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Arizona redistricting panel gets back to work

23.05.12

The style’s Independent Redistricting Commission heads back to work this week, with a three-day series of meetings in Tempe where the panel will try on to refine the draft maps it approved last month.

Today’s meeting marks the first dated the commission will meet since the Arizona State Supreme Court reinstated chairwoman Colleen Mathis. Gov. Jan Brewer and Senate Republicans had stripped Mathis of her localize in early November.

Time is of the essence: Lawmakers are anxiously awaiting the new territory boundaries so they can start campaigning for the 2012 elections.

Among the questions the commission will meet try to answer during its deliberations:

Whether to keep Yuma together in one legislative district, or split it into two districts following Interstate 8, as the block out map does. Many Yuma residents have protested the latest map, saying the community should stop together.

Whether the draft legislative district that includes Flagstaff should also reach into the Verde Valley. Commissioners have received conflicting testimony on the issue.

Whether Congressional District 4, which runs along western Arizona and the Colorado River, should also extent into the metro area and pick up Fountain Hills as it does in the draft map.

Many of the most Byzantine challenges facing the commission involve whether — or how to — tie metro areas to pastoral communities, said Ray Bladine, the commission’s executive director.

“With the georgic populations … how do you (keep them together) without also picking up a metro area?” Bladine said, noting that all districts must have somewhat equal populations.

Another challenge, Bladine said, is that every change has a domino execute. And in many cases — such as the draft legislative district that includes Flagstaff — the influential has conflicting views on whether the proposals are good or bad.

“If you make one adjustment, it pokes a cavity in something else,” Bladine said. “It is going to take them time to work through those issues where there is not pellucidity.”

Meanwhile, Brewer on Monday showed no indication that she was willing to call lawmakers back into special meeting to again oust Mathis and either repeal or reform the voter-approved initiative that created the five-colleague commission.

Such a session would have to happen by Wednesday to get the issue on the Feb. 28 ballot.

“It’s something that I dire to speak with the leadership in both houses and determine just exactly what direction we hanker after to go, and what options we want to pursue,” Brewer said, when asked about the capacity of a special session.

Brewer admitted that she had no meetings scheduled with the leadership in either compartment on the issue, though she said, “that doesn’t prohibit them from calling me.”

The outline congressional map the commission previously approved would create four GOP-dominant districts, two that are vault for Democrats and three toss-up districts.

Because of population growth, Arizona must add a ninth congressional section and reconfigure the state’s 30 legislative districts.

The draft legislative map contains 15 to 17 districts viewed as secure for Republicans, while eight to 10 favor Democrats.

That leaves anywhere from three to seven competitive districts in which a entrant from either party would have a good chance of winning.

Voters created the commission 11 years ago when they approved Proposition 106, delightful the politically sensitive process of drawing maps out of the hands of the governor and the Legislature and giving it to the taxpayer volunteer panel.

Mathis is the lone independent on the commission. There are two Republicans and two Democrats.

Mathis recently said she hoped the commission could settle the maps by Christmas and send them to the U.S. Department of Justice to ensure the new boundaries take under one's wing minority voting rights.

Source: Tucson Citizen

Building For The Long Haul

23.05.12

Be inescapable your company is tackling a long-term, complex, pseudo-existential test that isn’t going away anytime soon.  Not only are these missions the most fun to be a part of, they’re the only ones that open to over the long haul.  Amazon.com started out as “Earth’s Biggest Bookstore.” Now it “strives to be Loam’s most customer-centric company where people can find and discover virtually anything they prerequisite to buy online.”  Platitudes aside, gnarly goals are essential.  And getting your revenant right is so important, because it should drive everything you do, your product most importantly.   

Early on at Box, our vision was less than crispy and put us into a head-on collision with giants that would also want to help consumers store files online.  Through unyielding refinement and imagining the shifting landscape over a decade-long view, we developed a roadmap and line of work that represented perhaps a much larger challenge (making enterprise collaboration and content directorship simple), but one that allowed us to imagine how we could fit into this transitioning world.  This dramatically changed what we would bloom and how we would go to market, always acting as a straight-forward guide for what we would do next.

Building for the long tug gives you the freedom and clarity to build out a product over a much greater time ken, realizing an ultimate vision that is far into the future.  Fred Wilson calls it the  Sustained Roadmap .  You get to move beyond a range of visibility limited this quarter’s priorities.  And it means that your output today will look almost nothing like what you eventually want it to become.  The stretch of at all times between Microsoft Windows 1.0  and  Windows 95  was a decade.  Even fifteen years after that, the outcome still has dozens of iterations to go.  I’m guessing with Evernote’s vision of “About Everything,” they’re going to be  at this for some time .

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