New Map Poses Challenges for Huber

Travis County Precinct 3 Commissioner Karen Huber was greeted by two very different bestubbled faces two Tuesday mornings ago. They both brought trouble.

The first belonged to Morris Priest, one of a trio of regular agitators who berate the Travis County Commissioners Court from the safety of the citizens' communication period. In what's become something of a normal spectacle, Priest sat down and began working his way through a list of seemingly half-informed (but entirely angry) complaints. For a few seconds, he settled his critique on Huber. "Many of us are going to be working very hard, Com­mis­sioner Huber, to replace you," he warned.

This would have been wholly unremarkable except for the news brought by the second disheveled gentleman. For the past several months, San Antonio-based lawyer George Korbel has served the court in an advisory capacity as its members went about the particularly loaded business of political redistricting. Korbel – who frequently appeared as if he'd rolled out of bed, suit and all, directly into the commis­sion­ers court – goes back far enough in the political world that Pct. 2 Commis­sion­er Sarah Eckhardt was able to note the work that he'd done with her father, former U.S. Rep. Bob Eckhardt.

By that Aug. 23 morning, Korbel and members of the court were staring at a still-smoldering map that reaffirmed the blueness of three of the county's geographically elected districts – Ron Davis' Pct. 1, Eck­hardt's Pct. 2, and Margaret Gómez's Pct. 4 – at the potential expense of Huber, a Demo­crat whose Pct. 3 remained the largest, most purple, and most untenable, in terms of both size and politics.

Political redistricting is by its nature a nasty sort of thing: Given a new set of demographic data, elected officials are faced with the task of reconfiguring their respective voting regions with a delicate touch that, in close political quarters, preserves as much of their interest as possible – while not screwing too much with that of their allies. It is the most political of political processes.

Travis County Commissioners Court currently seats five Democrats. (County Judge Sam Biscoe is elected at large and, as he's wont to joke, doesn't have to endure this particular mess.) But even in the heart (such as it is) of Democratic Texas, there are gradations of blue. To some local political minds, limiting the potential damage to one borderline seat – Huber's – is more acceptable than any sort of compromise that might erode the steadfastness of the others.

Commissioners are also somewhat constrained by provisions in the Voting Rights Act that aim to protect the representation of minority voters. The Travis process is further complicated by the fact that Gómez can argue for the concentration of as many Hispanic voters as possible, just as Davis can plead for African-Americans. Even with all of that lurking in the back of commissioners' minds, this time around, there was some thought that Pct. 3 might be able to get more blue. It didn't work out that way.

Though Eckhardt did take on a sizeable chunk of Huber's district, the debate in open court focused on the borders that separate Davis and Eckhardt, Davis and Gómez, and Gómez and Huber. Pflugerville had moved from Eckhardt's district to Davis' in an effort to balance out declining African-American numbers in the region. Huber had tried unsuccessfully to pry Travis Heights from Gómez, and was left to accept a slice of Austin's central business district and the University of Texas from Eckhardt in what seemed like something of a last-minute gesture from the Pct. 2 commissioner. Huber thanked Eckhardt from the dais.

Still, adding that piece of Central Austin to Pct. 3 served to nudge the benchmarks used by Korbel – the voting percentages in the 2008 Obama/McCain presidential race, and those in the 2010 Perry/White gubernatorial contest – by just a fraction. And in the end, the change may prove more complicated for Huber, whose precinct will now extend from far west Travis County to Downtown Austin. Huber, who started with a goal to shed some of the vast expanse of her territory, had her precinct's boundaries stretched even farther.

The map that the commissioners were working with carried No. 168. The latest version – the one that includes the central business district's switch into Pct. 3 – was labeled 170. Along the way, Huber, Davis, and Eckhardt lent their respective names to a host of district iterations; there was no lack of horse-trading as commissioners redrew their lines.

Except that Huber maintains that the final boundaries between her precinct and Gómez's were the result of a compromise between Davis and Gómez, a deal that she says she had no part of. In court, Biscoe suggested that this development came courtesy of Open Meetings Act limitations on out-of-quorum discussion. Gómez reinforced this idea.

"If two of us talked – we couldn't go talk to the third one," she said. "I did not violate the Open Meetings Act." She later added, "I follow laws to the letter." Gómez intoned Sarah Palin as she stood by her defensive posture. "As far as taking care of Precinct 1 and 4, you betcha," she said from the dais. Huber blames the consultant. "There was no real effort to help us broker a deal that we were all comfortable with," she said. And she remains puzzled by her colleagues' intractability. As for the idea of trying to serve such a large district: "I'm sad for my constituents," she says.