The biggest political debate of the decade kicked off in earnest Wednesday as the Alaska Redistricting Board met in an all-day session to set in motion what promises to be a divisive process for redrawing the state's 40 legislative districts.

This year's redistricting effort is fraught with suspicion because the state board is heavily skewed toward Republicans. A number of Democrats testifying Wednesday made it clear that they don't trust the board to fairly adjust legislative boundaries based on population shifts and that Democrats could be significantly shortchanged.

About 20 people, most of them Democrats and many from Southeast Alaska and rural areas, offered comments, many that criticized the board from the start for making it difficult to call into the meeting or access material. They also questioned the openness and fairness of the process.

Board chairman John Torgerson was immediately put off and reacted somewhat angrily to one caller. "You realize we just got the census data yesterday and it was on the web in a couple of hours," he remarked, adding, "I'm not sure your comments are justified."

Fresh Census numbers stoke partisan passions

Several who commented questioned the board's process -- including the fact that public comment was taken at the beginning of the meeting before information was released or decisions had been made that they might have wanted to comment on. A few openly suspected that board members had been meeting privately with political operatives who were lobbying them on how to draw the boundaries.

Jake Metcalfe, a former Alaska Democratic Party chairman and Anchorage School Board member who chairs the party's redistricting committee, politely but bluntly asked if any board members had met with Randy Ruedrich, the chair of the Alaska Republican Party. Metcalfe cautioned against "back door politics" and urged the board to conduct all its business openly and publicly.

That drew another pointed response from Torgerson who said, "I've met with Ruedrich as much as I've met with you and that's zero."

Other board members also said that they had not met with the Republican Party chairman. Ruedrich wasn't at the meeting Wednesday but did testify by phone.

The partisan crossfire is nothing new in Alaska's redistricting effort. The stakes are huge -- literally political control of the state.  Alaska is divided into 40 legislative districts with 40 representatives and 20 senators. Now, the Senate is split 10-10 between Republicans and Democrats, while the House has 24 Republicans and 16 Democrats. Democrats are worried that the redistricting board will finagle the new boundaries to force incumbent Democrats to run against each other or draw the boundaries so tightly around heavily Democratic areas that what's left are a few Democratic districts and lots of Republican strongholds.

New census data provided to the state this week puts Alaska's total population at 710,231, up from 626,920 in 2000. The board divides the total population by 40 legislative districts and bases the size of each on 17,755 residents. Numbers released by the board late Tuesday showed that while most areas of the state remained stable population-wise or even grew by a few hundred residents, the Matanuska Susitna Valley and Fairbanks gained thousands of new residents. So to keep the size of each district roughly even at 17,755 some districts, especially in Southeast Alaska and the rural Interior will need to be reconfigured probably significantly.

House District 40, the huge northern Alaska district that covers much of the top of the state, actually turned out to have held its own population-wise and did not come in significantly lower than the goal.

Ten years ago it was the Democrats, under then Gov. Tony Knowles, who were criticized for skewing the process. A 2006 review of that redistricting effort by Gordon Harrison, a longtime legislative director and academic who was the board's executive director, sets the stage for this year's political scrum as well. In 2001, the board "did not function as a bipartisan redistricting commission," he wrote in a piece for the Alaska Law Review.