 I'm James Milan. Welcome to this episode of Talk of the Town. It's great to have you here. Our subject for today is re-precincting. It is a process that is ongoing as we speak, and it is something that is, of course, related to the fact that every 10 years a census is taken, populations change, and where those populations are located in our town change as well, and we need to make sure that our precincts reflect those differences. A big concept that people are concerned about, and my guest today will be speaking to, I'm sure, consistently, is the idea of equity. This idea of re-precincting, either reducing the number of precincts, or I guess in some years you might add them. I don't know. But anyway, changing that configuration is all about preserving equity and making sure that it is a better situation for voters coming out of the new data from the census, and those are the things that inform these decisions. All right, that's enough of an introduction, and I want to apologize first to my guest who is the authority here, and that is our town clerk, Julie Brazil, and then also to the rest of you for, again, a typically lengthy introduction from James, but really wanting to set a little bit of the framework for our conversation. Julie, appreciate your patience, and thanks for joining us. I'm happy to be here. We really do appreciate it. So I was mentioning that this is, the re-precincting is directly connected to census data that's just coming available. Why don't you, though, do a better job than I of explaining what this process is, how unusual it is to be considering the kinds of changes that we are this year, or whether, in fact, this happens every 10 years, and it's par for the course. Sure. So I think, like a lot of processes, this one is specific to its time. We've had the same general map for 50 years. Every 10 years, we do go through the process, and the last two times, from the 2000 census and the 2010 census, we did move lines. And when you move the lines, redraw the precinct boundary that changes who votes where, and you have to re-elect all of your town meeting members. So it's a substantial process. The last two times, we did this and changed the lines. It affected 13 precincts and 15 precincts out of 21. So, yeah, you have to go where the numbers in the data take you. I have introduced the additional wrinkle this year of recommending that we revisit how many precincts we want to have. We've had 21 for 50 years, and I'm sure it solved the problem at that time. The select board always makes the decision to approve the number of precincts in the map. That's their job. But I do think that with the changes coming in elections, with early voting in person and voting by mail, slightly expanding the size of our precincts can make elections more efficient and more flexible going forward. All right. Yes, and I'm sure that we will hear more of that further on in the conversation. But thanks for that basic information that this structure, basic structure of 21 precincts here in Arlington, has been the case for half century now. And so in a sense, this is an innovative idea. Let's put it that way. Some people might say revolutionary, I don't know, but actually looking at changing the number of precincts is a relatively rare thing. Okay. Let me ask you, what are the options that you are considering? You were just mentioning that one of them would be reducing and there are certain reasons that would argue for that. But if you can just lay out what the different options are that you're considering, and what do you see as the respective advantages and disadvantages that pertain to those? Sure. So yes, I am recommending 16 precincts, so a reduction of five. That number was arrived at sort of from a couple different sort of mathematical ways. Well before we started playing with the maps. We currently vote in eight polling locations. So if we had 16 precincts, each location would serve two precincts. Right now, we double up and triple up. And so some precincts actually serve three precincts, and that's a little unwieldy at times in terms of just parking and traffic flow and confusing signage. And then there's a lot of math involved, and this is very confusing for people, so I don't want to make it tedious this afternoon. But we'll use me as a test subject. There you go. If you're still awake at the end of this. So the number of town meeting members is related to the number of precincts. The law says we should be aiming for 240 town meeting members. The number of town meeting members has to be divisible by three, because we normally elect one third every year. So if you do the math of 16 precincts and 15 town meeting members, then you get to a 240 exactly. And I thought, well, okay, so mathematically 16 is a comfortable number, you know, sort of well balanced. So that was sort of how I got to 16. And then we started looking at, you know, the 16 precinct modeling and of course keeping our same 21 precincts, because you don't have to decide to make that change. Right. So what I gather is that, you know, it's math I can follow. So I appreciate that. And that is the fact that, you know, by reducing to 16, with those eight sites that currently exist, wouldn't have to change those at all. But instead they would all be, you know, basically you could house two precincts at each site. And then it also would work out well in terms of, you know, having the right number of a number divisible by three. In this case, it sounds like five town meeting members in a 16 precinct Arlington five town meeting members from each precinct would would be elected each year. Do I have that right? Yes, except for next year, we would elect all of them. So it would be a really big town election. Despite the work involved in the confusion potential, you know, for voters, navigating that process. I'm choosing to see it as an opportunity. We often talk about how sad we are when turnout is low in a local election. And having the opportunity for every voter to choose all at once all of their town meeting