TALLAHASSEE -- Legislators have reached their first deal in the once-a-decade redistricting battle: Senators will draw Senate maps and House members will draw House maps.

It sounds like an obvious agreement — each chamber knows its own territory better than the other — but in practice it means that House and Senate leaders both have a better chance of making incumbents happy.

The first proposal for Senate boundaries is a good example. It is modeled after a redistricting map submitted by the Florida State Conference of the NAACP, packs Democrats into districts in order to strengthen neighboring Republicans seats, and gives incumbents on both sides of the aisle a good shot at reelection, a Herald/Times analysis has shown.

From the Panhandle to Miami, there have been few complaints from Senate Democrats or Republicans about the proposed map. The only trouble spots are a handful of districts that could provoke a court challenge because they might not comply with the requirements of the new Fair District amendments to the Florida Constitution. The Senate redistricting committee will discuss the map on Tuesday, while the House plans to take up the NAACP plan in a workshop Thursday.

Sen. Don Gaetz, the Senate redistricting chairman and incoming president of the Senate, “has piloted the ship very, very well,’’ said Sen. Jack Latvala, a Clearwater Republican whose district is shifted from south Pinellas County northward under the Senate plan.

Both Gaetz and Latvala defended the Senate map as being in keeping with an agreement made by Republicans and Democrats last month to give top priority to the creation of minority seats. The Senate reviewed the maps submitted by the Florida State Conference of the NAACP and then drew maps based on that plan’s minority districts.

INCUMBENT PROTECTION

But the Democratic Party and proponents of the new constitutional amendments that impose new redistricting standards say the maps protect incumbents, favor the party in power and permanently disadvantage minority voters who may not be in the protected minority seats — the opposite, they say, of what the amendments intended.

“These districts are packed,’’ said Rod Smith, chairman of the Democratic Party of Florida. “They’ve created enclaves of a disproportionate number of Democrats surrounded by largely Republican, or much more bleached, districts on either side.”

For example, both the Senate and NAACP maps include only two districts with more than 50 percent Republicans on each map, but there are eight districts with more than 50 percent Democrats on each map. Neither map has districts with fewer than about 26 percent registered Democrats, but some have as few as 11 percent registered Republicans in districts packed with Democrats. One packed Democratic district , number 33 in Miami, would be 69 percent Democratic.

The Senate map also mirrors much of the NAACP’s proposal for dealing with minority districts. The NAACP’s map was submitted on Nov. 3 by Timothy Stallman, a demographer with the North Carolina-based Southern Coalition for Social Justice. In an email to Senate staff two days later, NAACP president Adora Obi Nweze asked that Stallman’s name be removed from the map and the name of the NAACP be substituted instead. Repeated efforts to reach Nweze were unsuccessful.

‘GOING TO COURT’