ANC Redistricting Heats Up as Students Seek Greater Representation

The Georgetown Campus Plan hearings might be , but the back and forth between students and community leaders continues, manifesting itself in the .

The SMD working group's biggest issues are:

• How many student districts should there be? (The neighbors say two, the students say three.)

• Where should the boundaries for those districts be drawn?

A working group made up of community members has until Aug. 17 to vote for a plan to update the single member districts of ANC2E. 

Each SMD should be made up of about 2,000 people, with a 100-person deviation allowed, and each SMD has a commissioner who sits on the ANC. Currently ANC2E is comprised of seven SMDs, but given growth in population, there is room for a new eighth district. 

Two competing proposals:

• A proposal by the co-chairs of the working group, Jennifer Altemus, Ron Lewis and Lenore Rubino (the "co-chairs proposal")

• A proposal by Georgetown student John Flanagan (the "Flanagan proposal").

"Co-Chairs Proposal"

The "co-chairs proposal" is set forth by chair, Commissioner Ron Lewis of ANC2E, and his co-chairs, Jennifer Altemus of the Citizen’s Association of Georgetown and Lenore Rubino of the Burleith Citizen’s Association (See attached PDF). The proposal would add a new SMD and would increase the number of student-represented areas from one to two.

Under the co-chairs plan, several areas currently within non-student SMDs would be transferred into an area that is currently SMD04 and will, under the plan, also become SMD08. The total student population for each SMD would be 2,581, if the populations are split evenly between the two.

The co-chair's plan also seeks to maintain all of the Burleith community in SMD01, which would result in an overall population of about 2,400. The reasoning, according to a note sent to working group members, is that the large district reflects "the community’s cohesiveness and its strong relationship with Ellington School of the Arts and Ellington Field."

Other changes would adjust the borders of the current map to add or subtract census tracts to address the preference for 1900-2100 residents per SMD.

"Flanagan Proposal"

The Flanagan proposal would also create a total of eight SMDs, but would increase the number of student-held positions from one to three.

"With 45 percent of the population, students deserve at least three commissioners," Flanagan wrote in an email.

Flanagan's proposal would create three student SMDs in the West Village, look at this map to see his proposed boundaries. At least one of his SMDs would include several blocks of non-student residences.

"Because Burleith has a distinct architecture and geography, I gave it its own district," wrote Flanagan. But the northern-most of his proposed student districts would encompass the Ellington Field area, which in the co-chairs' proposal would remain in the Burleith SMD.

Flanagan's proposal separates the East Village into two SMDs, though both the current SMD map and the proposed co-chair's map have districts spanning sections of Wisconsin Avenue. Flanagan called Wisconsin Avenue a "natural boundary."

Point/Counterpoint

Of the co-chair's plan, Flanagan said it was "obviously gerrymandered" especially considering the "defiance of the natural boundary between East and West Village" (i.e. Wisconsin Avenue).

The co-chairs wrote a letter to the working group, in which they described Flanagan's proposal as "a mechanical approach driven by a faulty premise – that there should be three student SMDs – and flawed by insufficient ground-level research and inquiry."

Voting

Members are voting via email. The winning proposal will then appear on the ANC2E meeting agenda for Aug. 29 as a Community Comment item.

Should community comment lead to second guessing or offer new insight, the recommended plan could be reconsidered if a majority of the members of the working group request reconsideration by email before Sept. 7.

That plan will then go to ANC Commissioner Tom Birch, who is serving as the appointed chair of Council member Jack Evans's Ward 2 team, and Birch will in turn pass his recommendations onto Evans.