By Elliott Brack, editor and publisher | For years now, there has been debate on how many county and school board districts Gwinnett needs to best govern ourselves.
Currently there are five school board districts, and four county commission districts. Each board has five members. However, there are only four county commission districts since the chairman is elected on a county-wide basis, and makes up the fifth board member.
Some citizens think we need to expand both these to seven member boards. They feel this saying serving 900,000 people with only five members is difficult.
For simplicity, let’s just focus on the county commission. The four district members each now represent approximately 225,000 people. If there were six commission members, that means each would represent 150,000 residents.
That’s a lot of citizens. However, it’s not so daunting, in that there is little difference between representing 150,000 or 225,000. We’ve always maintained there’s little difference for the individual commissioner when representing big districts, since there are only 24 hours in the day.
Not only that, but there seems to me to be a more important consideration: it is a whole lot easier to govern when you are working with four district commissioners (and a chairman), than it is to work with seven people. In other words, the smaller the group, the easier it is to get consensus and govern speedily and more efficiently.
Marin
This year a proposal is being advanced by Rep. Pedro Marin, a Democrat, to re-draw the lines to add more people to the county commission. It got little traction this year in the Legislature.
The main reason for adding districts, Rep. Marin maintains, is to get more diversity on the board. We suggest another approach, which will be better.
If Gwinnett had districts redrawn to gerrymander at least one minority representative on the commission, what impact would one diverse member have? There would still be a majority of districts primarily white in nature, virtually isolating the diverse member.
In the last General Election, Commissioner Tommy Hunter barely beat Challenger Jasper Watkins. After the election, many suggested that in the 2018 election, and certainly by 2020, perhaps several diverse commissioners would gain victory to serve this growing county. That’s what happened in DeKalb County over the last few years, as its population make-up changed. And that’s why we see these changes happening in Gwinnett within two or four years, too.
After all in Gwinnett, if the county’s current 900,000 residents are now roughly 40 percent white, it stands to reason that this make-up will soon be lower, what with the current trend of population. Before long, there will be more diverse candidates on the Gwinnett boards, as a matter of sheer numbers, if the diverse communities get their members registered and voting.
We see the day, with four district commissioners, where there could possibly be one or two black, one Asian and one or two white commissioners…..and no telling what community the chairman would represent. There could be a diverse-majority commission in a few years in Gwinnett.
It would be awfully easier, and far better, to have a diverse-majority commission with five members rather than seven. And that would be preferable to having seven members, but still have a white-majority commission.
Be patient. A more diverse Gwinnett is surely coming real soon. We predict this for the county commission and for the school board.
- Have a comment? Send to: elliott@brack.net
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