CHAMPAIGN – A plan to take the power to draw county board districts from politicians and to give it to an independent, bipartisan commission won the endorsement Friday of the Champaign County Farm Bureau and the Champaign County Chamber of Commerce.
Other groups, including the League of Women Voters, also will be asked to support the proposal to be discussed by the county board in future months.
“Partisan politics is tiresome and detrimental to good public policy,” said Laura Weis, president and CEO of the chamber of commerce. “At the core of partisan politics is our current system which allows a select few politicians to draw their own maps in secret.”
The current county board district map was drawn by Democrats, who controlled the board following the 2000 Census. But supporters of independent redistricting acknowledged that the Republican Party, which dominated the county board until 2000, had drawn the map to its advantage for decades before.
The goal of an independent commission, supporters said, is to open up the mapmaking process and encourage competitive elections.
“We’re not getting people to come out and run for election. They won’t run because they think it’s all planted and the districts are all fixed and the incumbents are all in,” said Urbana Democrat Steve Beckett, who authored the redistricting commission resolution before the county board.
Beckett said he was “embarrassed” by his vote for the last redistricting map.
“Two people in a backroom drew a map. A major component of that was incumbency, could they eliminate people they wanted eliminated from office. And they succeeded,” he said.
The Republican-drawn map 10 years earlier also was “ridiculous,” he said. “That wasn’t representative of this county.”
Champaign Republican Alan Nudo said competitive districts would lead to better candidates for the board.
“Good candidates will come to the fore if they think they have a competitive election,” he said.
Republican Greg Knott, who lives in rural St. Joseph, acknowledged it would be difficult to make all county board districts equally competitive, but an independent commission wouldn’t draw districts that overtly attempt to help incumbents or aim to keep one party in control of the county board.
“Are you going to have some districts that are more heavily Republican than Democratic, or more heavily Democratic than Republican? Probably, but I think if the criteria is not to keep the party in control … that’s the objective you have when you draw a gerrymandered map,” Knott said.
Republicans will support the independent redistricting commission, Knott said. But Champaign Democrat Michael Richards said most Democrats will oppose it.
Using the commission would make county board members less accountable, he asserted.
“I think the voters want their county board members to be accountable,” he said. “They want us to be accountable for the decisions, whether it’s the nursing home or other matters of the county.”
Richards also contended that the resolution, as drafted, would appear to allow for only two rural-dominated districts. There are now four majority rural districts.
The resolution says the county board should adopt a plan that “divides townships or municipalities only when necessary to conform to the equal population requirement.” Richards said population growth in City of Champaign and Cunningham townships would appear to require that six districts be primarily urban and that a seventh district would primarily suburban, including the village of Savoy and Champaign Township.
The redistricting commission plan calls for the appointment of an 11-member commission, including two county board members from each party, that would be appointed by the November county board meeting. The process of drawing the map would be open to the public, including public hearings, and would require districts to be equal in population and compact and contiguous. The county board would have to vote to adopt the map. If it was unable to do so, the process would be turned over to another group of elected officials and party chairmen.
Distributed via Chicago Press Release Services