Not for the first time, a special panel advising state lawmakers about how to redraw House and Senate district maps has proposed the wholesale elimination of multimember districts.
But whether the seven-member Legislative Apportionment Board sticks to its guns — or lawmakers pay heed to its recommendations — is another question entirely.
Every 10 years, armed with new Census information, the General Assembly must redraw its boundaries to ensure compliance with the one person-one vote principle. And in this go-around, the apportionment board is diving headfirst into an old debate: whether to jettison larger, multimember districts for more compact, single-member districts.
On Oct. 15, the board voted 4-3 to approve a draft map for the Vermont House of Representatives with 150 single-member districts, removing the 46 two-member House districts currently in place. (A draft Senate map is not out yet.)
You can see the proposal and look up the district for your town in the tool below. (Note: Best viewed fullscreen on a computer. Here’s a direct link to the dashboard.)
The co-creator of the map, Rob Roper, said adopting single-member districts throughout the state was a matter of “equity” and “common sense.”
“As long as you have a hybrid system where some people have two representatives, and some people have one representative … there’s always going to be questions of what’s fair and what’s better,” he said. “I don’t know if that can ever really be solved, but the fact that there’s a debate at all, I think, is a problem.”
Roper is president of the Ethan Allen Institute, a conservative think tank. But single-member districts have some support across the aisle. Former Progressive House candidate Jeremy Hansen collaborated with Roper on the map. And the Vermont Public Research Interest Group, a left-leaning advocacy organization, spoke in support of single-member districts during board testimony.
“If a person can call on eight senators and representatives, they have more people in Montpelier looking after their interests than the people who can only call two people in Montpelier,” Tom Hughes, a senior strategist at VPIRG, told VTDigger earlier in October.
The plan has its detractors. Board member Jeanne Albert voted against the plan and produced her own with 62 single-member districts and 44 multimember districts.
She expressed concern about how, in her view, the single-member map deviates from the board’s legal and constitutional mandate: To create districts of roughly equal population that conform to town lines as much as possible.
Vermont statute requires the board to create a map where districts are within 10% of the “ideal population,” about 4,300 people per representative.
In Albert’s report on her draft map, she provides her own calculations on how the two maps compare on those standards. According to her data, districts in the single-member map vary from 9.8% too small to 8.8% too large, while her map varies only from 7.8% to 7.5%. Her plan also has fewer districts that are over 7% too large or small.
The single-member plan would also split up 30 cities or towns for the first time, while hers newly divides only 17 communities. Roper and Hansen’s plan, for example, splits Montpelier, a longtime two-member House district, into two separate districts.
Albert’s plan maintains Middlebury as a two-member district that follows the town’s borders. The single-member plan, on the other hand, would break Middlebury into three separate districts, combining the easternmost third of the town together with Bristol to its north.
Dave Silberman, a justice of the peace in Middlebury, called the single-member Addison County-area redistricting proposals “absurd.” Justices of the peace sit on the local boards of civil authority that give the apportionment board local feedback after the panel puts out its draft maps.
Middlebury and Bristol aren’t even in the same school district together, Silberman noted. And such boundaries matter, he argues, because people who send their children to the same schools form a natural political constituency — even if they don’t live in the same town — having voted and debated on school budgets for years. Another proposed Addison County district, he said, would span two mountain passes and take about an hour and half to drive through.
“There’s zero political cohesion there, right? These are not people who talk to each other,” said Silberman, who added that he was not speaking on behalf of the full Middlebury Board of Civil Authority.
Albert also disputed another argument made in favor of single-member districts: That they have popular support. Roper and Hansen’s report cites a survey by the board that found 75% of respondents supported single-member districts, and 65% said they’d prioritize them over following town and city borders.
But Albert said the methodology of the survey was not exactly scientific. The board posted it to its website, and several interest groups linked to it on their websites. That’s not a representative poll, Albert argues.
“I think [it] would most likely be filled out by people who … have the strongest views, one way or the other,” she said.
Will this go anywhere?
The latest plan echoes the apportionment debate of 10 years ago. Tom Little, head of the reapportionment board then and now, said an all-single-member-district plan passed the board 4-3 in 2011, but its final proposal to lawmakers backed off of that after getting feedback from the towns.
“There’s some towns that have been in the same, essentially the same, two-member district for decades. And they’ve become accustomed to it and they like that model,” he said.
Little himself was in the minority this year. “You can make a case that single-member districts are, in some sense, a better unit of representative democracy,” he said, but he thinks it’s better to make the statutory requirements a higher priority.
Local boards of civil authority will now meet and provide their own comments about the apportionment board’s draft. The board must then review that feedback before passing its final recommendations on to the Legislature.
And whether the board keeps its current proposal as-is when it is forwarded to lawmakers, the General Assembly is likely to make significant adjustments.
Shap Smith, who was speaker of the House during the last redistricting process, recalled how Rep. Donna Sweaney, D-Windsor, then-chair of the House Government Operations Committee — which takes a first pass at the redistricting map — listened politely when board members presented their ideas.
“And then she said, ‘OK, well, they presented their map, let’s go to work on whatever we’re going to do,’” he said. “I don’t feel like it gets a ton of deference.”
Roper said “there’s a lot of pressure from elected officials” to keep their own districts the same because they don’t want to lose the people who elected them. But he hopes that feedback from local communities will propel the plan forward.
“It’s like ripping off a Band-Aid,” he said. “It’ll only happen once and then this will be the norm and everybody will be fine with it.”
Since such a radical reimagining of the map could threaten the seats of many incumbents, the cynical view is that lawmakers will ultimately protect their own. But Smith argues lawmakers — and their constituents — just generally favor the status quo.
“I think one of the things that wins the day is as little disruption as possible,” he said. “And there’s something to be said for people getting used to the districts that they’re in.”