Newtown Will Face Its Own Redistricting Puzzle

By Steve Bigham

Here’s a tip for those Legislative Council candidates in District III who plan to take part in door-to-door campaigning: be prepared to travel. The district is huge and it’s got a lot of people.

District III stretches across the southern boundary of Newtown, covering parts of Hawleyville, Hattertown, Botsford, and most of Sandy Hook. It is the largest and most awkward of the town’s three voting districts. It covers Poverty Hollow Road at its furthest eastern point and then winds its way along out-of-the-way roads to Great Quarter to the west.

The fact that District III is so big has not gone unnoticed by Legislative Council member Will Rodgers.

“I was aware of this by virtue of walking it. When we go campaigning in the fall, I’m walking a wide geographic area,” Mr Rodgers said. “I’d almost describe it as a backwards ‘C’ that caps the Redding/Easton border over to Route 34 and the end of Newtown at its Monroe border. And then it sort of curls back toward the center of town at its east and west ends.”

In recent years, however, it has been more than just its geographical size and odd shape that had set District III apart. It is now by far the most highly populated district in Newtown, far surpassing the town’s other two districts in registered voters.

As of July 18, there were a 14,488 registered voters in Newtown. District III was home to 5,496 registered voters, District I held 4,633, and District II had 4,359. District III boasted 26 percent more registered voters than District II and 18.5 percent more than District I.

“Sounds like maybe we’re at the area where there needs to be some adjustment, but of course we’ll be looking to the state boundaries first,” Mr Rodgers said.

The constitutional principle of one person, one vote requires an equal value for every vote. For example a group of 50 voters should have less representation than a group of 500 voters.

In Newtown, as elsewhere, redistricting is an approximate science; exact divisions are impossible especially when they attempt a practical correlation with state and federal district lines. These are re-drawn every 10 years following the release of the US Census results. Earlier this year, those results indicated that Newtown’s population had risen to more than 25,000 residents.

Ten years ago, it was District II that had become too large. Registrars of Voters and council members rectified that problem by simply extending the District I boundary. It was an easy process since both District I and II elect the same state representative.

District III is somewhat trickier, however, since it is split between two different state representatives.

Town officials are hoping that the 106th District (currently represented by Julia Wasserman) will be redistricted completely within Newtown, losing Bethel and picking up either District 3A or 3B.

Once the state has drawn its lines, then Newtown will look at its own population and do its best to see that the three districts are as evenly populated as possible.

“Locally is where you get the greatest ability to equalize and the least interest in controlling who’s in what district. All we want is equal representation. There’s no gerrymandering,” noted longtime council member Melissa Pilchard.

The issue of redistricting has become a hot topic in Hartford these days as state officials and politicians jockey for advantage. Currently, there are 151 assembly districts in Connecticut, which now has a population of approximately 3.4 million people. Officials must now reconfigure the state into 151 sections of 22,553 people.

The state’s Redistricting Commission has been conducting hearings to solicit comments from residents about their feelings on how the state should be redistricted.

With a population above 25,000 residents, Newtown would now seem eligible to receive a state rep of its own. However, according to Gary Berner, the director of redistricting services for the House Republican caucus, it doesn’t always break that way.

“The realities are we don’t know where we’re going to begin to make the first cuts,” Mr Berner said. “It’s not a perfect science. You can’t combine both respect for town lines and equal representation perfectly. You always have to bring the argument back that you could do this for Newtown if you started in Newtown.”

Former state representative Mae Schmidle said Newtown has always been a “patch-up town,” being lumped in with small chunks of other communities. She believes the town could very well end up with three different representatives again, despite its population growth. It all depends on what the powers that be decide.

“Redistricting is 100 percent political. Each party tries to garner as many communities into their camp as they can. That’s how they do the federal redistricting too,” she explained. “Newtown is neither fish nor fowl. The largest representation is unaffiliated voters. So, if you are Republican town, then the Republicans will go to bat for you; or if you’re a Democratic town, then the Democrats will go to bat for you. If you’re predominantly unaffiliated, you don’t have a strong representation.”

In the past, redistricting has always started along the shore and worked its way north. That may explain why Newtown has always been paired with Fairfield, Monroe, and Easton for state senatorial representation, rather than with towns with which it may have more in common.

The state is expected to finalize the redistricting maps by the end of this year which will be in place prior to the November 2002 statewide elections.