Who would have guessed that California conservative icon Tom McClintock, the former longtime legislator from Ventura County and current congressman representing a district in Northern California, would step up at a critical time to give Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown a boost in promoting one of his controversial budget proposals?

The answer is, anyone who paid attention to McClintock's position as a legislator on the issue of redevelopment. As a property rights advocate, he was a leading foe of redevelopment. Now he's stepped up and released a You Tube video in which he calls on supporters to urge their state lawmakers "to abolish these rogue agencies."

The video comes just as city governments and other redevelopment advocates are sounding the alarm about a potential vote in the Legislature on two developing bills to accomplish most of what Brown is seeking. One bill would abolish redevelopment agencies; the other would allow specific agencies to stay in business, but only if they agreed to turn over most of their current flow of property tax revenues to their local school districts.

The Assembly vote to abolish redevelopment fell a vote short of passage in March, when only one Republican joined Democrats. That provided 53 of the 54 votes needed to establish a two-thirds majority. McClintock's plea could help to put some pressure on conservative lawmakers, or at the very least provide them with some cover to justify a vote to end redevelopment.

The political campaign complex was working overtime over the weekend to analyze the draft legislative and congressional maps proposed on Friday by the Citizens Redistricting Commission. The most comprehensive, publicly available analysis I've seen is the one put together by the Republican consulting firm Meridian Pacific, which can be found here.

The findings are consistent with the instant analysis provided Friday by Paul Mitchell of Redistricting Partners and reported in The Star in Saturday.

The data further document just how politically competitive the two proposed congressional districts on the Central Coast would be -- with the two proposed Senate districts not far behind. The three Assembly districts, however, would all be safe partisan seats, with Democrats controlling the Santa Barbara-West Ventura County seat (Jerry Brown won by 14 points last fall) and the Thousand Oaks-San Fernando Valley seat (Brown also won by 14 points there), and Republicans controlling the East Ventura County seat (Brown lost by 9 points to Meg Whitman there).

The one that has the potential to be the ultimate campaign battleground is the proposed congressional district that includes nearly all of Ventura County except for Simi Valley and Moorpark. It can't get much closer than this. In last fall's governor's race, voters in that proposed district went 46.65 percent for Brown and 46.58 percent for Whitman. In the Senate race, they went 48.3 percent for Republican Carly Fiorina and 45.8 percent for Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer.

A draft congressional district map about to be approved by the Citizens Redistricting Commission separates Simi Valley and Moorpark from the rest of Ventura County and puts them in a district that extends east into the Los Angeles County cities of Santa Clarita and Palmdale.

That is a change from earlier "visualizations" discussed by the committee, which kept Simi Valley with the rest of the county and split off Thousand Oaks instead.

That could make a 2012 campaign very challenging for longtime Congressman Elton Gallegly of Simi Valley. Although the district that includes his hometown is heavily Republican, it also is the home of incumbent Republican Howard "Buck" McKeon, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

Both Gallegly, 67, and McKeon, 72, are nearing retirement age. There is a possibility one could retire and leave the GOP nomination unchallenged to the other. Or, Gallegly could consider running (members of Congress would do not have to live in the district they represent) that takes in all the rest of Ventura County. He has represented all of the rest of the county at some point during his 13 terms. But that would be a challenging district for a Republican, since it includes the Democratic cities of Oxnard, Ventura, Port Hueneme, Ojai, Santa Paula and Fillmore.

In maps presented to the Citizens Redistricting Commission today, line-drawers abandoned a proposed Senate district presented last week that included Monterey, San Luis and Santa Barbara counties and a small slice of western Ventura County. As discussed in my previous post, such a district would have been incompatible with Senate districts proposed for Southern California and left a black hole of between 600,000 and 700,000 people in Ventura County unassigned.

The new Senate district proposal at least indirectly suggests "nesting," or combining, the two proposed Assembly districts that take in most of Ventura County. Thus, it would take in southern coastal Santa Barbara County (including the city of Santa Barbara, and all of Ventura County except for most of the city of Thousand Oaks and the unincorporated areas to its south and west, including Bell Canyon, Casa Conejo and Lake Sherwood.

The map does not exactly show most of the Ventura County portion, but it does show a Santa Barbara-Ventura-half of Oxnard district that is 450,000 people short of a Senate district -- or, essentially the number of people in the other suggested Assembly district.

Somehow, it will all become clear by Friday, when the commission officially releases its draft maps.

The initial "visualizations" of legislative districts presented by staff to the Citizens Redistricting Commission last week contained contradictory proposals for state Senate districts along the Central Coast. Part of the reason is that the commission divided the state into two sections, north and south, and Ventura County was the dividing line. It fell into something of a crack between north and south.

The Northern California proposals did not include a comprehensive Senate plan -- only some quick comments were offered about possibly "nesting" the Assembly districts. But they did include selected Senate plans for the four Section 5 counties that are receiving special attention because of the need to clear any maps with the U.S. Department of Justice. One of those counties is Monterey, and the Senate district visualization for Monterey County included it with San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties and small sliver of western Ventura County.

The Southern California proposals did include Senate district visualizations, including one that showed most of Thousand Oaks included in a north-south strip in western L.A, County that runs from Santa Clarita to Malibu.

Combined, those two plans are contradictory, because taken together they would create a black hole of most of Ventura County -- about 750,000 people, which are not enough to make a Senate district (target population of about 931,000 people). And the plans, taken together, show nowhere to go to pick up the additional population because all of neighboring Santa Barbara and Los Angeles counties are spoken for.

Sometime before Friday, when it releases its draft maps, the commission is going to have to decide if it wants to go with the Monterey County, Section 5 plan suggested in the north or with the Southern California Senate scheme. It won't be able to do both without making an orphan of Ventura County.

Meanwhile, the SoCal Senate district visualizations have left some observers in the Capitol speculating about the possibility of Republican Tony Strickland and Democrat Fran Pavley essentially having to switch seats, with Strickland moving east and Pavley moving west. As one observer suggested to me on Friday, perhaps the Stricklands will have to consider moving back into the apartment in Thousand Oaks into which they moved last spring so that Audra Strickland could run against Linda Parks for supervisor.

The Sacramento Bee blog Capitol Alert attended this week's roast in Sacramento of Assembly Speaker John Perez, and reports that former Ventura County Assemblywoman Audra Strickland delivered a few jokes that, well, she couldn't have said in front of her class back in the days when she was a teacher at a private Christian school.

Here's the zinger: "I was going through the Capitol this morning and chatting with a visitor and he said, 'You know, I always feel like we're getting screwed by legislators who don't know what they're doing.' And I was like, 'Tell me about it, it happens to me every night."

Audra, of course, is married to Ventura County Sen. Tony Strickland.

For the full report, including more R-rated jokes from some of the other speakers, click on the Capitol Alert link above.