Redistricting rehashed

Although the committee charged with redrawing the state's congressional districts to include a proposed new fourth seat doesn't officially convene until Monday, some members were already working Friday on an alternative GOP plan.

Meanwhile, a group of Utah Republicans is preparing a resolution that asks Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. and Utah's GOP congressional delegation to halt efforts to get a fourth U.S. House seat.

The resolution, to be considered at a Dec. 2 Salt Lake County Party central committee meeting and a February state GOP central committee meeting, says Utah should just wait until the 2010 Census, when population growth is projected to justify at least one additional seat in Congress for the state.

Leaders of the Legislature's just-named redistricting committee were tinkering Friday with a four-seat proposal put forward recently by the governor and House and Senate leaders. The plan would have split Salt Lake County in half, with the southern portion going into the new 4th District along with parts of rural Utah.

Instead of Huntsman's preliminary idea, committee leaders said, the state's most populous county may be divided among three of the four districts. A redrawn 2nd District could include Summit, Daggett and Morgan counties as well as Salt Lake City, the city's Rose Park and other parts of Salt Lake County.

"These are not set in stone. They're meant to be the starting point for discussion," said Sen. Curt Bramble, R-Provo, co-chairman of the redistricting committee. "We've come up with something that looks fairly benign."

But even as Bramble was drawing his new map, House Speaker Greg Curtis, R-Sandy, warned that any plan that split the county into parts of three districts would only come if Salt Lake County was the "population center of at least two of the districts."

The governor's proposal, along with a map drawn up in 2001 when the state first hoped to get a fourth seat in the U.S. House, will join other alternatives as the state attempts to convince the lame-duck Congress to give Utah additional representation.

Lawmakers are expected to meet in special session on Dec. 1 to approve a map to send to Washington, D.C., for action before the new Democrat-controlled Con- gress takes over in January. Public hearings across Utah on the proposals are expected to be held Nov. 27-29.

A fourth congressional seat in Utah is a political compromise in a bill that would give Washington, D.C., a voting member in the House. The new D.C. representative would likely be a Democrat, who would be offset by the Republican likely elected to represent a fourth district in Utah.