Every Sunday, “Back in the Day” looks at an article that ran on this date in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. The items are verbatim, so don’t blame us today for yesteryear’s bad grammar.
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The state Reapportionment Commission yesterday received a new plan for dividing up Oahu’s seats in the House of Representatives, and while the proposal answers some of the objections raised to the panel’s earlier work, the new version is still likely to draw some strong criticism.
The new plan, submitted by the reapportionment panel’s advisory commission, calls for putting Makakilo in a representative district with other Leeward Oahu communities, rather than including it in a district that stretches through Central Oahu and works its way across the Island to Kahuku on the Windward side.
That earlier proposal had drawn complaints from Makakilo residents, who said they were being lumped together with communities to which they had no social, political or geographical ties.
The new reapportionment plan also "puts back" a portion of the Kahala area — a small parcel on the kokohead side of Black Point — into the 8th representative district, which includes Waialae-Kahala. …
But some of the most contentious of the earlier parts of the reapportionment plan remain intact in the new version.
Under the new draft, much of the 8th representative district, an affluent community that … usually guarantees two Republican votes in the House, would still lose one of its two seats.
That proposed change prompted one of the district’s incumbents, Fred Rohlfing, to denounce the reapportionment process as gerrymandering and to talk about running for a statewide office rather than square off against the district’s other Republican incumbent, Barbara Marumoto. …
The 13th district, Manoa and Makiki, would still lose one of its three seats. …
And Mililani, where residents had pleaded at public hearings to be configured into a single district with one represen- tative, still finds itself split more or less down the middle. …
Because of changes in population, Oahu must lose two seats in the House to the Neighbor Islands, and the new reapportionment commission plan, like previous drafts, takes those seats away from the urban Honolulu area, where voters tend to be more independent, rather than from some of the more traditionally Democratic outlying rural areas.
