Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 21, 1991 TAG: 9103210457
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-12 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The plan, subject to a vote next week in a Senate committee, gives new meaning to the term "gerrymander," makes the Senate Democrats who concocted it look ridiculous, and threatens to erode further the quality of representative government in this region.
Incredibly, the chief Democratic dissatisfaction seems to be coming from Sen. Granger Macfarlane - whose compactly revised district, consisting of the city of Roanoke and an enlarged portion of Roanoke County, is one of the plan's few good points.
Southwest Virginia failed to keep pace over the past decade with population growth in the state as a whole, and so must lose a Senate seat. The region is shaped like an elongated wedge, and so options are limited for performing the redistricting surgery.
Still, those constraints can't excuse what has been brought forth. Clearly, the Democratic redistricters' guiding principle has been to protect incumbents wherever possible and, where not, make sure it's a Republican who gets hurt. That's neither surprising nor, within limits, shameful. But the lengths to which Senate Democrats have gone are ridiculous.
Bath County would be in the district of Sen. Elliot Schewel of faraway Lynchburg. The district of Sen. Dudley "Buzz" Emick of Fincastle would snake its way from Alleghany County in the north to a portion of Pulaski County in the southwest. Sen. Danny Bird of Wytheville would represent distant Buchanan County but not neighboring Smyth County. The latter would be in a district that slithers all the way to the Montgomery-Roanoke County line, so as to ensure the re-election of Sen. Madison Marye of Shawsville.
In the Roanoke Valley, Macfarlane's beef is that the additional county territory he'd pick up wouldn't be so firmly in his corner as a handy little piece of Bedford County where his anti-Explore bluster presumably has won great favor. That probably would require splitting Bedford County among three instead of two Senate districts, and perhaps the same for Roanoke County, but who's looking?
Actually, the idiocy begins in Southwest Virginia's far corner, where Democratic Sen. John Buchanan of the 40th District isn't expected to seek re-election because of illness and advanced age. Simply adding Scott County to Buchanan's old district would bring it close to the required population with little sacrifice in compactness. Other configurations, though less compact, could keep coalfield counties in one district, farming counties in another.
Instead, the new 40th reflects neither compactness nor community of interest. Its most remarkable feature is a long finger poking east into Bristol and southern Washington County. That (1) gives Republican Sen. William C. Wampler Jr. of Bristol a dramatically altered constituency and so could make him vulnerable to Democratic challenge, and (2) eliminates the pain of, somewhere between Bristol and Lexington, having to put two Democratic incumbents in the same district.
The price is high for such incumbent/partisan advantage. Throughout the region, Senate districts would be sprawling creatures of bizarrely ugly shape and unnecessarily long distances. Effective representation would be hindered; voters would have less access to their legislators; a citizenry already too alienated from politics would have little reason to become less so.
The Southwest Virginia senators who worked out the details have dubbed it the "Ancient Age Plan," after Marye's favorite brand of bourbon. Maybe they were drinking too much of it when they drew up the plan. On the other hand, the redistricting proposal isn't so much the result of giddy silliness as of transparent cynicism.
by CNB