MORGANTOWN – Gov. Jim Justice issued his proclamation late Friday afternoon for a special session on redistricting and a number of other measures to begin at 11 a.m. Monday.
The full Legislature will begin at that time to consider the maps proposed for House, Senate and Congressional districts that have been submitted to the respective House and Senate redistricting committees.
Justice’s proclamation followed on the heels of the Senate Redistricting Committee’s Friday meeting.
The committee had before it at the time 24 Congressional maps and 10 Senate maps. Chair Charles Trump, R-Morgan, said he did not wish at the time for the nine committee members to choose and submit preferred maps.
“Without having the whole Senate assembled to look at this we’re not going to be able to have a fair idea of what is approveable by the whole body,” he said. He wants more feedback from the public and other senators before the committee next meets at 3 p.m Monday, after the session begins.
Committee attorney Liz Schindzielorz reviewed with the members the required parameters for Congressional districts: compactness. There are about 150 potential measures of compactness and they had previously heard about 10 of them.
All the variables show how tricky weighing the various requirements for districts – population equality, contiguity, compactness, preserving communities of interest and respecting county lines – can be, he said.
One way to measure the compactness is to calculate the perimeter of each proposed district. A shorter perimeter equates to more compactness.
They looked at a couple of the proposed Congressional maps as examples. The one with the shortest perimeters had the highest population deviation, and vice-versa.
“This highlights, in my opinion, the balancing that this committee and ultimately the whole Senate, the whole Legislature is going to have to do,” he said.
And, as others pointed out, one map can have both the best and worst compactness score depending on which of the 150 metrics are used.
Turning from that problem, Sen. Mike Caputo, D-Marion, said some senators prefer a north-south Congressional district division while others prefer an east-west. He hopes they can whittle them down to one of each to debate.
“That seems to be a begging question of our committee,” he said.
Trump agreed, saying he hopes they’ll develop Congressional and Senate maps that achieve a broad consensus.
Other session items
The call for legislation to create new legislative and Congressional districts were just two of the 34 items on the call.
The Legislature will also take up a number of supplementary appropriations along with some proposed changes to state code. One proposed bill deals with application fees for a concealed carry permit. Another creates a Medal of Valor for emergency service personnel, firefighters and police officers.
Another deals with a topic that generated controversy during the session: county commission jurisdiction over local health board rules.
Tweet David Beard @dbeardtdp Email dbeard@dominionpost.com
