, here's the data for when the county was at 1.8 million a couple years ago, reflecting the growth during the first 2/3 of the 10 year period the lines were in effect. District 5 is then 32,000 and 34,000 residents larger than the smallest 2 districts. The average then is 360,000, so that means we have about 10% less representation than we should, allowing for continued imbalance in growth since that point. We have to alter the boundaries of District 5 somehow to reduce the population and increase it in the other districts.

Sunnyvale has been SPLIT between 2 districts. District 5 only has PART of Sunnyvale which now totals over 150,000 residents. An important goal is to unite both pieces of Sunnyvale under one district. Doing that reduces District 5 too much so some other smaller cities needed to be tacked on to it. It all makes sense, and it's not gerrymandering by any stretch.

San Jose now has population equal to about what should form 2.5 districts. Previously it was closer to 3 full districts....

Ah yes, and it is worth noting that the part of Sunnyvale that is NOT in our supervisorial district is the MAIN part of Sunnyvale--all of downtown Sunnyvale and most of the industrial park area. Very little of Sunnyvale is under Simitian now, mainly the part that lies south of El Camino Real but also a small portion below Central Expressway but above ECR. For all practical purposes Sunnyvale has been in a different district all along!