City Redistricting Season Picks Up Steam
Just a reminder that the City will begin their redistricting town hall meetings tomorrow. The purpose of these are two, as I understand it: for the city to provide information on the process, and to allow for public input from citizens on what they’d like to see happen. That last item may pertain to things like what neighborhoods to keep whole or whether or not we should have 2 new districts. Whichever way you lean, this is the one shot at getting it on the public record. And here’s the pre-Spring Break dates …
March 3 – District D (Museum of Fine Arts – 1001 Bissonnet)
March 7 – District E (Woodbridge Church – 5707 Kingwood Dr)
March 8 – District E (UH-Clear Lake – 2700 Bay Area Blvd)
March 10 – District C (Pershing Middle School – 3838 Bluebonnet Blvd)
Times for all meetings are 6:30pm till 8:00pm. Anyone can attend any of them and offer testimony at any, as well. I’ll be at tomorrow’s, so if you’re there, swing by and say hi.
The Council’s session today dealt with the following items:
ORDINANCE determining the population of the City and of each of the council districts; finding the population of existing council districts to be materially unbalanced; finding that the City’s current population mandates the creation of two additional council districts under the City Charter
There was some lively discussion on it and the result was that the two main aspects of this – the declaration of districts being material unbalanced and finding that the population mandates the creation of two new districts – were split into two separate ordinances and then tagged till next week.
From the sound of it, there may be a presentation before next week’s vote specifically on the issue of whether or not Council can/should declare the population at 2.1M. I can’t even begin to express how many degrees of fun that represents for me. I mean, I still feel like I’m on a sugar high and I haven’t had a soft drink since 9am.
The question of districts being materially unbalanced will pass. That’s an open & shut argument. But it sounded like the question of assessing the assumed population count would go along with that (I could be wrong here, so if anyone else took it in any better, please clarify). Whether or not we will go to 11 districts seems to have some vocal opposition. Sullivan, Pennington, Stardig, and Adams seem dug in on their opposition. Clutterbuck seems to be, as well. Whether they have the votes to win, we’ll see next week.
“Sullivan, Pennington, Stardig, and Adams seem dug in on their opposition.”
OK, I’ll bite – What’s Adams’ opposition about?
Ostensibly, it seemed to be a reaction to the fact that she hadn’t gotten timely response from the Mayor’s office or anyone else about the coming redistricting hearings. Personally, I’d suspect that her ulterior motives are to keep Montrose in her district since she’s more beatable in a smaller, more compact district built around Sunnyside. Most of those in opposition (Clutterbuck being the obvious exception) seemed to be those with the most at risk for changes made to their present district boundaries. But, for instance, Stardig raised the complaint about added cost of having new CMs at a time when there would be furloughs among city employees. That’s at least an argument on the merits. Adams’ complaint was by her own admission personal. Video should be up shortly for the entire conversation. It’s appointment internet viewing if you ask me.
You missed Johnson’s resistance as well.
I noticed Jarvis’ comments and sorta placed them in the middle of it all. I didn’t sense that it was a principled opposition on his part, so much as the generic critique that CMs weren’t given enough info in advance to make an informed move. I’m sure I’ll be re-parsing everyone’s words whenever the video is posted online. I could see Jarvis going either way this, though. It wouldn’t totally surprise me if Johnson, Adams, Bradford and Jones all sided against expansion, but I think the extra week and concession to split the ordinance might ease some of the concerns. Maybe we’ll see if the informational session on Jerry Wood’s memo and population analysis goes over any better.