members is good. I mean, I think it's democracy. I think that's that's an interesting process. And we'll do everything we can to make that easy for people. But all of the people interested in running for town meeting with further hat in the ring, and we would choose 15 if we went for the 16 precinct model. To be clear, if we move any line, and even if we were to keep a 21 precinct map, the same process happened. So if a line moves at all, then everybody gets reelected. And so, and given the way the 21 precinct map looks from the state, I think the vast majority of precinct boundaries are going to change. And so I don't really think we're saving ourselves any trouble by trying to stay with 21 precincts just to avoid that election outcome. Yeah, obviously, you're talking about, you know, whatever the, you know, whatever the the tumult is that could come, you know, on that particular day, you're talking about it happening once, which is in this first election after this redrawing of the lines. And then after that, things will proceed in a very familiar way, one way or the other. But let me ask you, you were saying that in 2000 and in 2010, after those censuses, that, that, you know, 13 and 15 respectively of the precincts were were affected by those. And is it true then that it is only precincts which are affected where the lines do change that would need to reelect town meeting members from those precincts? Or is it really going to be all the town meeting members from all the precincts no matter what? No, it's only you only reelect everyone if the line moves. And so, and so over the past 50 years, I looked it up. I'm pretty sure three precincts have never gone through this joyous exercise. They've just chugged along, electing their, their four every year. And I kind of want to, that helps me segue into thinking about equity, because that's, that's a very different experience between precincts. And that's one of the things that we considered as a re-precincting working group got started is there a virtue in trying to, you know, save two or three corners of Arlington from going through the same experience. And, and I have a sort of a number of thoughts about that that we can explore. Yeah, I think that equity has such different meanings, or it can be applied in so many different ways in what we're talking about here, equity between precincts, equity within precincts, equity within populations within precincts, etc. So let's kind of just establish what, what the terms are as you are, as you are referencing equity, you know, explain to us what you mean by that. Sure. I want to start actually with sort of the, the official charge that we're given under state law. Everybody gets the rebalancing of the number of residents per precinct. But we're also called on to look at the demographic data. And redrawn precincts and ward boundaries must not result in the dilution of minority group member votes. And the Voting Rights Act prohibits any voting practice, which results in a denial or abridgment of the right to vote on account of race or color or membership in a language minority group. So we really did start when we sat down with that, you know, sort of very clear understanding that we needed to look at the demographic data that we had on residents and be sure that we were being as equitable as possible using as many different ways to think about it as possible. There's pure demographic data when the mapping software lets us look at the lines, sort of with underlying data. So we can look at distribution by race. We can import information from the assessor's database and look at distribution of people who own versus rent. We can estimate household income using American Community Survey data from 2019. So if we do all of that, it allows us to get a pretty good picture of where to put the lines. And is the goal there in terms of equity to maintain some kind of demographic character of precincts? Or is the goal to make them all as close to evenly matched or comparable in the various ways that you were just saying, income and own versus rent and racial and ethnic diversity, etc.? So, well, the goal is to not dilute any minority subgroup. And so what that means is a practical matter is, if all of the subgroups evenly dispersed, then we would strive to have each precinct have the same profile. But since they're concentrated geographically on the map, we need to make sure that if we see a cluster that we want to keep that cluster together rather than accidentally drawing a line that carves just a corner off, leaving them very different from the rest of the precinct that they're now in. Conversely, if we had a very large spread of a characteristic that was too big to encompass in one precinct, we would want to put the line as evenly as possible so that the two resulting precincts have sort of equal weight in that. So what we're trying to do is prevent minority voices from being overshadowed. Town meeting is a representative thing, and so if a very small section of a precinct has a different opinion about a decision that town meeting is making, their voices might get lost. And so that's our goal, is to make sure that we're not dividing things up in such a way that voices get lost. Well, I probably don't need to tell you this at all, but that sounds like a lot of needles to thread, all kind of intertwined as well with each other and overlapping. Does the 16 precinct model help you do that any better? Actually, it does. We drew both a 21 precinct map from scratch just to go through the exercise, and we drew the 16 precinct map from scratch. And yes, the re-precincting working group felt that the 16 precinct model worked better for a number of ways, in a number of ways. The slightly larger precinct was easier to envision polling locations that were sort of better situated in the sort of pairs of precincts. There is always a question that comes up about transportation. Somebody's always going to be farthest from the polls, and you can't help that. So we definitely want to be sure that