Tampa senator testifies in congressional map trial

During congressional redistricting, only Senate conversations were recorded, but the House has agreed to follow the Senate’s procedures, as they are drawing the Senate’s map.

The main sticking point during that special session was the Senate push, orchestrated by Lee, to alter districts in the Tampa Bay region.

The state Supreme Court invalidated the current congressional districts in July, ruling eight districts had been created in violation of a state constitutional ban against gerrymandering.

After years of legal wrangling, two special sessions and much political finger pointing, a judge is going to try to sort out the mess left from squabbling over Florida’s 27 congressional districts. But once the Senate came up with a different idea, friction ensued with the House, which stuck by the base map.

The Supreme Court, in a 5-2 decision Monday, turned down a request from House attorneys to allow additional information-gathering – through a legal process known as discovery – about proposed maps submitted by the League of Women Voters of Florida, Common Cause and a group of individual plaintiffs.

Brief questioning by George Meros, a House attorney, seemed to raise a House objection to Galvano’s configuration of CD 9, which would stretch south to include the home county of U.S. Rep. Tom Rooney, R-Okeechobee, putting him in a district that would likely be dominated by the Orlando area.

Voters in 2010 approved the “Fair Districts” measures that mandate legislators can not draw districts meant to help incumbents or a member of a political party.

“I have reflected on the recent special session and the procedural challenges that we each had to deal with, as well as the impacts these challenges had on our collective abilities to work together to pass a single map”, Galvano wrote. “I recognize that there could be other ways to have drawn that district, but it doesn’t impugn the way that we decided to do it”. “I’d like to get this to the Supreme Court as soon as possible”, he said. The voting-rights groups, meanwhile, proposed maps drawn by an employee of the firm Strategic Telemetry, which also has Democratic ties. The Senate agreed to redraw its district maps.

Lee, a former Senate president who lives in Brandon, said he pushed for a district that would keep most of eastern Hillsborough County in one district.

Facing the likelihood of revamping precinct and district boundaries, election supervisors said in a court filing this week that counties need a new congressional map by December 1.

A series of court hearings began Thursday to determine which congressional map will go before the Supreme Court for approval.