Pushed by the progressive left, Fair Districts' reforms collided with minority interests at the state's redistricting road show in Central Florida.

Lawmakers were caught in the middle in Orlando last week when Hispanics and African-Americans demanded that the Legislature carve out legislative and congressional districts for them.

Emilio Perez, chairman of the Central Florida Redistricting Council, told legislators that failure to draw a Hispanic-heavy congressional district would "be like penalizing us for the growth that landed this state two new congressional districts."

The Rev. Randolph Bracy Jr., former president of the Orange branch of the NAACP, argued that a congressional seat should be drawn to elect a black representative.

Hispanic and African-American groups are banking on the 46-year-old federal Voting Rights Act to boost minority representation at the state Legislature and Congress. Florida is among the Southern states whose redistricting plans must obtain race-based "preclearance" from the U.S. Department of Justice.

But despite an ongoing influx of Hispanics, it's unclear whether Central Florida has either the requisite minority population or geographic concentration to construct such ethnic districts according to the Fair Districts guidelines.

Under Fair Districts amendments, approved by Florida voters last November, redistricting plans cannot --

• Favor incumbents.
• Favor any political party.
• Deny equal opportunity to minorities.
• Vary district population size.
• Stray from existing political and geographic boundaries.
• Divide districts or fail to make them compact.

"When legislators confront these dilemmas, it won’t be altogether clear how they should proceed," said Bill Mattox of the James Madison Institute, a conservative think tank in Tallahassee.

"In fact, the new guidelines explicitly reject criteria ranking except to say that the first three considerations are more important than the last three," Mattox said.

The DOJ has been no help in establishing a hierarchy of priorities, let alone deciphering what "equal opportunity" for minorities actually means. Federal attorneys issued only a bureaucratic, two-paragraph response to the Legislature's request for guidance.

Based on their groups' population gains, Hispanic and African-American activists say Central Florida's current political boundaries are out of whack. The region has one black state senator, one Hispanic state representative and one black state representative.

U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown, an African-American, represents a gerrymandered district that runs north from Orlando to Jacksonville. Her CD 3 is considered a prime example of racial districting, as it picks up minority communities along the interior of the First Coast.

Similarly tortured lines -- the very kind that Fair Districts was designed to erase -- would be required to establish designated Hispanic and black districts in Central Florida.

"Bottom line, there aren't enough [legal] Hispanic citizens in Central Florida to even have a state Senate seat, much less a congressional seat," said Doug Guetzloe, a veteran political operative based in Orlando.

"Corrine, of course, wants to keep minorities corralled into the most gerrymandered district in America, but I predict she will be unsuccessful," he said.

As for the expected additional congressional seat in the region, Guetzloe said Republican U.S. Reps. "Daniel Webster, Sandy Adams, John Mica and Bill Posey all want to lump Democrats, blacks and Hispanics into one new 60-plus percent Democratic district as a safety valve."

He predicts that the new district will encompass central Orlando south to Osceola County, taking in the heavily Hispanic Buena Ventura Lakes, Winter Garden, Winter Park and Eatonville.

"Even then, blacks will only be 10 percent and the registered Hispanics about 10 percent," Guetzloe said.