EdCone.com

The City Council is doing an effective job of uniting people on a variety of issues, although much of that unity is in opposition to the City Council.

Jordan blogged last night's meeting.

N&R coverage of the less-bad redistricting plan passed on a do-over.

N&R also front-paged the news about the County tax cut having a big impact on City taxes, just five days after it first appeared online.

City press release:

A public hearing to receive community comments on redistricting will be held during Greensboro City Council’s meeting on Tuesday. The Council meeting begins at 5:30 pm and the redistricting hearing is scheduled as agenda item No. 17. Residents who would like to address redistricting are encouraged to attend.

Redistricting maps here.

Word is that Trudy Wade has come up with a redistricting plan that would move just a couple of precincts, give DBS an area around the mall she's long wanted, keep Lindley Park in Rakestraw's district, and fix an existing glitch that had people from different districts voting at the same location.

Should be up on the website soon (although as of 12:30 PM today it shows outdated information about the Rakestraw plan).

UDPATE: Two plans credited to Dr. Wade are now available at the City website.

UPDATE: A City press release explains, "The proposed Plan D impacts 4,583 residents and two precincts (G31, G56) while proposed Plan E affects 5,522 residents and four precincts (G31, G56, JEF1.2, JEF2.1)."

GSO doesn't need to redraw its City Council districts this year, but the numbers are close enough to warrant consideration of doing so.

And there seems to be a simple and politically-neutral fix: Moving one precinct from District 5 to District 4.

More, from Killian's article in today's N&R (GPV):

Steve Sherman, the city staffer who crafted the district lines for 32 years, said [...] moving one precinct — with 2,137 residents — from Wade’s district would make all the districts more equal in size and would affect about 30,000 fewer residents than Rakestraw’s plan. Wade won the last election with more than 70 percent of the vote, including that precinct. And she and Rakestraw are political allies.

The next step in the redistricting process will be to secure preclearance for the new boundaries from the U.S. Department of Justice actually follow a redistricing process instead of just allowing a hasty vote by too few Councilmembers on a mysterious document.

There, fixed that for you.

Manager's Weekly Memo, p. 7.

Eight of the nine members of the city council, including Vaughan, now say they would like to see a new, more open redistricting process.

Councilwoman Mary Rakestraw, who  introduced the controversial plan, said Thursday she supports revisiting the vote but declined to discuss specifics of a new process.

Killian in the house.

It's been a good couple of days for local journalism, in all its various forms.

Zack Matheny, via email, on the redistricting circus: "It is a debacle."

He adds: "I am trying to wrap my head around everything. I am supportive of pulling back, taking a deep breath and creating something less controversial."

Mayor Bill Knight said he supports Vaughan's initiative to reconsider the redistricting plan...

..."I think we as a council need to work together for the community for the good of the community."

Is good reportage.

Mulligan!

Nancy Vaughan, via Facebook:

After speaking with my fellow council members over the last few days and hearing the public's concerns, we agree that it would be proper to give the redistricting issue further consideration. Therefore, I will be asking to reconsider the action we took this past Tuesday.

Tony Wilkins points to Nancy Vaughan's remarks at the 5:30:40 mark of the Council meeting video as "a political trade-off to reverse the council’s earlier decision to remove Early Voting precincts."

Vaughan, to Bill Knight: "I think this will justify us putting early voting back...I think we need to give back..." Knight seems to concur.

It might just as easily have been a conciliatory gesture, but either way she's linking the the two.

I'm disappointed in Tony's blithe acceptance of this redistricting vote as politics as usual.

It is true that majorities redistrict all the time, but if Tony doesn't have a problem with the way this particular sequence of events went down then I have to question his interest in transparency and process.

Lawyers from the Southern Coalition for Social Justice are mounting a legal challenge to the redistricting plan accepted by the Greensboro City Council on Tuesday.

Even a successful legal challenge would not be as meaningful as the City Council doing the right thing and reconsidering the plan.

Pass it, or shoot it down, but do it with due diligence and plenty of sunlight.

Councilwoman Mary Rakestraw — who submitted the map the council members approved Tuesday night — announced she didn’t create the map at all: It mysteriously showed up on her doorstep.

What does that even mean?

Seriously, what is she talking about?

Was an envelope literally left at her door, with no return address? And she opened it, and thought, "Huh, a redistricting map, I'll mark it up with Trudy and Bill and put it up for a vote?"

This is the standard the Greensboro City Council has set for itself?

And this isn't much better:

Matheny is distancing himself from the situation. He was out of town on business Tuesday and didn’t vote. On Wednesday, he would not say how he would have voted.

The guy who was supposed to be in charge of the process won't even say how he would have voted?

The Greensboro City Council assigned a member to run its redistricting process, and he said publicly there seemed to be no need for action...

...and then another member advanced a plan that redraws district lines to her advantage, with said plan released late on a Friday afternoon and voted into reality two business days later, with the guy in charge of the process absent.

Another member was absent as well, so the hasty decision to redistrict thousands of voters was made by less than a majority of the total Council.

Whatever the merits of the plan, the process stinks.

As Joe Killian explains it, the issue can be revisited if one of the members who voted in favor of the plan asks to do so.

The four are Bill Knight, Trudy Wade, Mary Rakestraw, and Nancy Vaughan.

At least one of them should step up and do the right thing.

Q. Is it possible to construct a scenario for redistricting Greensboro that smells worse than the Mary Rakestraw proposal to benefit Mary Rakestraw?

A. In theory, yes. You could create a district that includes only Mary Rakestraw, her husband, Frank, and Bill Burckley.

Q. Didn't the councilmember responsible for redistricting, Zach Matheny, say no redistricting was necessary?

A. Yes.

Q.  So Council voted for a plan deemed unnecessary by its appointed expert on the topic, who did not even show up to the meeting?

A. Yes.

Q. Was there any meaningful dialogue with the public?

A. Yes.

Bill Knight: "Your time is up."

Voice from the audience: "Yours is too."