Our Place In Connecticut’s Political Portrait

The US Census Bureau reminds us every ten years that the American portrait is a moving picture. And most of the movement over the past ten years has been away from Connecticut. People are heading west and south and are taking congressional districts with them. One of Connecticut’s congressional districts now has to pack up for a new home somewhere in the sun – California, we expect. The state legislature’s reapportionment committee has spent the summer traveling around the state soliciting public comment on which district will go.

As one might expect, the six incumbents in Connecticut’s congressional delegation, who have spent millions in campaign funds padding their respective district seats, have transformed this exercise in reapportionment into a high stakes game of musical chairs. When the reapportionment committee stops the music later this year, one member of Connecticut’s congressional delegation will have no place to sit. Unfortunately, too much of the debate over reapportionment has concerned itself with the outcome of this game rather than in how best to configure congressional districts that are truly representative of the state.

Now that the reapportionment committee has concluded its hearings and started its deliberations, we would like to remind politicians of all stripes – those involved directly in the process and those shouting so loudly from the peanut gallery – of something they may have forgotten in all the commotion: Reapportionment is not all about you. It is not about Maloney, or Shays, or Johnson. It is not about preserving the influence of their close advisors, friends, and supporters. It is about finding a formula for dividing political districts in the state so that elected representatives, no matter who they are, actually know something about their constituents because they have grown up around their district – not because their district has grown up around them and their political exigencies.

Reapportionment should be about the people living in the towns around Danbury and Waterbury. It should be about the people of Bridgeport and Westport, Moodus and Moosup, Hartford and Stafford. It should be about what is happening in these towns and cities and not what is happening in the capitol lobbies.

So before deciding to take Newtown, Bethel, Brookfield, Danbury or any of the other municipalities in this area of the state and applying them like a salve to the worried ego of some congressman or woman in a far-flung district to the south or the north or the east, we urge the reapportionment gurus to consider this: half the total growth measured by the Census Bureau in Connecticut took place right here in the western part of the state. If all of Connecticut grew at the same rate, we would not be losing a congressional seat in the first place. Like the population in the state, prerogatives of redistricting should be moving in the Danbury area’s direction, not away from it.

Connecticut’s portrait, like America’s, is a moving picture. And in that moving picture, this area of the state should be coming into sharper focus, not dissolving and fading into the background as the spotlight moves elsewhere.