Breaking up the IC-CR `Corridor,’ not a deal breaker

By Iowa City Press-Citizen

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About a dozen citizens came out to the Kirkwood Community College campus in Cedar Rapids recently to speak to the state's redistricting commission about the redistricting plan recently proposed by the state's non-partisan Legislative Services Agency.

Although the plan reduces the number of Congressional districts in the state from five to four, we're surprised at how much of the current Second District remains intact in under the new proposal. The big difference is that the proposal would move Linn County out of the district and would add in a few counties to the east and several counties to the west.

That, of course, means that Linn and Johnson counties - the supposed Iowa City-Cedar Rapids Corridor - would be split and thus represented by different members of Congress.

For more than a decade, Cedar Rapids and Iowa City leaders have been trying to brand the two counties as one metropolitan area. The Cedar Rapids Airport has been renamed the Eastern Iowa Airport. And there have been calls for merging everything from the areas' chambers of commerce, to their economic development agencies and to their convention and visitors bureaus.

We've been skeptical of such merger plans. We do see a natural alliance between all the contiguous communities in Johnson County, and we think area leaders should always be looking at how to balance their city's best interests and the economic health of the broader region. But even after a decade of branding efforts, the idea of Iowa City and Cedar Rapids being some kind of sister/twin cities still seems decades - if not generations - away.

So we don't have a problem with “the Corridor” having split representation in Congress. Anyone who played around with the redistricting program on the Des Moines Register's website could see how few of the viable scenarios -- the ones with four compact, equally-populated districts - would allow Johnson and Linn counties to stay together. And the two counties have been in separate districts for all but a few decades of the state's history.

The dual representation could even be more beneficial because it means two members of Congress - rather than one - would be working on behalf of the area.

We've urged the Iowa Legislature to pass this first redistricting proposal - unless, of course, the public hearings show the proposed districts to be unevenly divided.

Our local legislators definitely shouldn't view the proposed breaking up of Iowa City and Cedar Rapids as a deal breaker.

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