{"id":4286,"date":"2013-12-22T13:16:59","date_gmt":"2013-12-22T13:16:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/highplainsblogger.wordpress.com\/?p=4286"},"modified":"2013-12-22T13:16:59","modified_gmt":"2013-12-22T13:16:59","slug":"re-thinking-single-member-districts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=4286","title":{"rendered":"Re-thinking single-member districts"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I am reconsidering my long-standing opposition to single-member districts to determine who represents Amarillo municipal government.<\/p>\n

I’ve long held that the Amarillo City Council was served best by having all its members elected at-large. Each of its five members — including the mayor — represents the entire city. They’re all elected from the same citywide voter pool. Call one or all of them if you have a problem. Someone will tend to your concern.<\/p>\n

Well, on Saturday I crossed paths with someone who’s been involved for years in the single-member-district campaign in Amarillo. Janie Rivas formerly served on the Amarillo school board. Her husband, J.E. Sauseda, is a lawyer who’s been at the forefront of the effort to change the city’s voting plan.<\/p>\n

Janie and I visited for a few minutes, got reacquainted and ventured a notion to her about this whole idea of electing folks from single-member districts. Why not, I reckoned, split the difference? Sauseda and others keep arguing for a governing council with all members elected from districts. Elect the mayor at-large, of course, but expand the council by two seats and divide the city into six districts.<\/p>\n

My idea is to expand the council to six council members, with two of them elected at-large and four elected from single-member districts. Many cities in Texas elect their councils from those kinds of voting plans. Beaumont, where I lived for nearly 11 years before moving to Amarillo, is one of them. The system works well.<\/p>\n

Amarillo’s population is about to surpass 200,000 residents. Its demographic profile is changing dramatically, with significant increases in Latino residents. The city still has many neighborhoods with disparate socio-economic levels. Plus, there exists this nagging perception among residents that the city pays too much attention to high-end neighborhoods’ needs at the expense of those who live across town.<\/p>\n

Another option might be to adopt a cumulative voting plan approved years ago by the Amarillo Independent School District. AISD started that plan to settle a lawsuit that had been filed by the League of United Latin American Citizens protesting AISD’s at-large voting plan. If AISD has three seats being contested, you can cast all three votes for a single candidate. That system has worked well for AISD.<\/p>\n

I’m thinking that the time has arrived for Amarillo City Hall to revisit the idea of how we elect our city council members.<\/p>\n

Think also of this: Electing council members from single-member districts gives the mayor more actual standing than he currently has in Amarillo, given that he would perhaps be the only council member elected at-large. Or … the mayor would be one of, say, three individuals elected at-large, while the other four come from these districts.<\/p>\n

Amarillo is growing up right before our eyes. Is it time for the city to keep pace with that growth by reforming its electoral system? I believe it is.<\/p>\n\n

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I am reconsidering my long-standing opposition to single-member districts to determine who represents Amarillo municipal government. I’ve long held that the Amarillo City Council was served best by having all its members elected at-large. Each of its five members — including the mayor — represents the entire city. They’re all elected from the same citywide … Continue reading Re-thinking single-member districts<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[276,1209,4280],"class_list":["post-4286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-amarillo","tag-cumulative-voting","tag-single-member-voting-districts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4286"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4286\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}