Nine districts divide the Kenai Peninsula Borough like the pieces of a puzzle. That means there are nine members on the borough’s assembly and nine members on the district's school board.
But it doesn’t have to be nine. That’s just the number voters chose in 2001 and again in 2011, after the last two censuses.
Then and now, the borough is considering adding districts to its map to accommodate shifts in population. A borough reapportionment committee is working on a nine-district plan and an 11-district plan and is considering putting the question to voters in the fall.
Bobbi Lay is the borough’s GIS specialist. She said at a reapportionment committee meeting Wednesday that the borough is required by the state to rethink how many assembly and school board districts it has when census data indicates big population changes. That process is called reapportionment.
And data from the 2020 Census reflect some large shifts since the 2010 count.
Lay said the greatest change for redistricting purposes was that the Nikiski district, District 3, lost population, while its neighbors, like District 4-Soldotna, saw growth.
“Primarily the differences between 3 and 4 is what put us over the edge," she said. "I heard a little bit of chatter when we first started that we could just switch out 3 and 4 and trade some land and it’ll be great. It’s not quite that simple.”
The challenge for the borough now is to take that data and rethink how residents are represented on the assembly and school board. The goal, Lay said, is to get each district as close to one voter, one vote as possible.
This week, she presented two potential new maps, with a big qualifier — they’re just examples. The borough won’t get to work crafting new boundaries, or redistricting, until voters decide how many districts they’d like to see.
Lay said there are multiple factors to take into account when drawing new maps, like service area boundaries.
Committee members said at the meeting community feel is really important. One of the maps proposed putting Cooper Landing in a district with Sterling. Virginia Morgan, who represents the east peninsula on the school board and is on the reapportionment committee, said that’s a no-go.
“We feel like Cooper Landing, Hope and Moose Pass, we are all one community in so many ways. And lumping us onto Sterling – just Cooper Landing and putting Moose Pass with Seward and Seldovia – just doesn’t feel very intuitive to me at all," she said.
Lay said she doesn’t know yet of how those communities think of themselves and their neighbors. She said she drew maps based on how they’d impact numbers.
But she’d like to hear from members of the committee about which map characteristics are nonstarters and which are important to them before she creates another version of that conceptual map.
Jason Tauriainen, who represents Nikiski on the school board, said he’d prefer to not make any changes to the map.
But since the borough is legally obligated to reapportion, he said adding two districts might be the way to go.
“Everybody’s gonna have some issues with this," he said. "The 11 is going to make the most sense with breaking up the communities.”
If the committee decides to put the nine- or 11-district question to voters, it will have to first get approval from the borough assembly before putting it onto the ballot. Then, a redistricting committee will redraw district lines, even if they decide to stick with the current nine model.
That’s what happened in 2011, when voters reiterated their support for nine districts. But the shape of those districts ultimately changed due to shifts in population.
