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Redistricting commission lays out timeline for drawing legislative districts – Daily Montanan

['Arren Kimbel-Sannit', 'More From Author', '- March']

Date: 2022-03-08 00:00:00

The Montana Districting and Apportionment commission has laid out a timeline to begin the work of redrawing the state’s legislative districts in time for the 2024 election, though the commission’s members conceded that a series of bureaucratic snags have slowed their intended pace.

The commission will begin looking at proposed maps in June after the primaries, and will hold three Zoom and four in-person public hearings on the maps between the final weeks of August and September. The meetings will be divided by region of the state, with at least one taking place on a Native American reservation.

The body must submit maps for legislative review by the 10th day of the 2023 session. That still gives plenty of time for the public to weigh in on whatever proposals exist, but it’s still not exactly what the commissioners were hoping for initially.

“I was thinking June public hearings on maps basically, and we aren’t on that timeline anymore,” said Kendra Miller, a Democratic appointee to the independent redistricting panel, at a meeting last week. “We still have time to do our work, and we still have time for a robust public comment period.

The holdup has to do with two secondary objectives that the commission has identified as requisites to drawing legislative maps: First, addressing the phenomenon known as “prison gerrymandering” by reallocating incarcerated people to their last known home addresses rather than to the prison or jail where they’re confined; and second, conducting a demographic analysis of residents in certain areas to check for compliance with the Voting Rights Act, a process known in redistricting speak as racial bloc voting analysis.

The commission, split equally between two Republicans and two Democrats with a theoretically non-partisan chair, agreed unanimously early in the redistricting cycle that it had to undertake these processes to have more equitable representation in the eventual districts. And once it got the task of drawing Montana’s two new U.S. House districts out of the way, the commission wrote up requests for proposal for contractors to do the heavy-lift data wrangling.

Contractors were slow to respond to initial outreach, and even once vendors were identified, State Procurement Bureau rules seem to have gummed up the process.

“I have been extremely frustrated with this procurement process here in terms of the laxness of deadlines and key things that are supposed to have been done, for a variety of reasons,” Commissioner Joe Lamson, a Democrat, said in last week’s DAC meeting. “I don’t know if it’s COVID or staffing or what exactly but I am embarrassed about how these things have gone and how all of a sudden we don’t know about it as a commission on some pretty key things from time to time.

Staff informed the commissioners that a committee had selected a firm for the prisoner reallocation work, but that some of the contract language was still being negotiated. The firm doing the analysis, Blockwell Consulting, also has to wait for an exemption from state workers compensation laws from the Department of Labor and Industry that can only be processed by mail. As for the racial bloc voter analysis, the commission is still waiting to hear from the Procurement Bureau on its recommendation for that contract, and the work may not be done until the summer.

“This project has been driven by the good work of all the commissioners together to do some important updating on how we’re doing this process,” Lamson said. “It just seems that we’re getting a lot of hurdles in the way.”

So the commission voted to lengthen the deadlines in the contracts for the work to be done, pushing back the overall redistricting timeline.

Commissioner Jeff Essmann, a Republican, also proposed that the commission write a letter to state procurement officials “requesting that due to the public interest and necessity, with respect to redrawing these legislative districts, that they give our RFPs priority in terms of scheduling and attention from their staff so that we can do a good job with respect to redrawing these districts.”

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