Darryl Rouson warns redistricting maps could ‘fracture’ south St. Petersburg representation

St. Petersburg Democratic Sen. Darryl Rouson warned on the Senate floor that a proposed redistricting map, now adopted by the Legislature, would fracture south St. Petersburg representation.

Rouson said the map will pull the city into a sprawling, multicounty district that could dilute the political voice of some of Pinellas County’s most vulnerable communities.

The longtime Democratic lawmaker highlighted how maps proposed by the Governor’s Office could disenfranchise south St. Petersburg residents by tethering the blue-leaning community to the entirety of Manatee County and other communities as far away as Hardee, Polk and south Sarasota counties.

“I have a lot of concern about this map, procedurally, substantively, and in terms of its impact on the people of the State of Florida — particularly the way the lines split and crack some of the communities I represent in Tampa Bay and how St. Petersburg gets tied to Hardee County.”

Rouson argued that claims that the redistricting effort is not politically motivated are false, and said St. Petersburg residents and those from other Tampa Bay communities could lose their political voice in the process.

“Look at St. Petersburg, my home city. It is stretched into a district that runs all the way out toward Polk County, then down towards DeSoto County. We know this isn’t necessarily due to any geographical quirk because for several years — as recently as 2020 — we did have a district that was entirely in Pinellas County: Congressional District 13. It was clean, compact and uncontroversial. The easiest district in the world to draw, and it was electorally competitive,” Rouson said. 

“But now the poorest neighborhoods in St. Pete, that have always struggled to be heard, will find themselves in a district contorted in such an unnatural way that they seem more like an addendum, or an afterthought, than full participants in the democratic process. Are those people, these constituents, really just numbers? Just dots on a map? Data points to be processed and manipulated?”

Rouson pointed to similar impacts in other districts in Tampa Bay and other regions across the state, which he said is being “cracked apart.” He notes that many of those communities have substantial minority populations, and many live in areas where economic challenges are prevalent.  

Many of those communities are currently represented by U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor in Florida’s 14th Congressional District, which currently includes much of the Tampa Bay shores in both Pinellas and Hillsborough but stands to be split into multiple Republican-leaning districts — including Florida’s 12th, 13th, and 16th Congressional Districts.

“These voters are being split from their neighbors and scattered into a district that stretches far away from them. Why is there such a sudden impetus to draw voters from Ybor city into the same district as Inverness and Citrus County?” Rouson said. 

Rouson sharply criticized the process behind the proposal itself, contrasting the current effort with the state’s previous redistricting cycles.

“Procedurally, we have not undertaken the full due diligence of analyzing these maps to understand their impact; and I served on redistricting in 2011 and 2012 when we had 26 hearings around this state. … That has not taken place in this instance, I would argue. What we have instead is a map, that according to what we were told in Committee, was worked on for two weeks and finished over the weekend, and delivered to us 24 hours before we vote on it in Committee.”

Rouson, one of Tampa Bay’s most powerful Democrats, was among many Senators who argued against redistricting proposals pushed by the Governor’s Office at the Legislature on Wednesday. He said claims that the maps are not based on racial profiling and political motivation do not hold up to scrutiny.

“Is it race neutral to split up communities made up largely of minority voters in ways that geographically make no sense otherwise? Are we to understand that these ‘race neutral’ maps coincidentally split up predominantly black voters in a way that just happens to be politically advantageous to one partisan group?” Rouson said. 

“In fact, we were told yesterday in committee that the map that we currently have is not unconstitutional. If that’s the case then why are we even here? Except for political reasons.”