Election day ’09 is done. On every level it was another brutal, petty, personal and embarrassing year in local politics.
This year’s top prize for dirt was the revelation that North Tonawanda City Council President Brett Sommer was asked directly by the most powerful Republican in the county to delay any progress on the pending Walmart contract until after Election Day so that incumbent Mayor Larry Soos would not benefit from the “good” news. Politics running government is our local culture, but don’t think the business world didn’t notice how local government jerked around the world’s largest retailer. If Niagara County’s most powerful Republican can jerk around that giant, what do you think the owners of small local businesses go through on a daily basis around here?
As they say in show business, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Our immediate focus turns to the life-or-death struggle that will be the race to control the state Senate. It will be fought in dark, seedy Albany bars where senators meet with convicted criminals and fought in the ornate Senate Chamber in the state Capitol. Don’t be fooled by the pasty-faced, rotund bodies in Brooks Brothers’ suits and perfect English. This will be a street fight to the death, with enough money to finance anything anyone can conceive.
Why so brutal this year?
Every 10 years, the district boundary lines that define Senate and Assembly districts here in New York are redrawn. It’s officially called redistricting, because calling it by its real name would be illegal. Gerrymandering is what actually takes place. That’s the process of drawing district boundaries specifically so someone or some party can win that particular seat. With gerrymandering, we get districts like Congresswoman Louise Slaughter’s district, which looks like a pair of headphones reaching around a bunch of rural territory. The concept there was that Democrat Slaughter needed as many Democratic voting areas as possible, while Republican Tom Reynolds needed as many Republican voting areas in his district.
With gerrymandering, you get districts that snake up the Thruway, taking in no voters until they reach the next incorporated city, where there may be Democratic votes. Imagine the logical insanity of representing Buffalo and Rochester, but nothing in between. No wonder most professionals steer clear of government and politics. It’s just logically — if not literally — an immoral business.
The official reason for redistricting is that people move. We’re a mobile country, and populations shift. So at the end of every census, the system is supposed to take the total population and make sure that each district has roughly the same population. The concept of equal representation: each district being the same size. You get the point.
Instead, what happens is that the people who do the redistricting factor in far more than population into the making of districts. They factor in race, voting patterns, voting enrollment and sometimes even who lives on what particular street. It’s not all that uncommon to have a boundary line move over one city block to remove an incumbent from his own district.
As you can see, those who draw the lines can greatly affect who gets elected and, even more importantly, who controls the majority in the Senate and Assembly for the rest of the decade.
With such a powerful tool as redistricting available to control entire branches of government in Albany, you’d think it would be controlled by some secure authority or panel of elders, completely removed from all politics, right? You’d be as wrong as if you thought Walmart was dealing with a level playing field in Niagara County.
The process of carving up Senate districts is left to the senators themselves. But only those senators who are in control of the chamber at the time of reapportionment. So, whoever wins control of the Senate in the 2010 election cycle will have the ability to carve their own districts. To keep towns and cities they like, to give towns and cities to others if they don’t think they do well there during elections.
All of this applies to the state Assembly as well, but with more than 100 out of 150 Assembly seats in the hands of Democrats, redistricting is a far less important venture. The Assembly isn’t flipping control from one party to another anytime soon.
To senators who have had control of the chamber for as long as anyone can remember, this is literally life or death. They must control this election, and don’t get in the way. We’ve already seen how far they will go — shutting down the state Senate for a month last year. We may have only seen the tip of the iceberg.
Tom Christy is the founder of FAIR Government, a non-political and non-editorial educational foundation dealing with local government issues. The Web sites is www.fair-government.org. He encourages communication and can be reached via e-mail at aim1986@mac.com.
