Move toward more single-member districts not just about race
The residents of Shadow Creek Ranch, a big masterplanned community on Pearland’s west side, have been clamoring for relief from noxious odors wafting from a nearby landfill. But the smell doesn’t reach the homes of the city’s mayor or most City Council members, who live on the east side of town.
Public officials, of course, are perfectly capable of responding to problems that don’t affect them personally. Human nature being what it is, though, it’s easier to get the attention of leaders whose daily lives have something in common with yours.
This is an important, and often overlooked, factor in debates over election systems for City Council members and school trustees. These disputes focus on the merits of at-large positions, with candidates elected from across a city or school district, versus from single-member districts, where candidates and voters are limited to a distinct geographical area.
Litigation over this issue focuses on the tendency of atlarge systems to make it harder for minority candidates to get elected — a concern that often prompts criticism from those weary of “identity politics.” But single-member districts also help to ensure that elected officials can identify with the routine, day-today challenges of the people they represent.
“It’s not just a black or Latino issue,” said Leah Aden, senior counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which represents plaintiffs in voting-rights cases around the country. “We want someone who can relate to us when we have streets that flood or when we need other services.”
The same theme is arising in a fledgling effort, reported recently by my colleague Bridget Balch, to change the Fort Bend ISD district to a single-member district system. All seven of Fort Bend ISD’s trustees now are elected at large.
“I think every community should be represented,” KP George, an immigrant from India who is one of two minority members on Fort Bend ISD’s board, told Balch. “Every community’s issues are different.”
Houston-area cities and school districts use a variety of systems — all single-member
districts, all at-large, or a combination. Sugar Land’s City Council has two-at large and four singlemember district positions. Houston, which created single-member council districts in 1979 in response to a lawsuit, has 11 district seats and five at-large.
In addition to Fort Bend ISD, other area jurisdictions with no singlemember districts include Pearland’s city council and school board and Pasadena’s school board. Courts have twice upheld the Pasadena ISD system, most recently in 2014.
At-large systems are not inherently discriminatory.
Austin voters, for example, regularly elected minority members to the City Council for years under a fully at-large system before the city voluntarily created single-member districts, said Michael Li, a redistricting expert at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice.
Austin did not have a history of racially polarized voting — a key legal test that must be met for a successful challenge under the federal Voting Rights Act.
“They had these crossracial and cross-ethnic coalitions, and it sort of worked,” Li said, adding that the creation of singlemember districts actually benefited Republicans in Texas’ most liberal city.
Lawsuits challenging at-large systems can drag through the courts for years and cost millions of dollars — and as the Pasadena ISD cases illustrate, the outcome is uncertain. Court decisions limiting plaintiffs’ abilities to recover legal fees have made such cases even more difficult, said Chad Dunn, a Houston attorney who represented the plaintiffs in the most recent Pasadena school district case.
Pasadena already has spent more than $2 million in legal fees in its current voting-rights case. A federal judge found in January that officials intentionally diluted the influence of the city’s growing Latino electorate by creating two at-large council seats. The city was ordered to revert to the prior system of eight single-member district positions.
A decision on whether to continue the city’s appeal of that ruling is one of the first decisions awaiting Pasadena’s newly elected mayor, Jeff Wagner, who will be sworn in Saturday. Wagner has said he would ask the council for guidance on the question. If the city’s appeal fails, it could be liable for the plaintiffs’ legal fees.
Civil rights groups such as the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which represents the plaintiffs in the Pasadena case, have limited resources and must pick their battles carefully. Activists in Fort Bend ISD and elsewhere face a lot of challenges in their struggle to be represented by people they can count on to respond to neighborhood problems — even the ones they can’t smell.