Democrats Cooked Their Own Goose In Redistricting Broiler
As the N.C. General Assembly was wrapping up Thursday afternoon to adjourn its session, state lawmakers approved new election lines for the Mecklenburg Board of County Commissioners, based on a map drawn by Republican members of a bipartisan citizens advisory committee tasked with creating redistricting plans for commissioners to consider.
Democrats are howling with outrage that a GOP-led legislature has trampled the autonomy and authority of local officials, claiming that the last-minute power play sabotaged a months-long process designed to allow for maximum public input, transparency, and inclusion to produce a fair and legal redistricting plan.
Republicans tell a different story: that local Democrats were thick in the midst of hatching a partisan plot to ram through new election lines that ultimately would have disenfranchised voters, robbing them of their voices at the polls by radically reshaping representation for county commission districts 5 and 6, currently held, respectively, by Republicans Neil Cooksey and Bill James.
“All of us had promised to leave our political hats at home as part of this process,” said Larry Shaheen, a GOP member of the citizens advisory committee that had been meeting for months and was comprised of four members appointed by Republican commissioners and five by Democrat commissioners.
“We had trusted the process and worked with the process in a good-faith effort at bipartisanship,” Shaheen said, “until it became obvious that trust was misplaced.”
The committee had created and voted to approve four redistricting maps to forward to county commissioners for consideration and, ultimately, a final vote. But in recent weeks, Shaheen said, Democrats on the committee had become increasingly aggressive in their efforts to champion one map in particular: the so-called Stetson 5 plan, which would have ripped the town of Pineville from District 6, currently shared with Matthews and Mint Hill, and gerrymandered it with parts of central and south Charlotte, including Myers Park, areas with a decidedly liberal bent. The Stetson plan also would have dealt a blow to north Mecklenburg’s District 1, a stronghold for Republicans, moving more Democrat voters into the district.
The map additionally ran counter to a bipartisan agreement reached earlier this year (to keep all three south Mecklenburg towns in the same district) and one of the main guidelines the committee was given in crafting their recommendations (to create three districts likely to elect a Republican and three districts likely to elect a Democrat).
“The Ds on the committee wanted to draw [district] 1 or 6 to create swing districts,” Shaheen said, “and it became clear they were trying to do that.”
Democrat committee members, he said, refused to provide any explanation for their favored plan, or to include tweaks offered by Republicans, and instead continued to unabashedly push it forward.
Indeed, committee member John Autry, a Democrat who has acknowledged responsibility for steering the Stetson map through committee, was also pumping its merits in local Democrat circles.
“That would be a real good plan for us to coalesce behind,” Autry instructed at a recent Tuesday Morning Breakfast Forum, according to notes from the meeting.
GOP committee members feared that the fix was in for the Democrat-controlled board of commissioners to approve the Stetson map and short-circuit the other three recommendations. So the GOP members (Shaheen, Mike Walker, Bryan Holladay, and Lee Teague) drew up a map and took it to state lawmakers.
The committee members contend the map that legislators approved, which will be used for the next 10 years to set county commission district lines, is both fair and legal, meeting all the guidelines and mandates provided to the committee and incorporating a balanced blend of the four maps that the whole committee had approved.
Commissioners were slated to receive the committee’s recommendations next week. That’s been scrapped, with new election lines already approved by the General Assembly, leaving democrats steamed, frustrated, and perplexed.
Commissioners Chairman Jennifer Roberts criticized not only GOP committee members for taking their map to the General Assembly for approval, but also legislators for intruding on what she said should have been a decision made at the local level.
“All of the committee’s effort and the goal of having a process to be open, transparent, inclusive, and accountable at the local level,” Roberts said, “all of that was wasted.”
It sends the wrong message to other citizen advisory committees, she said, that “all the hard work they do could end up being for nothing,” squashed by the actions of a partisan legislature.
“I wasn’t going to vote for the map [Republicans] were worried about anyway,” Roberts said. “It doesn’t seem to be a district that works well together, but I never got the chance to hear [the committee’s] explanation for why it was done that way.”
By shuffling their plan through Raleigh, she said, Republicans denied local residents the chance to offer their opinions and perspectives on all of the redistricting recommendations.
“If people had concerns about a particular map, we were ready to listen to their input,” said Roberts, who called the Republicans’ actions “an unwarranted preemptive strike.”
“Frankly, I don’t know why they did it,” Roberts said. “It’s a mystery.”
James, the current District 6 commissioner, offered a clue.
“In my opinion,” he wrote in an email, “the D’s were trying to set up the Republicans hoping that by the time the GOP figured it out they would have done the dirty deed at some future County Commission meeting and there would be no way to bring the matter up in Raleigh which would have been out of session.
“The GOP members of the redistricting committee saw what the D’s were doing, asked them repeatedly to stop,” James wrote. “Realizing that the D’s refused to stop manipulating the maps, the GOP asked for help from the legislature. I support the legislation to force the district lines back into balance and I am glad it passed.”
Shaheen stands by the GOP committee members’ actions, as well as the vote taken by the General Assembly, and laid fault for any controversy or discontent squarely at the feet of Democrats.
“They have nobody to blame but themselves,” he said. “They overplayed their hand and were trying to strong-arm through a plan based purely on partisan politics. We would never have acted if we thought there was a chance that a fair and legal plan would’ve made it out of the board of commissioners.
“It’s a damn shame it had to happen,” Shaheen said. “I don’t see it as a victory. I see it as the system working effectively to prevent a partisan majority from approving a plan that would have dramatically harmed residents in District 5 and 6 by creating a plan that was not fair and legal.”
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