As if the Austin ISD Board of Trustees did not have enough on their plates, tonight they will receive a presentation showing that they will almost undoubtedly go through major redistricting.
AISD has a hybrid trustee system, with two at-large members, and seven single-member districts. According to the assessment issued by outside counsel Bickerstaff Heath Delgado Acosta LLP (issued on March 25 and scheduled for tonight’s board work session), the 2010 census shows those single-member seats are becoming severely lopsided.
As there are 635,931 residents in the district, each of those seven seats should contain roughly 90,847 residents. Here are the actual numbers:
1 (East) Cheryl Bradley: 79,959 (-12% deviation from target)
2 (South-East) Sam Guzman: 89,056 (-2%)
3 (North-Central) Christine Brister: 81,071 (-11%)
4 (North-West) Vince Torres, vice-president: 79,935 (-12%)
5 (Central) Mark Williams, president: 88,111 (-3%)
6 (South) Lori Moya, secretary: 101,670 (+12%)
7 (South-West) Robert Schneider: 111,129 (+28%)
Under federal election law, the maximum permissible deviation between the highest and the lowest population districts is only 10%. Get above that, and you start to be in violation of the US Constitution. Since there is an almost 40% variation between Torres (the smallest district) and Schneider (the biggest) redistricting seems inevitable.
It is far too early to draw any maps, and the board is not scheduled to even adopt process criteria until April 25, but there are some obvious facts.
One: The big boil down is that every district north of the river is below the target, and every district south of the river is well above the target number. The district closest to the target number of Guzman’s, which straddles the river and is only 2% down.
Two: Both Schneider and Moya’s districts are so massive now that they are inevitably going to get sliced up. The real question is whether their houses will get drawn out of their districts.
Three: The three northerly districts (Torres, Brister, Bradley) are all down, so there is a good chance that any new maps will have to carve up or radically reshape Williams and Guzman’s district to bolster them.
Four: Currently there are four districts wholly north of the river, and three wholly or mostly south. These numbers could very well shift that balance of power.
This article appears in Dome Sweet Dome.
