The Reorganization Plan’s Defective Voting District Layout

On January 11, 2011, the Evansville–Vanderburgh County Reorganization Committee delivered its final Plan of Organization for a merged city-county government to the Vanderburgh County Commissioners and the Evansville City Council. The plan proposes eight voting districts, each from which to elect a common council member and all from which to elect three at-large council members.

Under the committee’s voting district layout, the existing city council districts remain nearly the same as they are now, and unconsolidated area of Vanderburgh County becomes two additional council districts. The concept proposed by the committee intends to protect the county’s rural lifestyle and preserve the agricultural community’s political influence within the proposed consolidated government system.

However, since the committee based its voting district map on 2000 census data, the map became outdated when the U.S. Census Bureau released 2010 census data earlier this year. The new data show a dramatic shift of population into the unincorporated county over the past ten years. For example, the new census data show a drop since year 2000 of 4,153 in the city’s population even though Evansville annexed about sixteen hundred apartment residents living east of Burkhardt Road between the Lloyd Expressway and Morgan Avenue in 2008.

At the same time, the unincorporated county gained 11,934 people, and most of these transplanted urbanites located in newer, small lot subdivisions built since 1999 in previously rural Center and Scott townships. As a result, the area designated as District 8 on the reorganization committee’s map now houses a population of about 32,500, or about 10,000 people more than will be allowed for a single council district. And that means the plan must be amended to include a completely redrawn map comprised of voting districts with balanced population before the map will be approved by state and federal election commissions, and before a unified local government may be elected under the plan.

If the committee really intends to preserve the agricultural community’s political influence within the bounds of its own voting districts, and to create only 8 districts, the fact is there will be only one rural voting district rather than the two appearing in the current reorganization plan. Furthermore, the single rural district will wander from the southwest corner of the county in Union Township bottoms, thence north 16 miles through westernmost Perry and German townships before turning east 18 miles across Armstrong and northernmost Scott Township to the northeast corner of the county. Yet even this single gerrymandered district must include the Town of Darmstadt and enough other residential subdivisions to total the 22,500 people needed for a single voting district.

Essentially, the rural and agricultural community’s political impact on local government in Vanderburgh County will evaporate under consolidation.

The reorganization committee attempts to address the known need to completely redraw the proposed voting districts by employing a so-called transition board only after approval of the plan by referendum. And the current plan empowers the transition board to divest the city council and the county commissioners of their traditional and statutory authority to redistrict. Yes, the current plan hands over redistricting authority to twelve people including 2 city council members, 2 county council members, 1 county commissioner, the mayor, the sheriff, and 5 other persons, with no particular qualifications, appointed by those elected officeholders. And the plan allows the transition board to appoint additional members, also with no specific qualifications.

Do city council members and county commissioners really want relinquish their traditional and statutory redistricting responsibility to a mixed bag of elected and appointed persons? And would it not be more appropriate to include a correctly completed voting district map to the public as a part of the merger referendum package rather than have an ad hoc committee patch one together after the fact?

Bill Jeffers; Evansville, Indiana