Courtesy of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, here are maps of the nine Guilford County Commission districts, color coded by race.I also have a spreadsheet produced by the coalition that lists current population for each precinct in the county broken down by race. E-mail me at jordan@yesweekly.com if you would like a copy. Precinct statistics on voter registration by race and political party are available at the Guilford County Board of Elections website.
Discussion at Guarino's blog. (Incidentally, I've been unable to comment for the past two hours. Do you know what's going on, Joe?)
8 comments:
Sorry about the trouble Jordan. This has happened occasionally with other commenters of late. Typepad says their end is OK, and it might be due to malware. I see you were successful in posting a comment this AM.
Still no luck, Joe. Thanks, all the same.
Here's my comment:
"I've read some guidance from the Justice Department on what constitutes retrogression. If you have a more objective source, please direct me to it.
"Re: whether reducing the size of the board would be retrogressive, going down to six districts has many, many attributes to recommend it — and I don't need to rehash them here — but the minority population in the High Point majority minority district would be significantly reduced in a 6-district plan."
jordan do you like how they split a city in halh in pleasant garden? i think pg 1 and 2 need to be together. I also noticed looking on gis on county web site that some of the boundaries go through backs of houses. To me they should be using streets as boundaries and also keeping neighborhoods together.
Keith, surely you don't mean the boundary lines go THROUGH the houses. If you mean they run along the back property lines rather than along streets, I'm not sure what to think about that. If streets tends to be the unifying element of neighborhoods, then you wouldn't want a precinct boundary there. If streets already separate neighborhoods, then they would make a natural boundary between precincts.
To your first question, it would be great to reunite the two Pleasant Garden precincts. That's a strength of the six- or five-district plans. If you don't like the way the PGs are split in the nine-district plan, then try your hand at redrawing the map.
jordan check out the dividing lines between district 6 and 8 from florida street to lee street , that makes no sense whatsoever.The line should be on a street going down coliseum blvd.Look at elwood avenue, grove street,marion street, and oak street and look at the lines through the properties.
Like i have also said before to see them split starmount neighborhood in half is dumb as well.
If i had the tools like they do down in mecklenburg county i would draw a map but we don't have that up here for public input.
I am just pointing out the obvious on the maps from past especially the split of pleasant garden that should have never happened.
Keith, I'd have to have a better map to see what you mean about the Elwood Street area.
Did you notice that a couple of the maps I drew bring all of Starmount together in District 6? Likewise for the six-district and five-district plans.
You do have the tools to draw your own maps. Remind me tomorrow, and I'll send you the spreadsheed with population counts for each spreadsheet. Then it's a matter of addition and subtraction while keeping track of the racial balances of each district to ensure that you don't dilute minority influence.
jordan,i used the guilford county gis mapping system on their web site and put in the boundaries of the county commissioners and it came up . I needed to scroll down to street level to see where the boundaries went through. If these boundaries are correct then they also need fixing in this round of redistricting.
I also might give a call to the mayor of pleasant garden to see if he is ok with having 2 commissioners splitting the town in half and does he want a united pleasant garden.
Forsyth County is going to be redrawing precincts soon. From what I understand, redrawing precincts is typically done by the board of elections, in contrast to redistricting, which is handled by the affected board.
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