WXOW News 19 La Crosse, WI – News, Weather and Sports |Redistricting map released

ST. PAUL, Minn. (KTTC) -- The long awaited map is out.  On Tuesday, lawmakers sat in their offices at the capitol in St. Paul, discovering where their new district boundaries lines were drawn.

"We're getting reports from the metropolitan area exactly about what we had talked about earlier today, that there is some pairing going on.  And what we called "flipping," where a senator had a particular district, lost one half of it, and picked up somebody else's half," said Rep. Gene Pelowski of Winona.

Pairing means where once a district was home to one representative is home to two… a concept that's less of an issue in greater Minnesota.

"It's more difficult to pair up somebody who loves in the city of Austin when the next closest person lives in the city of Albert Lea and somebody else lives in Preston," said Representative Jeanne Poppe of Austin.

Pairing is more of an issue for former Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann who says she'll run for re-election in her old district, even though the new map put her home in someone else's district.

Why the change? 

The shifting of districts represents a shift in population explained Pelowski, "It shifted to either St. Cloud, Minneapolis, St. Cloud or Rochester.  That is the huge population arc now."

"Most definitely southwestern Minnesota lost population," said Poppe. "In every other part of the state... in the corners of the state, except southeast Minnesota, they lost population."

And the map shows who's in control.

"Well the burbs and the metro are going to drive the show.  That's a given.  If you are in greater Minnesota, you're either going to have to have seniority or you're going to have to work very hard," said Pelowski.

Mazeppa Rep. Steve Drazkowski reviewed the map and explains how every representative is still accounted for saying "more people have moved to the urban area and so they are naturally going to have more numbers of representatives.  But the same number of people will be represented by the same number of representatives and each of those senators as there are in our rural area."