LITTLE ROCK — New hope for breaking the congressional redistricting deadlock in the Legislature emerged Tuesday from a state Senate committee. Whether the Senate will approve it and send it to the House is another matter.
Unlike a plan that the state House of Representatives approved, the new plan will leave Fayetteville of Northwest Arkansas as part of the 3rd Congressional District rather than include it in the4th District.
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That was dubbed the “Fayetteville Finger” plan by some critics, partly because the shape of the 4th District as outlined in that plan had a crook similar to the shape of a finger, among other reasons. Republicans tended to call it the “Fayetteville gerrymandered finger” or some similar phrase.
The new plan would make Russellville, now in the 3rd District, part of the 4th.
A Senate committee refused Monday to advance the House-approved plan to the Senate on a party-line vote, with Republicans opposing it.
That same committee on Tuesday gave the go-ahead to the new approach, which was installed by amendment in Senate Bill 871 by Sen. Robert Thompson of Paragould, the Democratic leader in the Senate.
That happened after almost six hours of private negotiations between Democrats and Republicans at the instigation of the Senate’s top official, President Pro Tempore Paul Bookout, D-Jonesboro.
Dozens of different maps of possible boundaries were in circulation among lawmakers as the discussions were proceeding through the day. About a half-dozen plans in legislative bills had made it to legislative committees earlier in the session but did not make it out.
“We’re kind of in uncharted waters,” Bookout told Senate colleagues at one point.
Thompson told the State Agencies and Governmental Affairs Committee late Tuesday that his amended version is not his first choice.
His favorite is the House passed plan, he said. That’s House Bill 1322 by Rep. Clark Hall, D-Marvell.
HB1322 would count Fayetteville as part of the mostly southern 4th District.
“I’ve learned in this redistricting debate there are lots of different thoughts about how we should redistrict, but one thing that we know is we have to do it,” Thompson told the committee. “We can’t ignore it. We can’t ignore our duty to redistrict the congressional districts in the state. In order to do that, we have to find the majority of our colleagues to go along with us.”
Thompson’s plan would split two counties - Pope and Searcy. The part of Pope County that includes Russellville would be in the 4th District. Part of Searcy County would be in the 3rd District, part would be in the 1st.
“The primary policy goal that I had in drawing various districts was to draw a district that included many of the counties in the Arkansas Delta, and this achieves that policy goal,” he said.
The bill includes Ashley, Chicot and Desha counties in the 1st District. Currently they are part of the 4th.
The bill also would make Yell County, now in the 2nd District, part of the 4th and count part of Searcy County, now in the 1st, as part of the 3rd. Franklin, Johnson and Madison counties, now in the 3rd, would become a northern stem of the 4th.
After the committee action, Bookout said he didn’t know whether the plan could get the 18 favorable votes it needs to pass in the Senate.
“I hope so. We are taking one step at a time,” he said.
Thompson, noting that numerous versions were being circulated, said, “We attempted to find a map that might get the closest to satisfying as many senators as possible and this was it. This was the one that I found that was closest. There will certainly be some people who don’t like it very much, and I’m not crazy about it.”
He, too, was unsure whether 18 senators will vote for it.
Even if senators OK it, the House may not.
Before the committee’s vote, Sen. Jimmy Jeffress, DCrossett, told several senators he would try to kill the plan in the House if the legislation would shift Ashley County from the 4th District to the 1st. That is one of the things the plan does.
“I know this proposal is dead on arrival at the House,” Jeffress said after the committee recommended the bill.
“I don’t know if it’s part of an overall greater strategy to go back to the original proposal,” he said, referring to Hall’s bill. “Certainly it might work. We are spending more time just playing games. I think with a little bit of tweaking Rep. Hall’s proposal can be made palatable to enough members over here [that] if we had to extract it from committee we could do so.”
It takes 18 votes to extract a bill from a Senate committee. The Senate is made up of 20 Democrats and 15 Republicans.
House Speaker Robert S. Moore Jr., D-Arkansas City,said Tuesday evening that he had not yet seen the map approved by the Senate committee and did not know whether it could pass in the House.
“It was fragile putting votes together for [Hall’s] map, and suffice it to say it will be difficult to sell a different version in the House,” he said.
Moore said he was "disappointed" that the Senate committee rejected the House-approved bill.
“It was a product of a lot of work on the House end, a lot of communication with the Senate,” he said. “I think it was a good map. It is a good map. I think we could have gotten this resolved a long time ago. But they’ve taken the actionthat they’ve taken, and we’ll deal with it from there.”
The House will convene Thursday at noon and will look at the legislation if, by then, it has been approved by the Senate, Moore said.
But Sen. Randy Laverty, D-Jasper, said he doesn’t plan to vote for the bill in the Senate.
“It’s just not suitable with the people I represent,” he said.
Sen. Gilbert Baker, R-Conway, said the bill, which he voted for in the Senate committee, is a good plan.
“But it’s a plan that everybody has a little bit to hate, which any compromise does,” he said. “It gets rid of the gerrymander finger going in and reaching for a city out of a county. It keeps more counties whole and you have communities of interest together.
“It is a good compromise map,” he said. “There may be some more compromise yet.”
Baker said there’s a chance that Thompson’s bill will be approved by the Senate.
He said he is exploring the possibility of leaving Ashley County in the 4th District and leaving Madison County in the 3rd and “then make that up” by counting Marion and Searcy counties as part of the 1st.
During Tuesday’s activities, the Senate Republican leader, Sen. Ruth Whitaker of Cedarville, slumped at her desk in the Senate after becoming faint. Paramedics removed Whitaker, 74, after about 20 minutes and took her to the UAMS Medical Center, according to Secretary of the Senate Ann Cornwell.
Cornwell said Whitaker did not lose consciousness.
In March 2009, Whitaker, who has had heart problems, became faint in her Senate office and was sent to UAMS because of problems with her pacemaker, Cornwell said.
Whitaker is the oldest member of the Senate.
Cornwell late Tuesday told the Senate that Whitaker would be in the hospital overnight and plans to return home today.
The Legislature needs to draw new congressional district boundaries in light of new 2010 federal census numbers to comply with the legal principle of one-man, one-vote, which requires that districts be about equal in population. Over the past decade, the population in the 3rd District has grown so that it must be made about 120,000 people fewer and population must be added to the 1st and 4th districts to make all four U.S. House districts about the same in population.
Information for this article was contributed by Sarah D. Wire and Alison Sider of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 04/06/2011