Let’S Build On Solid Districting Start

At their first public meeting Thursday evening, members of the city of Spokane’s districting board seated themselves not up in the posh chairs behind the curved, elevated desk where City Council members sit, but down at audience level.

“We are not starting out with an us-up-here and you-down-there process at all,” board member Bob Mansfield told me.

Maybe it was largely symbolic, but it was a sign of how strongly the board members want Spokane citizens to be comfortable as active participants in the districting job.

Now the question is how much citizen interest there will be in actually doing the work prescribed by Proposition 1, the general election measure that establishes council representation by district.

More, let’s hope, than was shown a few years ago when a specially elected board of freeholders had little success getting public input on a charter that would have created a unified city-county government.

Thursday’s meeting, at which the districting board presented an overview of the process and laid out basic considerations for a workable plan, brought out about 40 community members. Not bad, considering the short time frame, but not good enough over the long haul.

The district representation initiative was put forward as a means of improving representation and accountability in local government. Here, then, is a chance for interested citizens to play a direct role in making sure it’s done effectively.

But there is no time to spare. The next public meeting is from 7 to 9 Tuesday evening at Roosevelt Elementary School, 14th and Bernard. Four others are scheduled through Feb. 15.

Citizens don’t need to attend any of the public meetings to present their own districting proposals, but the task is harder than it looks and the deadline is Feb. 4.

To hear David Bray, the author of the initiative, tell it, the districting chore isn’t complicated at all. “Anyone with a calculator and a map should be able to do it in an evening,” he has said.

Perhaps. Maybe there isn’t much chance to go wrong in dividing a city of nearly 200,000 people into three districts.

Then again, the districts must be as nearly equal as possible in population, yet the data that citizens, the districting board and ultimately the City Council must depend on consists of nearly decade-old census figures, adjusted to reflect building-permit activity.

And then there are all the anti-gerrymandering requirements spelled out in either the initiative, state law or previous court decisions.

District lines, for example, should follow voting precinct lines as closely as possible, and not break up political subdivisions or communities of interest such as ethnic or socioeconomic clusters. However, the city’s official neighborhood boundaries - certainly communities of interest if not actually political subdivisions - don’t generally coincide with precinct boundaries. Something has to give.

To complicate things a little more, the city’s most reliable population data are compiled by census tracts that don’t coincide with either neighborhoods or precincts.

And once the districting board has forwarded three plans to the City Council for a final choice, any Spokane resident who spots a flaw has standing to challenge the whole product in court.

Spotlighting such pitfalls is not meant to imply that the task is unmanageable, only that there is a world of opportunity to do it poorly. It’s an important task that deserves the thoughtful attention of as many concerned citizens as possible.

Whether or not you supported the districting proposal, all of us in Spokane have a stake in seeing to it that the final product is fair and credible.

Mayor John Talbott did an honorable job of appointing commission members according to their qualifications rather than political allegiance.

Avista official Mansfield, along with respected civic activist Elinor Magnuson and Gonzaga University Professor John Kohls, have invested a lot of personal energy to devise an open and participatory process.

The community is lucky to have them on the job, but the districting board can’t do the work alone. Indeed, under the initiative, they can’t draw up a plan, only citizens can do that.

But with interested citizen participation, they can facilitate a process in which a variety of proposals can be offered, discussed and defended, and the final product can truly reflect shared community values.

Only, however, if a broad representation of citizens seize the opportunity to help design the government so many of us criticize for ignoring our wishes.