Tomorrow night at the Hickory City Council meeting the issue of Ward Realignment will be addressed. The issue was first discussed at the City Council Meeting of April 5, 2011 by Deborah Stagner of the Law Firm Tharrington Smith.
Summarizing: There is a constitutional requirement for one person one vote. Each electoral district (ward) must be substantially equal in population, so that each person's vote counts the same and therefore every 10 years after the official Federal census, governments are required to look at their districts and determine whether or not the lines need to be adjusted.
The City Council must look at whether the process can be completed before the third business day before the filing deadline for the upcoming election. She is looking to adopt a resolution sometime in June. The filing opens on July 25 this year in the City of Hickory, and the wards must be drawn up three business days before that filing date begins. That means that this plan has to be in place by July 19, 2011.
Each district does not have to be identical in size. Courts allow a reasonable variation amongst jurisdictions. The overall deviation between the smallest and largest districts should not be more than 10%. When looking at the current districts, the ideal number can be found by dividing the population of the city into the total number of districts. The population of the city of Hickory after the last census is 40,010 divided by six districts, which means that the ideal population for each district would be 6,668. In looking at the largest and the smallest districts in the city of Hickory, you see that there is more than 10% difference between the largest and smallest district. There's been a significant amount of growth in Ward 2 and a significant decrease in Ward 5. Ward 2 is 21% over the average and Ward 5 is 14% below the average. And adding this together, you see that there is a 35% deviation, which is far above 10% desired deviation.
Equity in Government: During the last City Council Meeting of May 3, 2011, the Catawba County Democratic Party's spoke about their vison and in those statements they stated that they want to work together to build a community which respects diversity and they look to "hold government 1eaders accountable for their political actions and policies by insisting upon openness" in government.They believe that the poor and minority community in Hickory has no effective voice in city government due to a lack of representation on the City Council. They have respectfully requested the Hickory City Council to seek and implement ways to show greater sensitivity for the legitimate concerns of under-represented minorities in this community.
In their goal to Support the creation of a Minority-Majority Ward, the Democrat Party mentions that until 1970, city elections were ward based. In that year, Hickory instituted the modified at-large system for electing City Council members. They believe that this change has created an electoral system which eventually led to the under-representation of poor and minority citizens in elected positions and the modified at-large electoral system now in place essentially denies that possibility and thus insures that representative democracy is diminished in our community;
THE HOUND: I cannot disagree with the summarization of the Democrat party on this issue. Under the guidelines expected to be passed tomorrow night, the public is supposed to have a voice in this decision making process, but if one looks back to what happened last year with the City's swimming pools in Ridgeview and West Hickory, they will remember that citizens were supposed to have a voice in that decision also; but in the end they had no voice, because city officials highjacked the process and swerved it towards their own personally desired conclusion.
In my opinion, under this current situation, the right question is not being addressed. Remember from Mrs. Stagner's own address of Council, she stated that the goal of the legislation is to have one person - one vote. To me, that opens up another question. By the term vote are we suggesting that we are trying to create equal populations in wards as a way to meet a State governmental statute or are we trying to truly empower representation of individuals in each of the six wards of Hickory?
I Honestly believe that the minimum will be done to meet the threshold of criteria set forth by North Carolina General Statutes. And the goal of creating a Minority-Majority ward would not address the issues either. I sat in a room two years ago at the Candidates Forum at the Catawba County Chamber of Commerce in which a gentleman insisted that Hickory needs to go back to Ward specific voting. At that time, I disagreed with him and for the most part it was for selfish reasons. I had a personal interest in seeing Harry Hipps win Ward 6 and I knew that he could not defeat the incumbent if it came to a pure ward vote. I counted on the other wards' votes and for the most part those other wards did not show up. In the end my personal selfish interests showed the true dilemma that Hickory faces. In the end I was wrong.
What Hickory needs to see is Ward specific elections. Ward 6 should not be determining the person or interests that represent Ward 1 through 5 and Ward 1 should not be determining who represents Ward 2 through 6. The only general election should be for the Mayorship. Why? Because we have seen races in the past 40 years where the Ward has a primary in which one candidate wins the primary and then when they go to the general election they get blown out because of the heavy weighted turnout from another ward. That means that the specific ward isn't being represented by the person of their choice. They are being represented by the choice of another Ward. This has happened multiple times to Larry Pope in Ward 4 and it happened to Gary Ewing in Ward 2.
We don't need to see multiple elections. We have a hard enough time getting turnout for one election. In the Ward 4 race two years ago, you had over 300 people show up for the primary and 77 people show up for the general election. If you have 1, 2, 3, or 4 candidates it should not matter. You can say that the person has to win by 50%-plus or a plurality plus 10% and that would make for a fair election (or then there is a runoff of the top 2). What we see dilutes the effectiveness of Ward Representatives. The Ward Representative would do best by winning over the people within their own ward. As it stands now, you can theoretically not talk to a single person in your ward or represent a single issue of your ward; but you can still win by going and talking up the issues that face other wards even when those issues don't represent (work against) the interests of your own ward. Does that make sense?
What my opinion is is that what entails our current local municipal election process (and subsequently governance) is not working. I do believe that much of our populace is not being fairly represented. It isn't about being a sore loser. It is about fairness. This isn't a Race issue to me, because if one looks at Ridgeview much of the African-American population has been dispersed throughout the city. Ridgeview and its immediate area is becoming more racially diverse. What I see is more of a socio-economic issue where the poor people in the community are not being represented. Look at the make-up of Council. I believe the people on Council do not have a clue how the poor to middle class citizens lives in this community.
The people in Viewmont wouldn't want the people of the South Side of the tracks imposing their will or desires upon them and we know that the same can be said if the roles are reversed. This issue will not be settled by redrawing lines and adding a few residences here or there. In the last election only 2,300 people showed up to vote out of 27,000 registered. Would you consider that a success?
A healthy community wants people to vote. In the 2009 election, I believe that more than half of the voters came from 3 voting precincts in the City of Hickory. Those precincts represent the people who have most of their issues addressed by the Council. It is good that these people vote and they should not be ashamed or penalized for voicing their privilege and desires. But, what The City of Hickory needs to see is more people buy into the process of governance. Everyone in the city should be working together and looking out for each others interests. That cannot happen if we try and impose our will upon one another. That can only happen if the community meets at the table on an equal footing. Ward specific voting will not be perfect, but it will insure that the voices that represent the local neighborhoods (and their opinions) are listened to and understood and that is all that anyone should rightfully ask for.
