Lawmakers on Beacon Hill are putting the finishing touches on new congressional district maps that will set the state's federal political boundaries for the next 10 years. But not everyone is happy with the plans so far. GBH State House reporter Mike Deehan explained how the maps divide Fall River and New Bedford on GBH’s Morning Edition Tuesday. Henry Santoro spoke with Deehan to understand the debate over representation. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.
Henry Santoro: The contention here at the heart of this public hearing on the proposed new congressional maps really focuses on Fall River and New Bedford and how they should be represented in Congress. What's the latest that you've heard?
Mike Deehan: So right now, the situation is that in most of Fall River is currently in the 4th District that's represented by Jake Auchincloss, which is dominated by voters in the more suburban areas north of that area — places like Brookline, Wellesley — and only, you know, barely stretches all the way down to the South Coast. It's probably one of the stranger looking districts that we have. But right nearby to Fall River is, of course, New Bedford, the sister city. You know, they're represented by Bill Keating next door in the 9th District, [which] is Cape Cod and a lot of the South Shore.
So what's been happening now is that local activists and some elected officials have been really banging on the Legislature's door to unite them into the same district, preferably both of them into that Keating Cape Cod district. They argue that, you know, they're both working-class cities [and] having them both in the same district would mean greater influence over who gets elected and how they serve an immigrant population — in this case, Portuguese and Azorean immigrants, mostly, that are in those two cities — instead of kind of being afterthoughts for the two different, mostly suburban districts.
Santoro: It's hard to believe that that there would be people who are against uniting these two cities because, as you said, they're like sister cities — they're right there next to each other. But what are the arguments that you're hearing?
Deehan: Yeah. Well, we actually heard yesterday from the committee led by these legislative leaders that they're not going to make the change. So unless the Legislature itself really turns on its heels right now, it looks like Democratic leadership is saying no, they're going to keep splitting them up. But you know, there was a hearing on this a little while ago, and lawmakers kind of expressed that they thought they had already done well by uniting Fall River for the first time in several decades. It had been split into different districts. This puts all of Fall River into that number four and all of New Bedford into the number nine. They thought that was going to be enough, but it isn't.
It kind of comes down to a political philosophy: Is it better to have one representative who really answers to a united set of voters, in this case, that kind of immigrant community in Fall River, in New Bedford? Or is it better to have two people in the halls of Congress advocating for your line items, your budget things, your earmarks, down in D.C.? And there's no clear answer to this. A lot of folks are on either side arguing for and against it. A lot of it had to do with just the the very intricate, delicate nature of aligning all of these different congressional districts into this new map.
Santoro: So are legislative leaders open to feedback on this?
Deehan: They they said they had been. It looks like that committee is no longer open. They got the feedback and kind of rejected it. The House Chairman Mike Moran said it just wasn't a compelling enough argument and that even though they are first-generation and immigrant communities in these two cities, Azorean Americans aren't a protected class the way that other minorities are under federal law, meaning that they weren't obligated to carve out any kind of district for them along the South Coast, especially if that means that it would be harming some of the other efforts they did, especially to keeping Ayanna Pressley's district, the 8th District, as as diverse and as majority-minority as they could drive.
Santoro: Does a public hearing makes sense?
Deehan: That's what we saw last week. It was a chance for those arguments on that philosophical debate to be heard about. Obviously, this is a legislative process. There's an awful lot of hearings and things. There were certainly local hearings down on the South Coast months ago, throughout this process. But when it came down to it, the Legislature has their priorities for what boundaries that they are going to want to set. They have a little bit of flexibility and changes they can make to appease people who want to appeal those decisions. And in this case, they stuck to their priorities.
Santoro: Is it as big a change as they're making it out to be?
Deehan: It's not really a change so much as the status quo. And I think there is some interest in the fact that Fall River will be together for the first time in a long time. Like I said, you know, a lot of lawmakers see that as a win to begin with. But this only happens every 10 years, so activists and some elected along in the area thought that this was their chance to finally get united. But now, unfortunately, it's back to the drawing board — and that drawing board is going to take place in 2031.
Santoro: Great. Mike Deehan, always a pleasure.
