The Vermont Legislature has just one shot every 10 years to redraw the lines of their own districts. This time around they face a time crunch to get it done.
The U.S. Census Bureau was months late in providing states the population data required to redraw district lines. Now Vermont lawmakers have a question before them: Should the state stick with its unusual multimember districts or transition to the more typical but new-to-Vermont single-member district model?
Vermont’s Legislative Apportionment Board, which is charged with drafting a redistricting scheme, typically would have received census data in March or April and presented its plan to the Legislature in August. But the apportionment board didn’t even get the census data until August.
In October, the tri-partisan board voted 4-3 in favor of a draft House district map, which featured 150 single-member districts and removed the 46 two-member House districts currently in place. The board sent two sets of maps to the Legislature — the single-member plan favored by the majority of the apportionment board and an alternative multimember plan — on Nov. 30. But lawmakers only received narrative descriptions of the maps on Wednesday, according to Rep. Sarah Copeland Hanzas, D-Bradford, who chairs the House Government Operations Committee.
That committee is now considering which option to support.
The committee’s Republican members appear to lean toward the apportionment board’s single-member model, which could be more politically favorable to their party. The map was drawn up by Rob Roper, president of the conservative Ethan Allen Institute, and Jeremy Hansen, a former Progressive candidate for the House.
The Legislature typically would have had months to hear from local boards of civil authority and members of the public on the various options. But now it’s racing to meet an April 1 deadline set by the Secretary of State’s Office in order to print primary ballots on time.
Because of a Vermont statute dating back to the ’60s, the House actually takes not one, but two votes on district maps in reapportionment years. The first vote is on a draft map. The second is the final vote.
The government operations committee is teed up to vote in favor of the apportionment board’s alternative multimember map on Friday, sending it to the full House for a vote as soon as next week. But Copeland Hanzas said the first vote “isn’t in any way an indication of what the final districts will look like.”
What testimony her committee would usually take prior to the legislative session, she said, would instead be taken after passage of the first draft map. The committee’s logic is that the boards of civil authority have already had an opportunity to provide feedback on the apportionment board’s recommended single-member map — so passing the alternative map as a draft would give Vermonters and lawmakers two options before approving a final version.
Some Republicans have taken issue with the House’s fast-tracked approach.
Sen. Corey Parent, R-Franklin, called it “outrageous” in an opinion piece he circulated Wednesday.
“This unnecessarily rushed process would push through a poorly-vetted map without adequate public testimony in the first 72 hours of the legislative session,” Parent wrote.
The two-bill process is an “oddity” unique to the reapportionment process, Copeland Hanzas said, and it can trip up lawmakers and the public. During Thursday’s hearing, members spent hours pondering whether to scrap the two-step process entirely in order to streamline the system.
Rep. Bob Hooper, D-Burlington, on Thursday urged his colleagues to see past the quirks of the process and just get the work done in their crunched timeline.
“I think that we’re dancing around the fire here and ought to get our marshmallows out,” he said.
