About 30-40 people from the Greater Wilshire area turned out at Wednesday’s meeting of the Los Angeles Redistricting Commission to show support for the Greater Wilshire Neighborhood Council’s position that the entire GWNC area (roughly Melrose to Western to Olympic to La Brea to Melrose) be reunited within one city council district as new city council boundaries are defined.
As it turns out, this was a popular request — in addition to the presentation by GWNC president Owen Smith (see http://www.greaterwilshire.org/site/files/redistricting.pdf ), about 10 other neighborhood councils made similar pleas for their areas.  In the past, city council districts have been defined for a wide variety of reasons, some of them undeniably political, but in this year’s redistricting process, there has been a large groundswell of support for drawing the boundaries around our existing neighborhood council boundaries.  NC boundaries are, for the most part, drawn by the stakeholders of each local area, and are designed to keep intact certain communities of interest, as defined by the communities themselves.  In the long run, if these requests are heeded by the Redistricting Commission, our city council districts may become more reflective of – and more accurately representative of – our local neighborhoods…which would be a great benefit to our city.
If you agree and would like to support this grass roots redistricting effort, please let your current city council representative know how you feel by dropping them a letter, e-mail or phone call as soon as you can. Â This is important, since the Redistricting Commission will present a draft map of the new city council district boundaries to the Council Members and other city leaders for preliminary approval before the end of this month.
