Hevesi: Forest Hills is Gerrymandering Poster Child

The march toward redistricting in New York state is in full force now, with Democrats and Republicans in Albany fighting over a series of plans to draw new lines for the 2012 elections.

According to Assemblyman Andrew Hevesi, Forest Hills has been one of the big battlegrounds in that war of words so far.

“Forest Hills, in particular, in the Senate, is very difficult,” Hevesi said this week. “Forest Hills has been pointed out as the perfect example of gerrymandering.”

Gerrymandering, the process by which sitting legislators draw up their own district lines to get constituents who favor them, is the issue at the heart of this year’s redistricting fight. It was Gerrymandered areas like Forest Hills — — which cause Gov. Andrew Cuomo to promise an independent redistricting panel during his election campaign.

That panel has yet to materialize, and the state is running out of time, Hevesi said. In a matter of weeks, Cuomo will face a choice: to veto plans drawn up and delivered by the legislature and accept that his independent panel never got a chance to exist, or veto the plans and let New York’s courts decide district lines.

“As soon as there is a public hearing process, the governor then has to make a very difficult decision,” he said.

Forest Hills specifically has already been redrawn multiple times during the contentious process, Hevesi said, and is likely to see more revisions as the redistricting fight heats up over the next few weeks.

“I have actually seen an iteration of what my district will look like. It has changed twice already, ” Hevesi said. “They’re still playing with it. They play with census data, they play with trying to keep neighborhoods whole, they try it with ethnic groups, they try to do the best they can.”

The Assemblyman said that residents of Forest Hills’ Assembly and Senate districts are likely to see the final proposal for their lines in the next couple of weeks.