Wednesday, Jan. 19, 2005
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Wednesday, Jan. 19, 2005
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Redistricting?
jflynch@theCitizenNews.com A lone participant holding aloft a hand-written sign that read “Re-district Fayette Now!” offered the only reminder at Monday’s King Day parade of the impending fight over the way Fayette County elects its county commissioners. Already, opinions on the issue are divided almost exclusively by lines of race and politics. Of the seven members of Fayette County’s legislative delegation, four black Democrats support making the change while three white Republicans are opposed. Saturday, the county delegation will hold the first of three meetings planned to get public feedback on switching from at-large elections to district voting. The forum starts at 10 a.m. at North Fayette Elementary School on Kenwood Road. Introducing a bill in this year’s General Assembly to require district voting in Fayette County is a key issue for Rep. Virgil Fludd, D-Tyrone, whose 66th District serves northwest Fayette. Fludd, chairman of the delegation, is joined in his support for the switch on the opposite side of the rotunda by Sen. Valencia Seay, D-Riverdale, who lives in Clayton County but represents a segment of north Fayette in the 34th District. “We’re moving in the right direction,” said Seay of going to district representation at the county level. “It’s the way to go. It was just 10 or 12 years ago that Clayton County made the switch to district voting, and that’s how I was able to get elected” to the legislature, she said. Seay said redrawing the County Commission maps to better reflect the county’s diversity doesn’t have to be a complicated process. “There are several models from other communities out there that we can follow,” she said. The presumption behind district voting is that it improves the chances that a minority or Democrat will get elected, but only if at least one or more of the districts are drawn to create a voter block that would support such a candidate, a common practice in congressional redistricting known as “gerrymandering.” But data on voting patterns drawn from the most recent election, combined with current census estimates on Fayette’s minority population, suggests that even with districts in place, there would be no guarantee of breaking the Republican grip on local elected offices. Fayette County had 59,714 active registered voters on the rolls in the last presidential election, according to the Georgia Statistics System of the University of Georgia. Of those, 81.14 percent were white, while 13.58 were black, which closely mirrors the makeup of the county population as a whole. It will be hard to create a majority-minority precinct among Fayette’s five commission districts if they make up fewer than 20 percent of registered voters countywide, said Rep. Dan Lakly, R-Peachtree City. Of the county’s 36 voting precincts, just two, in the far northern corner of the county, have majority black populations, pointed out Lakly, whose 72nd District covers most of Peachtree City and central Fayette. Further, said Lakly, of the four black Democrats who already represent parts of the county in the General Assembly, just one of them posted a victory within Fayette lines: Darryl Jones of the 77th, and he was unopposed. Fludd, Seay and Rep. Roberta Abdul-Salaam of District 74 were all solidly defeated by Fayette County voters, but all won reelection to the statehouse on the returns from the Fulton and Clayton portions of their districts. Perhaps the best model for how county commission districts might be drawn can be found just down the street at the Board of Education. Though school board members are elected by countywide, they must reside in one of five equally drawn districts approved in 2002 by the U.S. Justice Department. According to Superintendent John DeCotis, the five school board districts are drawn to have a fairly equal population ranging from 17,585 to 19,051. The only one with a significant minority makeup is School Board Post 5 covering all of the county north of Fayetteville and east of Tyrone, including many neighborhoods where black families have moved in recent years. Yet even with the influx of minorities, the black population within the district was just 26.63 percent of the total in 2000. Post 4 covering central Fayetteville had a 13.42 minority makeup, while the remaining three school board districts averaged around 6 percent minority. Statistics aside, Lakly argues that districts don’t have to be drawn to favor black candidates for local office. He points out that Harold Simmons, a black resident of Whitewater Creek, almost unseated Herb Frady on the County Commission last summer, and in the 8th District congressional primary, Dylan Glenn defeated local favorite Lynn Westmoreland in every Peachtree City precinct, though he lost district-wide. The difference? Both Simmons and Glenn are Republicans. |
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2004-Fayette Publishing, Inc.
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