All the world’s a stage, and redistricting in New York is the main act

Sen. Martin Dilan was fidgeting throughout a recent meeting of the legislative task force on redistricting.

It was one of the last of the group’s dozens of public hearings before drafting new lines for election districts. Dilan, representing the Senate Democratic Conference on the task force, was upset about a memo from a Senate Republican lawyer that advocated for a 63rd Senate seat. The memo had been placed on the LATFOR website late on a Friday, with no Democratic input.

Dilan was not happy.

“We can see what the outcome is going to be here,” Dilan said, rigid with tension in a room filled with reporters and interested onlookers. “It will be the same one it has been for 50 years.”

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..."two significant events in the ongoing battle to redraw New York State’s electoral map. In the first, the legislature’s redistricting committee formally subtracted the state’s 60,000-plus prisoners from the population count of the communities where they are incarcerated and instead counted them as residents of their districts of origin – a hard-fought victory for Democrats that was fiercely opposed by Republicans in New York’s closely contested State Senate. Days later, a lawyer for Senate Republicans released a memo calling to expand the size of the Senate to 63 seats, drawing howls of protest from Democrats."

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Elmont NY - Town of Hempstead Supervisor Kate Murray, councilmen Ed Ambrosino and James Darcy, announced yesterday they'll be recommending the reinsertion of mixed-use development to the proposed rezoning law for Elmont's Hempstead Turnpike to the town board on January 24.

The town's rezoning proposal announced last month and published here on Elmont Online outraged community members familiar with the Vision Plan for Elmont.

Author:...

"Dr. King talks with NBC correspondent Tom Petit about why he chose to "take a vigorous stand" against the U. S. government's undeclared war in Vietnam, for which he had received widespread criticism from the news media, civil-rights groups, religious and labor leaders and President Lyndon B. Johnson's administration.

According to a recent letter from Councilman Ambrosino, the efforts and vision of the people of Elmont were the “foundation” of the proposed rezoning plan for Hempstead Turnpike.  Why then has the “mortar” of our rebuilding plan, permitting residential over retail development, been completely stripped away without any notice?