At the Ohio Apportionate Board public meeting today at the University of Dayton, the acting chair, State Auditor, David Yost, I thought set an affable tone. No doubt his agreeable personality has been a big boost to his political career.

Every ten years, after the results of the U.S. census are affirmed, Ohio’s 99 House Districts and 33 Senate Districts are redrawn so that districts have approximately the same populations. For this reapportionment, each House District should contain 116,530 citizens and each Senate District should contain 349,590. The board is holding 11 meetings this week around the state to hear from citizens about how best to organize the state into legislative districts. At the Dayton meeting about 50 people were in attendance and there were interesting comments from a stream of citizens. Yost reminded speakers that his committee deals only with the state legislature, not the federal.

The first to speak was Martin Gottlieb, who surprised me by saying he recently had retired as editorial and political writer of the Dayton Daily News. I hadn’t realized he had retired. I will miss his columns. Gottlieb pointed out that Montgomery County is fairly evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, but none of the five House Districts in Montgomery County ever have competitive races. He pointed out that the sixth Senate District is ridiculously shaped, as if making a doughnut around Dayton, “in search of Republican voters.”

Darrell Fairchild, of Lift Greater Dayton I thought made the most compelling statements. He evidently works with a lot of poor people. He said Montgomery County’s legislative districts should be divided in a more balanced way so that people who he works with are encouraged to participate in their democracy. Speaking from a wheel chair, he said that he experiences much apathy towards democracy because people feel the system is fixed, and feel their engagement would make no difference. Fairchild pointed out that the Apportionate Board, itself, is fixed — with a membership that has a 4 to 1 advantage for the Republicans.

I hadn’t planned on speaking, but at the last minute decided to do so. I was the last speaker and pointed out that though Kettering is much smaller than the size of one House District, we are divided into two districts. I pointed out it is not obvious where the lines are drawn because people living in the same zip code have different representatives. My point was that House Districts should have some geographic logic.

One thing I learned was that the Ohio Constitution agrees with the point I attempted to make — districts should have geographic logic. Some people I spoke with after the meeting indicated that, in their judgment, the 2001 apportionment was unconstitutional and that in 2001 there should have been a court challenge to the actions of the Apportionate Board. The feeling is that this year, unless there is a big improvement in the results of the Apportionate Board, the constitutionality of the results will have a court challenge.

According to one profound view of climatology, Gaia, the earth, is one body, a living and vast self-regulating organism, whose system is now so out of whack that Gaia has a fever. We call it global warming. In a time when the environment is deteriorating, we need to use personal carbon calculators to estimate and lower individual carbon footprints.

Gaia has a fever and it is too late to help her. She is sick and she soon will be even sicker. She will be desperately ill. She is headed for a period of misery and it will take 200,000 years for her to return to normal.

Dr. James Lovelock, ninety years old, a grand fatherly and kind acting man, has a horrifying message: In order to get well, Gaia is ejecting the source of its sickness and in this century it will see that billions of people will die.

There are now almost seven billion people in the world and the projection is that before mid-century there will be nine billion. Dr. Lovelock predicts that by the year 2100, there will be fewer than 500 million people on the planet.

He says it is foolish to focus on developing alternative energy sources and useless to attempt to bring Gaia to health. Gaia has caught a fever, and just like our human body, when we realize we are sick, it’s going to be a bad weekend. Our body will work it out, but we will be miserable in the meantime. For Gaia, the misery will be 200,000 years.

Lovelock says that in the last one million years, this fever has happened seven times when huge doses of carbon dioxide has made Gaia sick. Now it is happening again.  In the big picture Gaia will eventually be OK — when she succeeds in ejecting billions of humans and has a chance for some rest.

Citizens in the Dayton area who want to impact how the state should be divided into congressional districts can attend a meeting organized by The Ohio Apportionment Board on Thursday, August 25, at the old NCR building at 1700 South Patterson Rd.  The meeting starts at 10:00 AM and is scheduled to dismiss at 12:00 noon.

Jennifer Brunner’s web-site, Courage Pac, is urging voters to become “citizen legislators” and attend these regional meetings — eleven are scheduled this week (Aug. 22 – 26) across the state.  The web-site is urging:

Act now and push for these things for a fair process in redrawing the state’s district lines:

* Advance publishing of maps.  The Apportionment Board (and the Legislature when they consider congressional maps) should publish proposed maps on the Internet at least two weeks before they are voted on, to allow for public input, taking the process out of political seclusion.
* Take out the politics.  Maps can and should be drawn based on nonpartisan criteria such as preserving county boundaries and creating compact districts that are politically balanced avoiding favoring one party over another when balanced districts can be created.
* Competitive districts require legislators to be accountable to the public.  Nearly 2/3 of Ohio’s current house, senate, and congressional districts favor one political party or another by over 15%, thus practically ensuring who will be elected long before the election.
* Let the voters decide who will be elected.  61 of Ohio’s 99 state house districts favor Republicans, largely because Republican elected officials drew the districts.  When Democrats drew the districts, they also distorted the lines so that a majority of districts favored the Democrats. How about creating districts not designed with bias toward one party or the other, or if it can’t be avoided, creating as equal numbers of opposing political leaning districts as possible?
* Stop gridlock.  An artificially high number of one sided districts promotes far left or far right leaning legislators and that can promote gridlock with a battle of extreme views getting nowhere.
* Adopt a map generated from the public competition. Draw the Line Ohio is the only place where the public can draw maps that will be scored based on objective, nonpartisan criteria. Winners for the state legislative districts will be announced this week. Drawing can also be done at ReshapeOhio.org with no scoring.