Hawaii’s Reapportionment Commission will take up the latest version of its proposed state legislative map today. It addresses some of the outstanding issues pressed by community members — and gives Hawaii island a new House seat, while taking one away from Oahu.

Every 10 years, the state is tasked with redrawing district maps for state and congressional lawmakers, based on new census data. The maps dictate who lawmakers will be representing, and in turn who will be voting for them. The process now underway has been extended due to the military issuing a set of new numbers, over the New Year’s holiday, for personnel who are not permanent state residents.

The commission is required to ask the military to provide tallies of personnel living in Hawaii who were counted in the census but are not permanent residents. Also folded into the mapping process is the number of full-time students who are not permanent residents. The commission then extracts, or drops, that number of people from the mapping.

While previously drafted maps worked with an extraction number of 64,415, the latest number presented to the commission is 99,617. The commission voted unanimously, although some with reservations, last week to accept that number.

The maps are being drawn by a technical permitted interaction group, or PIG, comprised of four commission members. The commission has directed the PIG to redraw the maps in accordance to the new numbers, which has resulted in Hawaii island gaining a House seat and Oahu losing one.

The new map also apparently quelled community pushback touched off by drafts of the map in which House District 51 would have stretched from Kailua to Portlock.

While all previous iterations of the proposed map included a state House district that would have combined portions of Hawaii Kai with Waimanalo and Kailua, the newest map uses Makapuu Point as a barrier between districts.

Bill Hicks, chair of the Kailua Neighborhood Board, has been working on the reapportionment maps as a private citizen, creating alternative versions that have received substantial community support. Hicks said this week that he’s pleased with that change, but pointed out that it does not address the same issue in state Senate districts, which has been in place for at least two decades.

“They fix the most egregious problem, which would have created a new harm,” Hicks said. “They’re at least better than they had been before, but they did not establish Makapuu Point as a boundary between Senate District 9 and Senate District 25.”

Community members were concerned that the various neighborhood concerns confronting Waimanalo and Hawaii Kai were too different to be represented by the same lawmaker.

Another aspect of the map that was improved on is the deviation number. When making amendments to the map, commissioners must comply with a one-person, one-vote rule that requires each district to have roughly the same number of people. Given that exact compliance can be problematic, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that a deviation under 10% is acceptable.

The old draft map had a deviation of about 8%, the newest map has a deviation of about 4%. However, Hicks has maintained that the number could be even lower.

The state Senate Government Operations Committee held a meeting about reapportionment on Monday where some senators criticized the methodology used to determine the military extraction numbers. Some were worried that there had been an over-­extraction.

Because the maps are drawn using census data — while the military extraction number is based on a separate data set provided from the military — there are certain census blocks that have negative numbers of people after the extraction. To make up the difference, people from nearby census blocks are extracted.

The PIG will present the new map to the full commission at a meeting set to get underway at 1 p.m., and a final vote could be slated for the panel’s next meeting, which could be as soon as early next week. To attend today’s meeting, visit https://elections.hawaii.gov Opens in a new tab.