we're being thoughtful about where the possible polling locations could be. To be clear, the select board could always change the polling locations. The map is set for 10 years. We can move out around the polling locations to solve problems. In general, from an equity standpoint, though, it would make more sense for us to have the polling locations closer to transportation spines. If you have all of the polling locations in the schools that tend to be sort of in the leafy suburbs, those people probably, on average, have cars and could drive into the center to a polling location on the central spine. You have to think about a lot of difference at angles. We thought about it from the perspective of sort of that question of do you make everybody, if you move to 16 precincts, then obviously everybody goes through electing their town meeting members. That's, of course, equitable because everybody has the same experience. A couple comments raised an interesting consideration for us, and that is, some people are like, well, you shouldn't do that because it's expensive to run. But if it's expensive to run, then that actually argues for making sure that every precinct goes through the same experience. If you were to isolate three or four precincts in a 21 precinct model and say, well, you guys don't have to do it, that's very inequitable because those people don't have the same outreach issues as everyone else. And there's been a lot of thinking and talking about that. There was a comment specific to that where someone said it is expensive to run, and I think the town should look for ways to remedy that. But in spite of that issue, I support the 16 precinct option. So it's nice to know that people are really thinking about it. The same way that we are, that's always nice. And so I mean, I think we have to look at solutions. One solution that I have been exploring would be to address some of that equity issue for campaigning by setting up a system where all candidates for town meeting can submit written statements that we can publish. Volunteers have been doing that on the League of Women Voters website. I would like to be able to do it on the elections page. And I'd like to build it into our process so everyone gets the same form and invitation at the same time. And I think it encourages more participation, which is good. Incumbents should introduce themselves to their precinct every time they run, just because new people move into the precinct and wouldn't know them. So I think the more we build that habit in and can provide that service, that would be great. It raises, of course, campaign finance issues. So I'm talking to a lot of lawyers, but that's a goal. I would like to do that in order to sort of address the equity in campaigning, give everybody a level playing field to campaign from for free. Yeah, you know, we had said at the outset that equity was going to kind of permeate this conversation in a lot of different ways. And that's yet another one, what you just spent a couple of minutes on that hadn't I have to confess initially occurred to me, which is, of course, equity in campaigning, equity for those who wish to represent their fellow precinct members at town meeting. Yeah, you've got to think about that as well. It's a very important consideration. I want to just take a second, though, Julie, and take a step back or step aside. And just ask you, you've referred a couple of times now to the study committee. And I can't remember exactly what the official designation of the group is. But anyway, the group that is kind of been looking at this and really working at it in the way that such work happens here in town, usually by a lot of volunteer energy, etc. But anyway, who is what is the makeup of that study group and how much of a representation from, you know, the Arlington citizenry is on that group. So the repressing working group is is what we're calling ourselves. It starts when the Secretary of State's office, the division that's managing this process, contacts the town clerk and says who should receive our emails when we have the data to communicate with you on the mapping process. So I talked to the town manager. The town clerk is almost always sort of point in this process. We, of course, invited Adam Korowski, our wonderful and very experienced mapping expert, our director of GIS. He's retired in the middle of this process. However, he's staying on on a part-time contract basis to help get us through this process because it's important to the town and important to Adam. Kelly Linema from planning, it's very helpful to have input from the planning department because one of the things that we get to play with as we rebalance the population numbers is if there's an area of town where we expect there to be new residential growth, it's a good idea, not required, but a good idea to have that precinct be on the lower end of the range so that they're not wildly out of balance in 10 years from the rest of the precincts. And then it occurred to us since equity was clearly key to the effort and something we felt really called to do. We invited Jill Harvey, Arlington's director of diversity, equity and inclusion, and she brings more information and more perspective, more resources to the conversation. And so we felt like the four of us could pull together the information. Technically, we're working for the select board since they are the ones making the final decision, but this is such a big process and that community input is so important that we definitely invited every resident to weigh in with their perspectives and their recommendations on places on the map that we should really look at where we might, where we need to look at the underlying demographic data and make sure we're not dividing a group awkwardly. Yes, so okay, so the working group itself is four people from different levels, understandable of town government. You've explained well what contributions they would make to that. So then I imagine you need to go through the same process in terms of soliciting