Contra Costa has launched a series of workshops where residents may view and voice their preferences, or submit their own, among a set of proposed new map boundaries for the county’s five supervisoral districts.

The county also has an online mapping site — www.ccredistricting.org — where residents may draw and submit their own maps.

Following the decennial census, elected boards must redraw their political districts in order to attain equal populations and comply with the constitutional mandate of “one person, one vote.”

Residents will view four map concepts prepared by county staff along with maps submitted by the Contra Costa Times’ editorial writer Dan Borenstein and the Contra Costa Citizens Redistricting Task Force, a volunteer organization started by the Contra Costa Republican Party.

The board of supervisors will vote on the final map in late summer.

The meetings will be held from from 7-8:30 p.m. (except for one workshop, as noted) on the following days and locations:

Today (May 16) — 2-3:30 p.m., Walnut Creek, City of Walnut Creek, Gymnasium Classroom, 2055 Tice Valley Blvd.

Today (May 16) — Walnut Creek, Library, Oak View Room, 1644 N. Broadway

Tuesday (May 17) — Pleasant Hill, City of Pleasant Hill Community Room, 100 Gregory Lane.

Wednesday (May 18) — Martinez, McBrien Administration Building, Room 101, 651 Pine St.

Thursday (May 19)  — Concord, City of Concord Council Chambers, 1950 Parkside Drive.

Thursday  (May 19) — Bay Point, Ambrose Recreational Center, 3105 Willow Pass Road.

May 23  — Antioch, Community Center Hall C, 4703 Lone Tree Way

May 24 — Clayton, Endeavor Hall, 6008 Center St.

May 24 — San Pablo, San Pablo City Hall, Maple Hall, 1381 San Pablo Ave., Building No. 4

May 25 — Oakley, City of Oakley council chambers, 3231 Main St.

May 25 — Brentwood, Brentwood Senior Center, 193 Griffith Lane

May 26 — Alamo, Alamo Women’s Club, 1401 Danville Blvd.

May 26 — Pinole, City Hall, Alex Clark Room, First Floor, 880 Tennent Ave.

A decade ago, political junkies needed pricey mapping software to draw their own political district boundary proposals. Today, anyone with halfway decent computer can draw maps from home.

Contra Costa County will host a DistrictBuilder webinar Monday, an informative online presentation about how to use web-based software that permits residents to draw their own county supervisorial maps.

Following the decennial census, public agencies governed by members elected from districts must redraw their political boundaries in order to comply with the constitutional “one person, one vote” mandate.

Voters statewide turned the job of drawing congressional and legislative lines over to an independent redistircting commission but boards of supervisors still draw their own.

Contra Costa’s five elected supervisors will select a final district boundary map later this summer but residents are invited to submit their own maps online for consideration.

The free DistrictBuilder webinar will be held live on Monday from 12:30-2 p.m. and the session will be recorded and posted, viewable at any time after the event.

Participants will learn about redistricting rules, how to set up an account, create and edit maps, and share and export the plans. The webinar is free but you must sign up at https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/242916862.

For additional information, visist the county’s redistricting web site at www.ccRedistricting.org.

Contra Costa will officially fire the starting gun in the supervisorial redistricting debate on Tuesday, but I wrangled some advance copies of the four concept maps the Board of Supervisors will use to launch the discussion.

Check them out below.

Concept 1 is the closest to the existing supervisor boundaries, while Concept 4 offers the biggest change with the transformation of District 3 into an entirely East Contra Costa district.

Sometime Thursday, the county will post the full set of concept maps with more details at www.CCredistricting.org.

Concept 1

Concept 2

Concept 3

Concept 4

Bay Area residents and organizations with something to say about the shape of California’s political districts may speak at a local hearing on May 21 in Oakland.

The Citizens Redistricting Commission will take public input from 2-5 p.m. at Oakland City Council Chambers, 1 Frank Ogawa Plaza in Oakland.

It’s part of a statewide series of redistricting hearings prior to the scheduled June 1 release of the commission’s draft maps. Residents may attend any or all the meetings, of course, but it’s nice to find one a little closer to home.  Click here to access the full schedule.

Voters created the independent, 14-member Citizens Redistricting Commission and charged with the decennial drawing of California’s congressional, legislative and Board of Equalization districts. By statute, it must adopt final maps by Aug. 15.

