By Karen Gleason
The 830 Times
Del Rio City Council members in December will review a proposed redistricting of the three council districts.
Attorney Clarissa Rodriguez of the law firm Denton Navarro Rocha Bernal & Zech, the city’s legal consultants, made a presentation about the redistricting to the council during its most recent meeting.
“A couple of meetings ago, we talked about engaging a consultant, who is with our firm, to work on the redistricting process, and so we’re just going to go over the reapportionment results, the numbers that were run by the consultant, and then we’ll go over the next steps,” Rodriguez told the council.
Rodriguez showed the council the current maps of the three council districts in the city.
“So the total population (of Del Rio) is 34,946, making the ideal size of (each district) 11,649. Currently, District I has 10,862, District II has 12,899, and District III has 11,185. So as you can see, we probably need to move some population from District II, namely into District I, and we may move some into District III just to even it out a little bit as well,” she said.
“I think what the most important thing is that when we do move things, we don’t want to break up neighborhoods of interest, and what that means is that we want to make sure we stay consistent. For example, that there is one neighborhood that is together, with specific streets there, we don’t want to pull any of those streets into one of the other districts; we want to make sure they all stay together,” Rodriguez said.
Rodriguez then reviewed the specific deviation formulas required.
She said the deviation for -6.75% for District I, meaning that there are 787 people below its ideal size.
“For District II, we are 1,250 people above the ideal size, and so this is a deviation of 10.73%. It’s just a little bit over the 10% deviation allowed by law, but what you notice is that when we do the actual calculations, you use the highest and the lowest, and you calculate an average, so that’s why I mentioned earlier the number is 17%, not 10%,” she said.
District III is 464 people under the ideal district size, she said, a deviation of about -4%.
She walked the council through the “Del Rio maximum deviation calculation,” explaining, “You take the deviation of plus 10.73% for District II, add it to the deviation of -6.75% for District I, and that gives us a maximum deviation of 17.49%, and legally, you can only be 10%, so that’s why we need to move and equal out everything up to 10%,” she said.
Rodriguez also explained that when the lines of the districts are moved, some specific laws must be followed.
“There is mandatory criteria and discretionary criteria. For the mandatory criteria, those things are making sure you’re not packing people in or moving minorities out, but because Del Rio has a majority of Hispanics in all districts, we’re not necessarily worried about that happening, whereas you might have that in other cities or municipalities. So that’s not a concern.
“Discretionary criteria, that’s when you hear about gerrymandering or making funny lines. We have to make sure there is contiguity and compactness, so we want to make sure that everything stays the same and you’re looking at consistent lines as opposed to funky, weird lines that don’t make any sense,” she said.
Rodriguez also showed a map displaying a theoretical boundary change, showing a small area at the junction of the three council districts. She showed the map to illustrate how the consultant would go about redrawing the district lines to get as close as possible to the ideal district size of just over 11,000 persons.
“We’ll do that in each district to make sure that we’re equalized,” she said.
Rodriguez also went over the next steps in the redistricting process.
“We’re going to come up with some sample maps. We’ll work with the districts that are relevant and we’ll be basing upon the Census data and your input, like making sure that there are no neighborhoods of interest that are broken up, and then you’re going to adopt the new maps by ordinance,” Rodriguez said.
She said during a previous council meeting, Councilman Alfredo “Fred” Carranza Jr. had asked that the process be done before the filing deadline to apply for a place on the 2022 city election ballot.
Technically, she said, the redistricting must be adopted 90 days before Election Day.
“I think we’re on track. It’s not super complicated,” Rodriguez said, adding she believes she will be able to bring back the final maps for council approval during its second regular meeting in December.
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