Utah's years-long struggle to gain a fourth congressional seat hit another speed bump Tuesday when the Senate voted 57-42 against a bill that would have granted the state an additional representative.
The rocky process started after Utah narrowly missed out on an extra seat following the 2000 Census while North Carolina gained a seat. The state launched an unsuccessful challenge to the Census Bureau's failure to count some 11,000 Utah residents serving overseas missions for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. State officials have continued working to gain the seat.
"This is something that's important for Utah," said Lisa Roskelley, spokeswoman for Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. "If we can get an additional Congress member sooner, it helps our state."
But time is running out for the state to reap the benefits of additional representation, given that demographers have said Utah is guaranteed a fourth seat after the 2010 Census. In that case, the earliest a new representative could be elected would be in 2012.
Kirk Jowers, director of the University of Utah's Hinckley Institute of Politics, said while it would be worthwhile for Utah to gain four
extra years of representation, the Bush administration's opposition to the bill, coupled with amendments offered, create "an impossible obstacle course."
Pamela Perlich, senior U. research economist, said Tuesday's failed vote won't "make a huge difference in the scheme of things," because the state is headed for a fourth seat due to population increases.
"It just delays the inevitable," she said. "Our growth rates are among the fastest in the nation."
The idea for a bill to give Utah an additional seat and at the same time grant a congressional vote to Washington, D.C., arose after the state lost two court challenges.
In addition to questioning the Census Bureau's failure to count LDS missionaries, the state also challenged the bureau's "imputation" method to estimate the number of residents in a household who couldn't be reached after several attempts. That challenge was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, the discovery of a census counting error narrowed the population gap between Utah and North Carolina from roughly 850 people to only about 80.
Perlich said the lesson Utah should learn from the 2000 Census is to do a better job counting its ethnic minority communities, particularly the rapidly growing immigrant communities. Those communities are traditionally under-counted, she said.
"If we were able to catch that (growth), we would have gotten a fourth seat anyway," Perlich said.
E-mail: dbulkeley@desnews.com