An Oakland firm co-owned by UC Berkeley Statewide Database Center director Karin Mac Donald was chosen to redraw California’s political districts under the direction of the new, voter-created independent redistricting commission.

The 14-member panel unanimously awarded Q2 Data and Research the $510,000 contract but not before engaging in pointed partisan discourse about the other bidder and Mac Donald’s ties to UC Berkeley professor Bruce Cain, a Democrat who drew lines for his party in the 1980s.

Read full story here.

Charles Munger Jr., the Palo Alto physicist who has been the single largest bankroller of California’s redistricting reform, gave $12,000 last Monday to the San Mateo County Republican Party.

Munger, the son of billionaire Warren Buffett’s investment partner, was the largest financial backer ($1.367 million) for 2008’s Proposition 11, which created the Citizens Redistricting Commission to take state legislative reapportionment out of the Legislature’s hands, and the proponent and bankroller ($12,157,442,83) for 2010’s Proposition 20, which widened the commission’s purview to include congressional districts.

Munger’s party affiliation has never been a secret, but some of his redistricting-reform allies bristled at the idea that his motivation for pursuing the issue was partisan.

In other political money news, the CDF Firefighters Small Contributor PAC – representing the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection’s firefighters – gave $100,000 to the Democratic State Central Committee of California last Tuesday. And the California Professional Firefighters PAC gave $52,005.31 to the committee last week. Why the big money? Is it the increased attention to first-responders’ salaries? Or the growing debate over whether or not there’s an urgent need to reform public employee pensions?

Other big spenders from last week:

The California Independent Petroleum Association put $49,500 into its own PAC last Thursday.

The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America’s independent expenditure committee gave $35,000 to the Democratic State Central Committee of California last Tuesday.

The California Credit Union League PAC gave $32,500 to the California Republican Party last Wednesday.

The Coalition for Reliable & Affordable Electricity – a committee of “concerned taxpayers, homeowners” and PG&E – put $25,450.13 last Tuesday into the committee that supported last June’s Proposition 16, the PG&E-conceived effort which would’ve required a two-thirds vote of the local electorate before a public agency could enter the retail power business. The measure failed, with only 47.2 of voters supporting it, but apparently there are still bills to be paid.

The California Association of Realtors’ California Real Estate Political Action Committee (CREPAC) gave $25,000 last Tuesday to the California Republican Party.

Those behind Proposition 20, last November’s successful ballot measure to extend the Citizens Redistricting Commission’s power to include redrawing California’s Congressional districts, said today that the new law has passed an important hurdle.

The measure has received pre-clearance from the U.S. Department of Justice, meaning the new law now can be fully implemented. Section 5 of the U.S. Voting Rights Act requires that changes in election law affecting polling places, voting systems, redistricting and other issues in certain jurisdictions be “pre-cleared” by the Justice Department to ensure they don’t infringe upon the any citizen’s voting rights.

“Preclearance has confirmed what we have known all along: that Proposition 20 protects the rights of California voters,” Charles Munger Jr., Proposition 20’s proponent and main funder (as in, almost $12.2 million of the $13.8 million behind it), said in a news release.

California Common Cause Executive Director Kathay Feng said that as the law is put into practice, “all California voters will finally have a real voice in who represents them in their districts.”

The measure’s supporters insisted letting the Legislature draw Congressional lines led to a bipartisan gerrymander that made the state’s seats safe for incumbents and reduced the possibility of competition, making House members less responsive to their constituents.

California will learn Tuesday morning whether it gains, loses or keeps the same number of congressional seats in the next decade. Click here to watch the U.S. Census Bureau’s Tuesday reapportionment press conference online. It starts at 8 a.m. PST.

Reapportionment is the process under which the 435 seats in the House of Representatives are divided among the 50 states based on population figures gathered in the decennial census. Every state is initially assigned one seat, and a calculation called the Method of Equal Proportions is applied to the remaining 385 seats.  Watch a Census Bureau video on how the formula works here. Or view an interactive nationwide map here.

California has gained at least one seat every decade since 1930, but the leading reapportionment analysts at Virgina-based Election Data Services predict the Golden State will remain at 53 seats. Here’s a look at California history:

• 1910, gains 3 seats

• 1920, gains 0 seats
• 1930, gains 9 seats
• 1940, gains 3 seats
• 1950, gains 7 seats
• 1960, gains 8 seats
• 1970, gains 5 seats
• 1980, gains 2 seats
• 1990, gains 7 seats
• 2000, gains 1 seat

Reapportionment is different than redistricting, the process by which political boundaries are redrawn within a state after the census.

