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Politics & Government

New Maps Split Rockland Senate Districts

Haverstraw and Stony Point are absorbed by a largely Orange County district while Ossining, a Westchester town, becomes an outpost of 38th S.D.; Democrats see partisan motivation.

A reshaped and expanded state Senate proposed by a legislative task force would break up Rockland’s 38th District, which now encompasses the entire county.

Maps published on the task force’s website show the county’s northernmost towns—Haverstraw and Stony Point—grafted onto the Orange County towns of the 39th District. At the same time, the Town of Ossining in Westchester, with a population strikingly close to Haverstraw’s, became a cross-river component of the redrawn 38th District.

The new lines, plotted by a bipartisan task force working for the Republican-controlled Senate, directly impact the Democratic incumbent, David Carlucci, and drew immediate criticism from Rockland Democrats.

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“It’s clear to anyone, not just followers of politics, that these districts weren’t drawn with the best interests of the people in mind,” said Democratic County Chairwoman Kristen Stavisky.

“Splitting communities, drawing districts without regard to municipal or geographic borders, and putting politicians before people is the very kind of partisanship that Gov. [Andrew] Cuomo said has no place in redistricting,” she said.

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Cuomo had urged, to no avail, that the Legislature allow an independent commission to draw the new district lines, threatening to veto any overtly partisan plan. He renewed that threat Thursday. “At first glance, these lines are simply unacceptable and would be vetoed by the Governor,” a spokesman, Josh Vlasto, said. “We need a better process and product.”

Rockland’s Republican chairman, Vincent D. Reda, said he had not yet studied the task force report. “Let me have a chance to digest it,” he said.

 

Closed-door drafts

Though its work could influence electoral politics for at least the next decade, the task force drawing Thursday’s maps toiled in secret, deciding behind closed doors on revised shapes and locations for the state’s 150 Assembly districts and, in a one-seat increase, 63 State Senate districts. 

Guided by population data, and likely a welter of political considerations, the task force—its members selected by the Legislature’s divided leadership—has defined a new state political map in time for November’s elections. Those maps now go to the Assembly and State Senate for a vote. After that, they would go to the governor for a signature or that threatened veto.

With few New Yorkers able to identify the districts in which they live, let alone name their state senator or assemblyman, immediate interest in the maps will likely be limited, largely confined to officeholders, those who would displace them and the entourages of both. Within that realm, however, the decennial districting process seems inevitably to attract controversy.

This time around, it has been especially contentious, drawing complaints from insiders like Cuomo and former New York City Mayor Edward I. Koch, who want an independent—a nonpartisan rather than bipartisan—panel to draw the lines, and Common Cause, which has already drawn its own proposed districts.

In the end, said one Westchester politician, “The courts will probably have the final say.” A veteran of the county’s back rooms, he said it’s unlikely that districts drawn by any of the oft-mentioned mapmakers—the Legislature, the governor or an independent commission—would escape a legal challenge or two. “That’ll leave it to a judge to decide what the maps look like,” he said.

None of this political churn is provoked by the ostensible reason for remapped districts—the need to keep them roughly equal in population, reflecting population shifts seen in the 2010 census—but instead by how they place “different sets of voters together in new ways,” as the Brennan Center for Justice puts it.

“The way that voters are grouped into districts . . . has an enormous influence on who our representatives are, and what policies they fight for,” the public-policy body says in a study of redistricting.

Over the years, political strategists have jockeyed to leverage a district’s demographic data, combining or dividing ethnic, racial, religious and other concentrations to enhance their voting power, or minimize their strength.

The maps released Thursday are advisory-only. In that sense, the commission that drafted them— the Legislative Advisory Task Force on Demographic Research and Reapportionment—functions as a legislative committee, reporting its work product to the full chamber for ultimate disposition.

LATFOR, as the bipartisan commission is known in Albany, comprises two state senators, two Assembly members and two non-legislators, all of them appointed by the political leadership of the Legislature’s two houses.

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