The Georgetown Metropolitan

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 →

While it’s fun to look at the census numbers to analyze demographic changes, their primary purpose is to assist lawmakers to periodically redraw political districts. And in DC that means three things: drawing ward boundaries, drawing ANC boundaries, and drawing Single Member District lines.

Ward Boundaries

District law requires that the boundaries of each ward be drawn in such a way that each ward’s population is within 5% of one eight of the District’s population. And the most recent count of DC’s population brings the total to 601,723 and one eighth of that is 75, 215. So each ward must have a population between 78,976 and 71, 455.

And most of them in fact do. But Georgetown’s ward, Ward 2, has about 1,000 too many people. And Wards 7 and 8, which are mostly east of the Anacostia river, both are several hundred people too small. So Ward 2 needs to give up some land and Wards 7 and 8 need to grow.

The political consensus (rim shot) seems to be coalescing around the idea that Ward 8 (which is entirely east of the Anacostia and bounded by Maryland to the east and Ward 7 to the north) will take some of Ward 7’s land. And Ward 7 will in turn take some land from either Ward 5 or Ward 6. Which ever of those two wards that give up some land will likely be the ward that takes portions of Ward 2.

Ward 8 Councilmember Marion Barry has made it no secret that he would rather grow by taking some land from the booming waterfront on the other side of the Anacostia. But Ward 6 Councilmember Tommy Wells looks like he’ll put up enough of a fight to prevent that.

Either way, for Georgetown it looks like all of it will stay in Ward 2. It helps that Jack Evans: A. lives here and is unlikely to redistrict himself out of a job, and B. on the redistricting committee. Continue reading →