Californians are unusually well informed about redistricting these days, thanks to a series of successful ballot measures that  stripped the Legislature of the job of drawing its own boundary maps and turned it over to an independent redistricting commission. The commission settled on its final, 14-member roster on Wednesday. Click here for information about the new panel.

On Tuesday, the Census Bureau will announce total state populations in 2010 and run the national reapportionment formula.

The detailed numbers the Redistricting Commission needs to redraw California’s congressional, legislative and Board of Equalization boundaries will not emerge from the Census Bureau until probably the end of March. The bureau will start rolling out the detailed tables in February but California is usually at the tail-end of the schedule.

In the meantime, if you are a redistricting junkie and you are dying to look at some maps or look at analysis of where districts might have to move, check out the Claremont McKenna College Rose Institute redistricting site.  Its scholars have posted a great deal of analysis, including a Dec. 8 report called ‘The 2010 Census and California’s 2011 Redistricting.” UC-Berkeley has a fabulous site, too, called the Statewide Database.

Rose Institute experts say California’s population center continues to shift away from its traditional coastal metropolitan regions toward inland communities. For example, the Bay Area has grown at a rate less than 1 percent in the past decade, significantly lower than the statewide rate of 10.4 percent.

The introduction of the citizen’s redistricting commission could result in very different political maps, the institute’s report concluded.

“With California’s new Citizens Redistricting Commission now in charge of the state’s redistricting process, incumbent legislators will no longer be able to control the effects of regional changes in California’s population,” the study said.

Last night on KQED’s “This Week in Northern California,” Lisa talked about the new citizens’ redistricting commission; I talked about the prison overcrowding case argued before the U.S. Supreme Court; and the Chronicle’s Marisa Lagos talked about Kamala Harris clinching the election for state Attorney General:

The absence of a single individual from the City of Los Angeles in the 36-member pool of potential panelists on the California Redistricting Commission is fueling considerable speculation.

Los Angeles is California’s largest city. How could a panel charged with drawing political boundaries fail to include a single person from the state’s biggest city?

The theory, first mentioned by blogger Greg Lucas and repeated up and down the state today, is that the California legislative leaders intentionally struck all Los Angeles residents from the list of 60 eligible panelists in order to form the basis of future lawsuit in which the claim would be made that California’s largest city had been disenfranchised.

Wow, that’s pretty Machiavellian for a group of people whose budget was a record 100 days late.

By way of background, the State Auditor’s Office whittled down the initial 30,000 applicants to 60. (Click here to read the full FAQ’s on the commission.) The four legislative leaders could strike 24 names from the pool. That would leave 36 people from which the final 14-member board would be comprised: Eight through a lottery style drawing held this morning and the final six would be selected by those who won the random draw.

Sources in the Democratic and Republican parties tell me it’s nonsense.

For one, the GOP has publicly endorsed the creation of the independent redistricting commission, which will draw new political boundaries for state, board of equalization and congressional districts. (That does not mean some of its members are happy about it, though. Previous redistricting plans were adopted for the benefit of incumbents in both parties.)

And second, Nathan Barankin with Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg’s says the legal case for “disenfranchisement” exists with or without Los Angeles residents.

“The bottom line, this commission will be comprised of 14 people,” he said. “Throughout history, the lines have been drawn by 120 people elected to the Legislature. There is no way, mathematically, that a group of 14 people can provide the same level of representation to the public as the 120-member state Legislature.”

The 36-member pool does include 10 people from Los Angeles County but no one from the city proper.

As specified in the voter-approved ballot measure, the top leader from each of hte two major parties in the Legislature were permitted a total 0f 24 strikes without cause. They made their decisons behind closed doors but Barankin said Steinberg selected people he consiered as the “best of the best,” rather than choosing people to eliminate.

And who are these people eliminated by legislative strike?

Only two were from Los Angeles: Leland T. Saito and Josefa Salinas.

Interestingly, one of the East Bay applicants still in the pool is Maria Blanco of El Cerrito. She told one of my colleagues that she is moving — guess where? — to Los Angeles later this year.

Problem solved.