The GOP majority of the Chatham Board of Commissioners is working on pushing through their commissioner redistricting plan. Brian Bock explained how they did this in his blog. Basically he and Commissioner Petty drew the districts with help from the county GIS department. No one else was included.
Commissioner Bock justifies this by claiming this is what George Lucier did in 2007. The exact quote from his blog on this is:
Commissioner Lucier worked directly with the county GIS department to develop new districts to propose to the BOC.
Furthermore, Bock's supporters have been hitting the bulletin boards, claiming that what Commissioner Bock is doing now is no different from what Commissioner Lucier did then.
However, Bock and his supporters are not telling the full story. Commissioner Lucier did not simply go to the county GIS office and invent a completely new district plan like Bock and Petty did. Commissioner Lucier's goal was to restore the districts to what they were prior to 2006, when Bunkey and his lame-duck board attempted to gerrymander them after being voted out of office, but before leaving office.
Recall that among other things, the Bunkey gerrymander would have prevented commissioner Patrick Barnes from running for re-election, plus it was rejected in a countywide referendum in November 2006, so it was clearly an egregious injustice that had to be undone.
So Lucier did not come up with his own plan. He simply restored what was there before Bunkey tried to gerrymander the districts. This is what Lucier and his allies said they would do before the 2006 general election, and he followed through.
Now when this is pointed out to Bock's supporters, they will claim that is not true, that Lucier did not restore what was there before Bunkey. And it's true that Lucier's map is slightly differerent from the pre-Bunkey map, however it had to be.
The only way Lucier could legally replace Bunkey's map was if his replacement map had more equal population between districts than Bunkey's map, using 2000 census data. Bunkey's map had about a 3.5% population deviation between districts using this data. So Lucier and the county GIS department tweaked the pre-Bunkey districts to make their 2000 census population deviation 1.7%, to meet this legal requirement.
Did that result in a different plan that was "devised" by Lucier? Well rhetoric can fly all day, but at the end of the day the best way to judge that is compare the actual maps side by side.
First of all, apologies for the quality of the following pictures. They are like this because the only way I was able to get them was in .pdf format. I had to screen copy the PDFs and convert the screen copy into jpgs, to get these into a postable format.
This is what the Chatham County commissioner election districts looked like before Bunkey changed them in 2006 (source: Chatham County GIS office):
This is what they looked like after Lucier changed them in 2007 (source: Chatham County website):
Looking at these two maps side by side, it's pretty obvious that what Lucier did was restore the pre-Bunkey maps as much as possible. OK, he also changed their map colors. :) That's it. The very slight differences between the two maps, which were legally required, are very thin justification indeed for likening what Lucier did to what Bock is doing now.
Correction 6/23/2011: I actually had the maps switched when I originally posted this, and have corrected that. It's an easy mistake to make because, except for the colors, the maps are almost identical (which was the point anyway).
