Three Anchorage residents filed a lawsuit on Friday challenging the new political district known as Senate Seat L, as drawn by the Alaska Redistricting Board. Their lawsuit objects to having part of East Anchorage lumped in with part of Eagle River, which the plaintiffs call “arbitrary and egregiously irrational senate districts … despite the starkly different and even contradictory legislative needs of those communities. Critically, the pairings inexplicably ignored the demographic, economic and geographic characteristics of these communities and the lack of meaningful contiguity…”
Eagle River is largely white, they say, while East Anchorage is very racially diverse.
Friday was the deadline for lawsuits challenging the new district boundaries to be filed.
The plaintiffs are all part of the new Senate Seat L: Felisa Wilson is a Democrat party activist who lives at an address on JBER. George Martinez is registered nonpartisan who has run for mayor of Anchorage in the past and is described in media as a “prominent Occupy Wall Street activist” from New York. Yarrow Silvers is a nonpartisan voter who is cofounder of a political action group called Anchorage Action, which is a counter to the Save Anchorage grassroots group. The three say that the new map gives Eagle River disproportionate power and lessens the political clout of East Anchorage, when it comes to representation in the Senate.
Another lawsuit was filed by the City of Skagway, which disputes the boundary that puts it in with the north Juneau House district. Skagway maintains that the final version of the map, Version 4, was never made available for public review or comment, in violation of the Open Meetings Act, prior to the last meeting fore presentation of draft plans to the redistricting board.
The plaintiffs in this lawsuit say that Skagway prefers to be aligned with downtown Juneau and Douglas, not the Mendenhall Valley and north, which is physically closer to Skagway. The lawsuit says Skagway wants the map the way it was during the court-approved 2013 redistricting plan.
The City of Valdez filed a lawsuit because its House district was moved in order to align with the Mat-Su, while it says it is economically more aligned with the Richardson Highway pipeline corridor.
Earlier, a lawsuit was filed by the Mat-Su Borough, which said the new map diminished and diluted its growing population. On Friday, a group of Native Corporations joined the suit on the side of the Redistricting Board, saying the map, as now drawn, better keeps Native shareholders in the same district.
The Alaska Redistricting Board has scheduled a meeting on Wednesday, when it will have an executive session to review the lawsuits with the board’s attorney.