community input as other departments in town have to do around different things. The planning department, you know, comes to mind with all the plans they have. So I would imagine, I believe in fact that there's a forum, a community forum probably coming up in the goal of which I'm sure, at least in large part, is just that, is getting a sense of what people's reaction feelings and feedback are about them. Is that right? Yes, absolutely. So on the elections page, we have a link to the re-precincting process where we're sort of collecting as much information as we can. It announces the dates of things like the forum, which is next Wednesday evening, September 22nd. It's a Zoom forum and it's being hosted by the League of Women Voters of Arlington and volunteers from the Election Modernization Committee. And it's a chance for people to ask some questions and then break out into small discussion groups and really dig in to the perspectives. I think that's what's important is as we're looking at the comments come in online, we have, there's a, you know, for every person who says, I think 16 doesn't make sense. Somebody else is like, I've never thought of 16, but that's brilliant. So, you know, it's great to hear all of those perspectives. And it of course tells us when there are questions and confusions that we can try to clarify. There are videos on the web page. We have a 12-minute video that I prepared explaining what I mean when I say more flexible election. I mean, there's a lot of election reform that I think Arlington really wants and it's easier to do with 16 precincts. So, I wanted to talk about that. And then Kelly Linemum sort of walks everybody through the process, a little more detail looking at the maps and how we created them, both 16 and 21, you know, sort of the trade-offs and pluses in-liners from each. So, there's a bunch of information that people can explore. And then of course, I think the forum will be very helpful for people who want to talk to their neighbors and sort of think about real-world impacts. So, when does this all come down, Julie? As in, you know, what is the timeline for when this decision needs to be made? Sure. The select board has to take a vote to finalize the map and the entire submission packet by October 30th. But sort of any time. I got the data files, the official census data files Monday afternoon. So, hopefully in the next few days, we'll dig in and see how we need to adjust the draft maps. And then we'll present those again. I of course have to do that in coordination with the select board. And so, there was a hearing on Monday and on the question of 16 versus 21 precincts. The select board wanted to just think about that. The sooner they can feel comfortable deciding that question, then we can really fine-tune one map really well. So, keep your eye on the precincting links on the web page. There's sort of it'll be constantly updated. There's a fact sheet. There's information and more. And it changes, you know, every few days. So, we encourage people to keep it. Keep an eye on it. There's a Google form if people want to submit information online. You can print just a PDF on regular letter size paper from home if you have a printer. And, you know, just sort of circle a neighborhood and say, I'm really worried about this. And then, you know, drop that off at town hall or send us a photo, email us a photo of that page and we'll include all of that data. The data from people, you know, sort of block by block neighborhood by neighborhood will help us fine-tune. We might think it makes perfect sense to put a line there because the data we get is in census blocks and it, you know, that it's not as small as maybe people are aware of, you know, the situation in their neighborhood. So, we definitely encourage people to take a map and say, worry about this location. And then whatever version of the map we're doing will have that neighborhood in mind. Right. It's like locals, you know, very, very local scouts, the people who know these things the best, kind of sharing that information with you. All right, Julie, I've got to give you your due. You know, before we went on air, I said, well, we have up to half an hour and that should probably be enough. And you're like, I'm not sure. There's a lot to cover here. And we're right because we're right up against the half hour and I'm sure we could keep going. We are going to have to call it here and certainly I think there's plenty of good content for folks to digest here. And I'll just ask you remind people one more time how it is that they can either get more information or provide their own feedback as succinctly as you can and then we'll sign off. So, on the, on the reprecincting page, you know, it's a link on the elections page, then there's social media, then linking it. There are, there's instructions. We can accept written documents that you mail or drop off at Town Hall. You can email us written comments. You can email us a picture of a map. You can use an online Google form and just write your comments say, you know, this neighborhood has a lot of people who share the same interest and keep an eye on that. And then we'll present all of that information to the select board so that they're aware of it when they make their final vote. All right. Well, thank you very much. It has been a most informative half hour for me to digest and I'm sure for the rest of our audience as well. Complicated stuff and glad that you're glad it's your problem and not mine. But really appreciate, you know, how hard it is to kind of, as I mentioned earlier, thread all these needles. We look forward to seeing what the, what the end results of all of this is. I have been speaking on the subject of representing with our town clerk, Julie Brazil. I am James Milan. This is Talk of the Town. We sure do appreciate Julie taking the time to explain this complicated situation to us as best she can. And we appreciate your time that you've given us in tuning in. We'll see you next time. Thanks for joining us.