Tulsa redistricting commission considers plans

Tomorrow, September 24, 2021, the City of Tulsa Election District Commission will hold a special meetingto consider a set of five proposed plans for redrawing Tulsa's city council district boundaries for possible presentation for public comment. The proposed plans were assembled by mapping staff at the Indian Nations Council of Governments (INCOG), which is a contractor to the City of Tulsa for planning services. The key agenda item: "Presentation and possible selection of alternative Council District Plans for public review and comment."

A series of four meetings for public comment on the proposals are planned for mid-October:

• Tuesday, October 12, 2021, 7:00 p.m. Martin Regional Library, 2601 S. Garnett Rd.
• Wednesday, October 13, 2021, 7:00 p.m. Hardesty Regional Library, 5131 East 91st
• Thursday, October 14, 2021, 7:00 p.m. Zarrow Regional (West) Library, 2224 West 51st
• Monday, October 18, 2021, 7:00 p.m. Rudisill Regional Library, 1520 N. Hartford

The proposed timeline for the Election District Commission calls for the commission to review input from the public meetings on October 22, select a preferred plan on November 5, hold a public hearing on the plan on November 19, then vote to approve the selected plan on December 10. The new plan will govern the 2022 Tulsa City Council elections.

Tulsa's city charter requires redrawing district boundaries following each decennial U. S. Census to take into account shifts in population. By charter, the city uses existing precinct boundaries as the atomic building block for districts, rather than going down to the block level as congressional and legislative redistricting must do.

Tulsa's 2020 population is 413,120, making the ideal district size 45,902. The five proposals deviate from the ideal between 3.0% and 4.3%. Currently, Districts 2, 3, 6, and 7 are overpopulated, 8 is slightly below the ideal, and Districts 1, 4, 5, and 9 need to add significant population. District 6 (53,536) has had the most growth in the last 10 years, thanks to new housing developments in the Broken Arrow school district (south of 31st and east of 145th East Ave). District 2 (51,363) has most of the territory that lies within the Jenks school district and has seen significant growth around Tulsa Hills. (One gets the impression that liberating the rest of the city from Tulsa Public Schools would encourage growth in those areas as well.)

The PDF of the proposed plans from INCOG includes statistics on the demographics of each district for each plan. Although African Americans now constitute 15% of Tulsa's population, the city is so racially integrated that it is difficult to draw a district that contains a majority of African Americans. Only INCOG plans 1 and 5 succeed in that, and only barely with African Americans comprising slightly over 50% of the population in District 1 in those two plans. (If we had 15 city councilors, more facets of Tulsa's population could be represented on the City Council.)

After approval of a charter change pushed by Mayor G. T. Bynum IV, the Election District Commission is now a five-member board, all appointed by the mayor. The board members are former City Councilors John Eagleton, Susan Neal, Rick Westcott, and Joe Williams, and the ubiquitous Sharon King Davis. ("Should we go out into the community, meet new people, and appoint someone without political and social connections, who's never served on a commission before? Nah, let's just appoint Sharon again.")

The 2011 commission was used by then-Mayor Dewey Bartlett Jr. and his allies as an instrument of political revenge against his critics. Eagleton was drawn out of his district; his District 7 precinct was attached to District 9, where Bynum IV was the incumbent. Westcott faced some disadvantageous precinct shifts, losing heavily Republican precincts on the east side of the river, but after he announced his intention not to seek reelection, the proposed boundary changes were reversed. Major population shifts between districts helped well-financed challengers unseat incumbents in Districts 3, 4, and 5, as the incumbents had to build support where they had no previous relationships with constituents and neighborhood associations, where the media narrative of bickering councilors was unchallenged by direct personal experience. In a nutshell, the mayor and his allies successfully used redistricting to wipe out any check or balance from independent-minded councilors.

Ten years later, we don't have any dissidents on the City Council at all, and elections are now officially non-partisan (but not really), so the motives shaping the process will be different this time. Three of the members have found themselves on the wrong side of the city establishment, and two of them were directly targeted by the last redistricting effort, which offers some hope for integrity in the final product. I suspect there will be an effort to protect District 8 councilor Phil Lakin, an important cog in the Kaiser System as CEO of Tulsa Community Foundation and Bynum IV's heir apparent in 2024, but I don't see any evidence of a serious challenge to his 2022 re-election.

Given that the 2011 map was a gerrymander that involved moving a large number of people between districts to punish certain councilors, it would be appropriate to reverse some of those changes. For example, Maple Ridge should be moved back into 9, and the area east of Yale that shifted to 9 ("Bartlett's Revenge") should go back into 7. It would be interesting to start with the 2001 plan and create a plan that equalized population with a minimum of precinct changes.

For the sake of inclusion and equity, it would be good to pack as many half-million dollar homes into one district as possible (two districts at the most). The wealthy have dominated and will always dominate the mayor's office because of the resources required to run a city-wide campaign; for balance, the council should maximize representation of Tulsans from the working class, middle class, and small business owners. Pursuant to that, District 9 should not expand further northeast; it would make sense instead to add precincts like 115, 123, and 124 to 9.

Many jurisdictions are using a free website, Dave's Redistricting App, to allow citizens to experiment with potential maps and submit them to redistricting commissions for consideration. (The screenshot at the top of this entry shows Dave's Redistricting App with the current Tulsa district map.) Tulsa is not officially supporting such an effort, but I have created maps showing the current (2011) and previous (2001) district maps, as well as the five INCOG proposals:

• City of Tulsa: current council district boundaries
• City of Tulsa: approximate district boundaries from 2001, before the Bartlett gerrymander of 2011. The boundaries on the 2001 map are only approximate, using current precinct boundaries, because of consolidation of precincts over the last decade.
• City of Tulsa: INCOG Plan I
• City of Tulsa: INCOG Plan II
• City of Tulsa: INCOG Plan III
• City of Tulsa: INCOG Plan IV
• City of Tulsa: INCOG Plan V
• City of Tulsa: INCOG Plan VI (added 2021/09/24)

I encourage you to sign up for a free account, duplicate the maps I've linked, make your own edits, and then publish and share your proposals.

MORE: My 1991 Tulsa Tribune op-ed in reaction to the Democrats' legislative gerrymander, setting out some principles that should govern redistricting, including the most important, communities of interest: "Ideally, districts should be centered around regions, cities, neighborhoods, and other natural affiliations. You should be able to give a simple geographic name to each district: northern Broken Arrow, Brookside, metro Oklahoma City."

UPDATE 2021/09/28: At the September 24, 2021, meeting of the Election District Commission, an additional map was introduced. Here is the current package of six maps. This is similar to Plan V, but it moves precinct 111 from District 2 to 9, precinct 123 from 9 to 8, and precinct 171 from 8 to 2. The change reduces the number of precincts moved from one district to another by 1, but increases the population deviation from 3.0% to 3.3%. I've added the map to Dave's Redistricting App and to the list above.