COUNTY COMMISSION SHOULD SLOW DOWN REDISTRICTING

Any idea that the process of redistricting was progressing smoothly in Hamilton County was shattered this week.

First there was plenty of verbal fire Tuesday evening at a redistricting hearing at the Greater Second Missionary Baptist Church where residents gathered to voice concern about the process many think is disenfranchising their community and diluting the political voting power of the minority community throughout the county.

Plenty more sniping came Wednesday at Hamilton County’s Commission’s nearly four-hour meeting. There the concerns came both from some commissioners and from community members who packed the commission room and took the dais to address commissioners.

The redistricting process is constitutionally mandated and based on new census counts made every 10 years. County commissioners are charged with redrawing boundaries to determine both commission and school board districts.

Hamilton County’s preliminary work has resulted in a proposal to expand the county’s nine commission districts to 11 districts, based both on county growth and on the county’s changing diversity: 2020 census data shows racial diversity increasing in Hamilton County over the past decade, with the share of nonwhite residents rising from 29% in 2010 to nearly 32% last year.

The way new districts are drawn has been used for decades as a way to strengthen or dilute voting power, depending on the party or politicians in charge. It’s best known as gerrymandering. It’s often partisan. It’s also often racist.

Even though Hamilton County and the Chattanooga area remained less racially diverse than America as a whole — 40% — an influx of other ethnic groups locally nearly doubled the county’s diversity index. That index measures the probability that two people chosen at random will be from different racial or ethnic groups. Put another way, whites make up just under two-thirds of the population here, and the other near third is either Black, Hispanic or Asian.

Diluting voting power — both partisan and racially — is not new here. In 2012, then-state Sen. Andy Berke was gob-smacked out of his almost assured re-election bid when the GOP lopped away Democratic-leaning Marion County from his 10th Senate District and pushed his district eastward through Republican areas including East Ridge, Apison and a major chunk of Republican-rich Bradley County. That same year, Tennessee House districts were redrawn to lump two long-time powerful Black politicians into one district, pitting the then-Rep. Tommie Brown and then-Rep. Joanne Favors against each other.

Typically gerrymandering has been more subtle at the county level.

But on Tuesday evening, Hamilton County District 5 Commissioner Katherlyn Geter attended the meeting at Chattanooga’s Second Missionary Baptist Church, and at the end of the meeting she told the group: “To be quite honest … it doesn’t look good. The 11-district map option, not only for district five, is concerning. … What they’re doing is just blatantly disenfranchising people in the Tyner community. They are diluting voter power.”

Many in that group showed up in force at Wednesday’s commission meeting to advocate for slowing the process down long

enough for community members to become familiar with the redrawn maps and engage. So far their effort has only bought a couple more weeks — a tall order for a hard-to-understand process with too-little available information.

Commission Chairwoman Sabrena Smedley, who is holding most of the power over the redrawing process by insisting that commissioners’ requests for changes go only through her to the county’s GIS office, defends the process, insisting that it is more fair and transparent than previous redistricting efforts.

But other commissioners disagree. Geter and District 6 Commissioner David Sharpe have filed a freedom of information request for commissioners’ emails about proposed changes. And District 4 Commissioner Warren Mackey joined them in complaining that getting the proposed maps and other information has been hard to get — even for commissioners, let alone the public.

“Commissioners have gone to GIS trying to get maps and have been told, ‘well, you’ll get them when everybody else gets them. Not only that, the information is not fully shared,” he said in Wednesday’s commission meeting.

Organizers of the Tuesday meeting said they had asked that a representative of the county GIS office attend and explain the maps. The organizer said a representative of the GIS office said they could not attend, per Smedley’s order. Smedley said she didn’t “have the authority” to send the GIS member. She is, however, completely in charge of the redistricting process.

The proposed countywide maps are now online on the county commission’s web page at tinyurl.com/8fh8wm7f and the county GIS page at tinyurl.com/2zm4nvjx. There still, however, are not individual district maps online, so good luck finding your street or school in the tiny fine print.

Another small win for citizens is that Smedley agreed to add another map workshop to the schedule next Wednesday after the commission’s regular meeting. She insists, however, that the commission will still vote on the proposal on Nov. 2.

There really should be no rush. Tennessee law sets a Jan. 1, 2022, deadline for county legislative bodies to complete the work, according to the Tennessee Comptroller of the Treasury’s “Guide to Local Government Redistricting in Tennessee.”