Group seeks neutral legislative redistricting plan

A group saying it wants a "neutral" legislative redistricting plan drawn up following the 2010 census will run a citizen initiative petition aimed at setting up an "independent" commission.

Lisa Watts Baskin, a former GOP legislative candidate and former legislative attorney, says a group she's working with — Fair Boundaries Coalition — will soon file the paperwork to start collecting 99,000 voter signatures needed to put a proposed commission-creating law before voters next year.

Criticizing the Legislature's redistricting "is great rhetoric, great drum-beating for some," said Utah House Speaker Dave Clark, R-Santa Clara.

But Utahns have been "well served" by legislative redistricting since 1896 statehood, Clark said. And he hopes that this new group "will at least study" all the work that the Legislature itself does in "an open, yet political" process of redistricting.

The Legislature, controlled by Republicans, refused to vote on Democratic-sponsored bills in the 2009 session that would have set up an independent commission.

And just last week GOP Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. formally told his political-reform citizen commission not to study legislative redistricting — saying he agreed with GOP legislative leadership that redistricting is an internal legislative branch function.

Watts Baskin says her group knows how difficult it is to gather the 99,000 signatures from the required state Senate districts needed to get a measure on the 2010 ballot.

"But if we don't do it now we have to wait another 10 years to fix" the current redistricting process, she said, which has been much criticized by some as letting legislators pick their constituents, not the other way around.

For a variety of reasons — including incumbent lawmakers redrawing their own state House and Senate districts — by far most of the turnover in the 104-member, part-time Legislature comes through voluntary retirements and deaths.

In the 2008 legislative elections, 91 percent of the House members and 82 percent of senators who ran for re-election won, a review by the Deseret News found.

But Clark, who chairs a National Conference of State Legislatures' committee on redistricting, said "there are volumes of settled case law" on how redistricting must be done, paying attention to communities of interest and many other factors besides new census population numbers.

Yes, Clark said, when it comes down to it legislators will decide whether a boundary line is moved "half a mile or so" this way or that in urban areas from what may be recommended by the Legislature's own redistricting committee.