• District Conversion Update 5: Draft Maps

The city has uploaded three draft maps with different configurations for the coming new city council districts.

To better view the maps, you can go to the city's website (This Link), or you can follow the next set of links that will take you to specific maps. Also from the city's website, you can locate demographic analysis. 

• Link to Draft A Map
• Link to Draft B Map
• Link to Draft C Map

Of the three proposed maps, I found that Draft A seemed the most representative of the city. Keeping it in the most logical groupings while also balancing out the demographic concerns. Without poring over the maps, and the other data, the only change I'd suggest is removing the notch that district 5 makes into district 4 (see image below).

No need to break up that common neighborhood.

If the notch was made due to a numbers concern, I'd suggest finding a different place to make that adjustment.

The next meeting dealing with District Conversions will be at the regularly scheduled city council meeting, Wednesday February 10th, at 6:30pm. Plan on a long meeting, and I was told that the Districts issue will be at the end of the agenda so as to allow it as much time as it needs.

A recent article appeared in the Press Enterprise discussing this topic. Very informative, but there was one sentence in there that rankled me.

The goal is to come up with five districts evenly balanced by population, while giving Latinos, the city’s largest minority ethnic group, a better chance to win. 

Link to the Press Enterprise article.

That is an insult to every man, woman and child in Wildomar... ethnicity notwithstanding.

There's no need in reminding everyone that our mayor, Bridgette Moore, is of Mexican heritage because we've already been brought up to speed on that (her grandparents came to the USA before the outbreak of WWII, and her grandfather fought alongside other Americans in that war earning a Purple Heart.) Also, that she was elected in the first group of council members and was reelected in 2012.

No one has ever tried to dissuade a single voter or a single candidate based on their name, national origin or pigmentation in Wildomar.

It's just appalling that people are still being grouped together based common DNA (or common surname origins) instead of common thoughts or common living areas in which people freely choose to be part of... if they have to be lumped together at all.

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I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. 
— Martin Luther King Jr

Wildomar Rap reminds you: judging others by their wrapper is bad no matter which direction it stems from.