CHARLESTON (AP) —
West Virginia’s House of Delegates takes its next step toward redistricting Tuesday, when members have been asked to submit the initial round of draft maps responding to the 2010 Census.
Those ready for that quick deadline include representatives of Eastern Panhandle counties. Delegate Walter Duke, R-Berkeley, said his county’s members have been drawing maps amid a series of public meetings in their districts. Jefferson County lawmakers have done the same, Duke said.
In the wake of the census results, the Legislature must revise its boundaries and the state’s three congressional districts to ensure equal representation. The House has a 30-member redistricting committee, though any delegate can submit maps. The state Senate is overseeing its share of the process through a task force. Lawmakers aim to hold a special session that coincides with the Aug. 1-3 interim study meetings to vote on a final redistricting plan.
The Eastern Panhandle has led the state in population growth. Duke said the approach by lawmakers from there has been to start with Jefferson County and then adjust westward.
“It makes the jobs of the other lawmakers easier because they know where the starting point should be,” Duke said.
Each delegate should represent 18,530 people, the census showed. Lawmakers are allowed to draw districts within 5 percent, or 926 residents, of that ideal figure. Duke said the Eastern Panhandle lawmakers have been drawing districts that under-populate, or fall within 5 percent below the ideal. This approach recognizes the multi-decade trend of growth in this region, and allows for it to continue. These draft maps also seek to keep counties intact when possible, Duke said.
As a result, the drafts give Jefferson County three complete House seats. It now shares one with Berkeley County, which became the state’s second most-populous county over the last decade. Besides that seat, Berkeley has three within its borders and another that also covers part of Morgan County. The draft would place five seats entirely within Berkeley County with a sixth that would include some Morgan County precincts but fewer than is currently the case, Duke said.
Duke hopes this approach will flow westward, so counties such as Morgan, Hampshire, Mineral and beyond can reclaim precincts that spilled over into districts dominated by other counties during the post-2000 Census changes.
“It’s sort of like a relay race,” Duke said. “One of our draft plans allows you to hold the Hampshire-Mineral-Hardy line, and this would then become a helpful starting point for drawing the next set of House district lines.”
All of the districts now representing this region are single-seat, and the draft maps drawn by Duke and the others would keep it that way. The last redistricting distributed the House’s 100 seats among 58 districts. While 36 are single-seat and 11 others have two seats, the rest have three or more.
The state GOP has been among those calling for this latest round to result in 100 single-member districts. Duke supports that goal, but said that fellow lawmakers and other residents may not agree when it comes to their own districts, regardless of party affiliation.
“I’m hearing a lot from them, whether R’s or D’s, that are expressing this reluctance,” Duke said. “They may be in favor of single-member districts, but when they sit down and try to draw the lines they are running into problems.”
The reason, Duke said, is the competing principle of maintaining “communities of interest.” He offered Wood County, along the state’s western border, as an example. Its population is clustered in the cities of Vienna and Parkersburg, and so the goal there is to keep those communities intact, Duke said.
That’s currently accomplished, in part, with a three-seat district. Delegate John Ellem, R-Wood and a member of that district, agreed with Duke’s assessment. On their draft maps, lawmakers in that area are weighing whether or not to chop up Parkersburg into different districts, Ellem said.
“Depending on what side of the street you’re on, you may be in a different district,” Ellem said. “It’s easy in concept, to say that single-member districts are a good idea. There are many pros. However, the detail is in actually drawing the lines, and we’re finding it difficult.”
Both he and Duke are on the House’s redistricting committee. Ellem and Delegate Dan Poling, D-Wood and another committee member, are co-hosting a public forum at 7 p.m. Thursday in Parkersburg’s city council chambers to discuss the subject.
Ellem said that comments so far have been mixed.
“We have people saying, ‘I don’t think it’s broken in this area, so why fix it,”’ Ellem said. “The district is very compact geographically.”
The trend nationally has been for state legislatures to move away from multi-seat districts. More than two-thirds of the states had them in the 1950s, writes Josh Goodman of Stateline.org, the nonpartisan, nonprofit news service of the Pew Center on the States. Just 11 do now, his recent analysis said, citing figures from the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Federal efforts to protect minority voters have been the major driver of the national trend, Goodman wrote. With some mention of West Virginia, Goodman focused on moves in New Hampshire and Vermont toward carving up multi-member districts. All three states lack sizable ethnic or racial minorities. He instead found that the New England states are fielding the same sort of debate ongoing in West Virginia. As a result, the article said, multi-seat districts may not disappear completely in this latest round of redistricting.
“Is it better that legislators have to appeal to a broad, diverse group of people, or should they represent a narrow, cohesive constituency?” Goodman writes, summing up the discussion. “Are citizens better served by having a single representative who’s close to them or several different ones to whom they can voice concerns?”
Lawrence Messina covers the statehouse for The Associated Press. Follow him at http://twitter.com/lmessina
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July 18, 2011
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