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An Ohio State University professor said it would have been the best redistricting proposal in the United States.
If so, it's now the nation's best dead redistricting proposal - and there is plenty of blame to spread around the Ohio Statehouse.
"I am very disappointed but not surprised," said Richard Gunther, a political-science professor who worked with the League of Women Voters of Ohio and legislative leaders in a futile attempt to change the way Ohio draws state legislative districts. "This would have been the boldest effort to eliminate gerrymandering ever attempted in the United States."
Today is the deadline for placing on the November ballot a constitutional amendment to change the hyper-political map-drawing process that will take place again in 2011, after the latest census. Critics say the system creates too many safe seats and secures power for one party, to the detriment of Ohioans looking for leaders to focus on the state's most pressing problems.
House Speaker Armond Budish, D-Beachwood, and Sen. Jon Husted, R-Kettering, agreed late last week on a compromise plan that would require bipartisan support for the drawing of legislative districts and set guidelines to ensure that neither party gets too many districts drawn in its favor.
"We came pretty close, if not completely to an agreement," Budish said in a call to T he Dispatch. "Unfortunately it does not appear there is enough support in either the House or the Senate for the compromise."
Husted, a former House speaker, said: "The powers of the status quo are a very powerful force. There are many partisans on both sides that do not want to see the system changed, because of the quest for partisan power."
Though Husted said he will keep up the fight and still hopes to make changes that could affect 2011 redistricting (he is running for secretary of state), as it stands now the Apportionment Board will again draw the lines to favor whichever party controls it. Gaining control means winning two of three seats: those occupied by the governor, auditor and secretary of state.
So what doomed the plan?
• Super-majority: Placing a constitutional amendment on the ballot requires a three-fifths majority in each chamber.
• Timing: Senate Republicans passed a redistricting plan in September 2009, but House Democrats didn't take action until late May 2010, two weeks before lawmakers started a long summer break.
• Senate pushback: With 21 members, Senate Republicans could have provided the 20 votes needed, but Husted got resistance.
"This new proposal seems to overly benefit the ... urban legislators at the expense of our more rural Republican districts," Sen. Timothy J. Grendell, R-Chesterland, wrote to all senators.
Sen. Bill Seitz, R-Cincinnati, also questioned some parts of the plan, such as one that would keep together municipalities and city wards, but not counties and townships. "I think this would work mischief," he wrote to Husted.
• Minority opposition: Passing the plan required votes from House Republicans and Senate Democrats, but neither minority leader was on board.
"The concern of our caucus was not the content of the plan, but rather the concept of putting something into the constitution that has not been tried," said Sen. Minority Leader Capri S. Cafaro, D-Hubbard.
In the House, Budish said Democrats had 51 of the 60 votes needed. He said he reached out to Minority Leader William G. Batchelder, R-Medina, "but he was not supportive and did not want to bring back the House."
Gunther said he was told by multiple sources in the speaker's office that Batchelder "specifically threatened to use every procedural trick in the book to defeat this."
"That's a lie. I never talked to Budish," Batchelder said, adding that the two only traded phone messages Sunday. "I never talked to the (Republican House) caucus about it."
If House Democrats were serious about redistricting, they would have held hearings on the plan during the summer, Batchelder said. But the latest compromise "was drafted so badly it would have had to have been done by a political-science professor. It had language in it that was incomprehensible in terms of the Ohio Constitution."
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