Point Austin: Stop Me If You've Heard This One

Once more up the mountainside.

I suppose it's a bit hyperbolic to compare Austin's serial flirtation with single-member districting to the labor of Sisyphus, but as Wells Dunbar points out this week (see "The Single-Member Situation"), each time the citizens have considered the matter in a municipal election, they've kicked the stone down the hill again. Yet paradoxically, SMDs have also been a perennial issue in City Council campaigns – neighborhood-based candidates regularly run on platforms that include the notion of geographic representation, and garner much support on those grounds (one reason all current council members have come to endorse the idea, at least in principle).

The central contradiction appears to be that the people who care about single-member districting care about it intensely – but the rest of Austin voters appear to be either indifferent or hostile to the idea. And, unless that first group can somehow find a way to engage and persuade that second group, the next attempt, whether this year or next, is likely to suffer the same fate as all the others.

The last time we actually voted on SMDs was 2002. As Mike Clark-Madison reported at the time (see "Mapping the Changes," April 5, 2002): "For reasons both noble and otherwise, voters who see in the green council a mirror of their own politics feel little reason to change, and as long as those voters dominate the total turnout, SMDs have a hard row to hoe. Even if we disregard the progressive tilt of the 'central city voter' as he or she now exists, the urban core has long been over-represented on the city council." He pointed out that historically, relatively few council members had lived east of I-35, or indeed even east of MoPac. That's changed somewhat in the ensuing years, but it remains true that "central city voters" have largely determined municipal elections, a process that becomes increasingly difficult to defend as the city continues to grow, this month officially at nearly 800,000.

That's also an argument for letting the council itself grow – asking seven people to represent 800,000 is an increasingly daunting request.

The Art of Representation

However, it's also worth noting that some of the opposition to districting is a consequence of many Austinites' lingering political nostalgia for "the way things used to be" (pick your antecedent era) – aka, Delusional Small Town Syndrome – combined with an increasingly libertarian-edged inclination that any government is too much (at least until somebody's own ox is gored). More understandable are objections that geographic districts reinforce factionalism (i.e., "ward politics"), an undeniable side effect that must be balanced against the equally understandable desire of citizens to elect representatives who are both accessible and accountable to their neighbors.

Last go-round, in 2008 – when council narrowly declined to ballot the question – Dunbar sardonically reported one official's opposition summation (see "Council Punts on Single-Member Districts," Feb. 29, 2008): "MVP (Most Vitriolic Pontification) honors last night went to [then-Council Member] Brewster McCracken, who ended an overlong and inflammatory sermon against districts by wearily stringing together a collection of buzzwords: 'redistricting, special interest, factional, pork-barrel ward-style politics.'"

The more substantive objections are also the most intractable: most specifically that because of desegregation and population changes, it is now impossible to draw a confirmed African-American district without using 14 seats (hardly an enormous governing body, but still likely to cause Austin voters to balk). Yet even without districts, we now regularly elect black representatives to council and elsewhere, and the corollary argument – that our current system now badly underrepresents Hispanic residents – seems irrefutable.

Proponents of districting are reluctant to acknowledge its drawbacks, but it's also true that there is no perfect electoral system, and we have to balance the dangers of sectionalism against the need for adequate, accountable representation. It is amusing that some of the same folks supporting SMDs are currently engaged in an Open Meetings children's crusade – would reps elected from different neighborhoods also be forbidden to speak to one another privately and only lob shots in public? – but on balance, the city needs to recognize the inevitable growth it physically designed into council chambers and evolve toward a more representative and larger council system.

Football or Franchise?

All this said, there is no reason to feel confident that a change the mayor and the whole council are now said to support – and one that the Chronicle has regularly endorsed – has any better chance of passing this time than it did the last six. In late 2007, when I asked the Charter Revision Committee chair, Mayor Emeritus Gus Garcia, how the latest effort was going, he said Public Apathy seemed to be winning the day – five public meetings had elicited only seven unique witnesses. Maybe, Garcia said then, people are just "worried about other things: the Dallas Cowboys, traffic, Christmas shopping, I don't know. But I think there's no two ways about it: A city this size needs to have single-member districts."

That remains true – although six times the voters have impertinently decided otherwise. Barring some surprise in the scheduling, the city and the public now have roughly 18 months to engage the matter once again. Perhaps next November, we'll admit to ourselves that the sleepy capital and college town is indeed no more, and we need to take our rightful place among the grand cities of the day. Then again, maybe not – but may we hope, at least, that those partisans fully invested in the issue, on either side, would this time find a way to generate some persistent enthusiasm across the whole city and the voting public, so that whatever decision we make will finally express the full electoral and representative voice of Austin.

Sure beats worrying about the hapless Cowboys.