City Council Districts - What's with the Gerrymandering?

[PonderInc]

Here are the city council district maps.  What's with the weird borders?  My neighborhood association is in two different council districts.  The line cuts right down a minor residential street before zigging and zagging around some more. 

Other oddities:
District 4 includes downtown, but not Crosbie Heights, one block west.
District 2 includes SW Tulsa as well as 81st and Harvard. (Small cultural, economic, and geographical difference between the two!)
Dist 7 seems to gerrymander more than most.  What's with that?

Anybody know the history of this crazy thing?






 

[waterboy]

I was told it was because of zip code boundaries. The mailings for councilors could be simplified if they were designed to match those boundaries. My zip in Maple Ridge has little in common with Crosbie Heights other than age of homes.

[Wilbur]

When government draw boundary lines for election districts, they try to keep two things in mind.

1.  Keeping neighborhoods intact.

2.  But most importantly, and what is required, each district must have the same number of residents to ensure equal representation.

Every ten years, when new boundary lines are required due to the census, you see each state shudder because of having to keep each district even.

I did one of those exercises at the capital one day during a Leadership Oklahoma exercise.  It was tough.

[MichaelBates]

Redistricting occurs after the Federal census. A three-member commission is appointed -- one member appointed by the Tulsa County Republican chairman, one by the Tulsa County Democratic chairman, and one by the mayor. They have to keep population as equal as possible, and they have to follow precinct boundaries.

Precinct boundaries are set by the county election board, but they are influenced by legislative redistricting. A precinct has to lie entirely within a single state house, state senate, and county commission district. If the legislature redraws a legislative district boundary across an existing precinct, the county election board has to split the precinct, and that affects where the city redistricting commission can draw the lines.

One precinct is a single block between 6th & 7th, Utica and Victor, with no residents. It exists because no other contiguous block is also in both Senate 11 and House 72.

As odd as some of them look, most of the districts are fairly compact. It's my sense that there is much less monkey business in Tulsa redistricting than there is in legislative redistricting. (Check out Mary Easley's district, Senate 18.)

[MichaelBates]

Regarding Crosbie Heights -- from 1992 to 2000 the precincts just west of downtown were in District 4. As population shifted south and east, boundaries did, too.