CHARLESTON (AP) —
West Virginia lawmakers will begin their special session Thursday with a fixed version of the House of Delegates redistricting plan that must be vetoed because of technical errors. But whether they stick with that plan remains to be seen.
House Majority Leader Brent Boggs, chair of that chamber’s redistricting committee, said Friday that staffers have removed the bill’s duplicate voter precinct listings. These mistakes stem from a pair of amendments adopted shortly before the bill’s Aug. 5 passage.
“We will have it as the baseline. That will be the starting point,” the Braxton County Democrat said. “We’ll just proceed from there, and will decide what direction we take from there.”
Critics of that final bill hope that means changes that range far beyond fixing the errors, which had residents of Kanawha and Morgan counties each double-represented by two-delegate districts.
The House plan “is seriously flawed in terms of both the final product and the process by which it was passed,” the chamber’s minority Republican leadership told acting Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin in a Wednesday letter.
GOP lawmakers are among the supporters of single-member districts for all 100 House seats. The plan that passed features 47 single-seat districts, up from the current 36. It puts another 40 seats in two- and three-member districts. But it also includes two four-seat district and one five-seat district.
That five-member district, representing Monongalia County, is actually one seat larger than the county’s current district. It would also likely be one of the biggest multimember districts of any state legislature after this latest round of redrawing boundary lines is done.
Among other points, advocates of single-member districts say they make delegates more accountable and more likely to live, shop or attend church where their constituents do. Supporters of multi-seat districts argue that they concentrate the clout of the area they represent, and that the delegates in them can be just as accessible as their single-seat colleagues.
States are revisiting both legislative and congressional districts in the wake of the 2010 Census, to ensure equal representation. House Minority Leader Tim Armstead and Minority Whip Mitch Carmichael urged Tomblin in their letter to veto the bill for public policy reasons, and not just because of the errors, to clear the way for a 100-district plan.
“The Legislature had a unique opportunity, which occurs only once each decade, to enact a clean, simple, and fair system of 100 equal single member districts,” they wrote. “Instead, the majority has once again thwarted the will of West Virginians by creating an unbalanced hodgepodge of unequal delegate districts.”
Tomblin has signaled that he will defer to the Legislature as to how House districts should be drawn, as he did during the initial five-day special session. While not ruling out the outcome sought by his GOP counterpart, Boggs questioned Friday whether that would occur.
“That was not the will of the body when we were there,” Boggs said. “We made significant strides toward single-member districts in the bill. For some people, that was not sufficient, but that was the bill that passed.”
The plan had cleared the House 64-33, with 8 of the 33 Republicans present voting for it and eight Democrats opposed. With each chamber traditionally deferring to the other’s redistricting plan, the Senate sent it to Tomblin 22-7. All five Republican senators present voted against it.
Besides resuming the debate over multimember districts, the House will also likely revisit the complaints from some delegates over the way districts carved up their counties. The nay votes from Democrats representing Brooke, Monroe, Raleigh, Summers and Wyoming counties reflected such concerns.
The 2010 Census found that the Eastern Panhandle county of Berkeley led the state in growth, followed by other counties in that region, while southern coalfield counties saw declines. These changes continue trends that emerged during previous census counts. Those trends prompted calls to under-populate districts in the growth counties, while overpopulating those where the population is dropping. That would allow these districts to continue to provide equal representation in the years leading up to the next round of redistricting.
West Virginia’s census results set the ideal district size at 18,530 residents per delegate. Lawmakers are allow to stray above or below that ideal by up to 5 percent, or 926 people. The Aug. 5 House plan included two Berkeley County districts that were overpopulated by nearly 5 percent — suggesting they each would have too many residents before 2020 if the county’s growth continues. Districts in Mingo, Lincoln and Logan counties, meanwhile, were underpopulated and so will likely end up with too few residents this decade.
“We’ve had to make some very difficult choices in the redistricting process,” Boggs said when asked about those outcomes. “I think that we tried to work with that underpopulating and overpopulating in mind. We were, quite frankly, not able to translate into all areas. There’s only so much you can do to push the numbers.”
Lawrence Messina covers the statehouse for The Associated Press.
State News
August 15, 2011
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