At a string of public hearings scheduled to last through the summer, the redistricting committee has been busy offering up a veritable buffet of pizza slice, doughnut and now doughnut hole maps.
We applaud the hearings and the effort at transparency they represent, and we hope that effort will prove sincere. We will know only when we see the final maps, which we hope will reflect input from Utah citizens and honor the idea of representative democracy.
As Utah's population has grown, it has also grown more conservative. It is nearly inevitable that Democrats will shed a few seats in the state Legislature. No matter how lines are drawn, Republicans will have a veto-proof majority in the legislature.
This means that Republicans can easily afford to do the right thing by drawing boundaries that keep communities of interest together. It is likewise wholly unnecessary to run up the score or rub salt in the wound by eliminating more Democratic seats than necessary or otherwise diluting Democratic votes.
In fact, doing the right thing could go a long way toward calming partisan rhetoric and promoting civic engagement through more competitive districts — all without threatening the Republican lock on power.
In an ideal world, redistricting proposals would originate with an independent commission rather than a committee of legislators with a clear conflict of interest. But in the real world of the 2011 redistricting process, we hope instead that the redistricting committee will demonstrate its sincerity by making a concerted effort to realistically identify communities of interest and keep them together.
For example, urban and rural communities grapple in large part with separate sets of issues. Rural areas are more concerned with agriculture, land use, natural resources and outdoor tourism than urban and suburban areas, which focus more heavily on infrastructure, transportation, air pollution and crime.
By this token, Box Elder County in the northwest and San Juan County in the southeast may have more in common with one another than either county does with municipalities along the Wasatch Front. This is a potentially important consideration.
Race and ethnicity also figure prominently in Utah's demographic change, and the committee should use caution in not breaking up easily identifiable ethnic communities. Other communities of interest may include economic, social or ideological communities.
Every effort should be made to respect existing city and county boundaries. Drawing lines to protect incumbents may be technically legal, but when it benefits only one party or divides communities of interest, it is ugly. Public servants, as the moniker implies, should certainly be capable of putting aside selfish motives in the interest of the communities they are elected to serve.
We encourage citizens to think about what defines their communities and then to speak up by attending hearings or submitting maps at the committee's website, redistrictutah.org. And we strongly encourage the redistricting committee to listen to the public when they do.
We genuinely hope the redistricting committee will rise above the temptation to gerrymander and will carefully weigh the inevitable politics against the best interests of the people of Utah. To borrow a phrase from the advocacy group representmeutah.org, we urge legislators to keep the focus on people choosing leaders rather than leaders choosing people.