Redistricting in Sandoval County

Redistricting in Sandoval County

by Jerry Saxton

As an aid to the redistricting of our County Commissioner Districts each commissioner appointed one member from his District to a watchdog group. Commissioner Orlando Lucero appointed me as his representative. As representatives, we were each asked to attend as many of the District meetings as possible, to assist in listening to constituents input, and to keep our individual Commissioners informed of issues. The primary reason for redistricting is to make each District have approximately the same population. Our own District 1 was the District that had grown the least in the last ten years. Our current District is almost 20% short of the desired population size. Thus our District would be the District that needed to be changed the most. In addition to meeting the population criteria, each District needed to meet four other criteria: must not dilute minority voting strength; must preserve communities of interest whenever reasonable; must be contiguous; and must be compact.

I attended all of the meetings except the one in Cuba. In general the meetings were sparsely attended with our own meeting being the one best attended as might be expected given the number of motivated and interested people in our area. Many individuals expressed a personal preference for one plan or another. It is obvious that you cannot please everyone.

The arguments which carried the most weight were those that could be applied to a community as a whole. The communities and pueblos to the northeast of Placitas do most of their shopping in or near the town of Bernalillo. Thus Pena Blanca, while it may appear far away to some of us, would much prefer to be in District 1 since their typical travel in our county is along interstate 25. There are no major roads to the west that connect the precincts along the interstate to the rest of their current District 5; so that any commissioner in District 1 would be relatively close to them compared to any commissioner living in the western or central part of District 5. There seemed to be a consensus that the redistricting of 10 years ago was not in their best interest. Thus a plan A1 was born and could be adopted if the commissioners would agree to support it.

Even though the addition of the precincts to the northeast seems to add a large area, additional population still had to be added to District 1 in order to meet the population goals. This is accomplished in plan A1 by adding some of the densely populated precincts that are adjacent to the town of Bernalillo to the west. Plan A1 also causes some ripple effects in the other Districts. The county hired an expert group to vet all of the plans including A1.

There are perhaps thousands of ways that plans meeting the population, compactness, and contiguous goals could be developed. The difficult part is meeting the community and minority guidelines. As to what plan the commissioners will finally accept I really do not know. However, I personally do not expect any of the plans with large changes to get much consideration.