Redistricting commission won’t endorse ‘bad map’

CEDAR RAPIDS - Defying Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz, Linn County's redistricting commission voted unanimously Tuesday afternoon to resubmit its preferred election map, already rejected twice by Schultz's office, to county supervisors.

It's mostly a protest vote.

“I've got no interest, personally, in picking one or two of these horrible maps,” said commission chair Mike Wyrick of Cedar Rapids, indicating the alternatives to the panel's preferred plan.

“I will not attach my name to a bad map,” agreed member Gretchen Lawyer of Marion.

The supervisors can either accept the panel's map again, setting up a lengthy and most likely futile legal battle with Schultz, or reject it and request that the commission draw a new map meeting the conditions cited in Schultz's rejection letter. Most notably, those include splitting Cedar Rapids into just three districts instead of the four on the original map.

Schultz's letter to the county stipulates that as top priority, and redrawing the map to that standard while meeting other state requirements leaves the county with three compact Cedar Rapids districts, one covering Marion and some nearby rural precincts, and a huge nearly doughnut-shaped district wrapping around the metro area.

Schultz instructed the county to either redraw its map, adopt an alternative drawn by the Legislative Services Agency, or have that map imposed on it by his office Dec. 1.

The commission's vote came after Supervisor Brent Oleson, R-Marion, urged it to “express your displeasure and send the board a no-adoption of any of these, and let us decide.”

Oleson said Schultz adopted the city-splitting standard as top priority in response to a “very partisan” redistricting process in Polk County involving Des Moines.

“They boxed themselves in,” he said. “I'm very, very disappointed. I think we did our level best to try and keep politics out of it, and I think we did.”

Supervisors will review the commissioners' vote at 10 a.m. today at Linn County West in Westdale Mall.