Monthly Archives: April 2011

Yesterday, GM talked about ward and ANC redistricting, and how Georgetown is unlikely to see either. Today GM turns to part two: single member districts (SMDs). SMDs are the districts that each individual ANC commissioner represents. Here’s a map of ANC 2E’s current SMD boundaries:

The History

The history of how this map came to look as it is is actually quite interesting. It begins back in the mid 90s. At that time, town-gown relations were possibly even worse than they are today. In response to several changes in policies viewed as antagonistic to students–removal of parking reciprocity and an attempt to limit student rentals to three residents per house were among them–a group called Campaign Georgetown organized students to vote in the ANC elections. Up to this point, no GU student had ever been elected to the ANC. And unlike now, there was no “student” ANC seat. Every student voted in districts mixed with non-students.

Campaign Georgetown was very successful getting students registered and getting them to the polls. As a result, in 1996 two students, Rebecca Sinderbrand and James Fogarty, were elected to the ANC, one representing west Georgetown and the other Burleith. The victory was followed by years of litigation over whether the students were in fact eligible to vote. The lawsuit wasn’t settled until 2002, well after the original commissioners had served their terms. In the mean time, a student, Matt Payne, won the west Georgetown seat in 1998 (the late Barbara Zartman won the Burleith one over a student that year) and two students, Justin Wagner and Justin Kopp, won both the seats again in 2000.

Then in 2001, the SMDs were redistricted. Up to this point, as discussed above, the student population was split up into several districts that also contained non-student residents. It took a large effort for the students to get organized to vote, but once they did they represented a significant enough bloc within each respective SMD to secure repeated victories in two seats. But the 2000 redistricting changed that. Continue reading →