Committee adopts new Pierce County Council district boundaries despite GOP opposition
The Pierce County Districting Committee narrowly adopted a map Thursday night to account for population growth across the county, despite process concerns from Republicans.
The biggest changes were the shape and size of County Council Districts 2 and 5 and geographical shrinking of more rural districts like Districts 1 and 3.
The redistricting committee was tasked with creating seven council districts that keep the populations as equal as possible, are “compact and contiguous” to avoid gerrymandering and preserve related communities.
The districting master who created an initial map, Steven Garrett, said he had to increase the size of Districts of 4 and 5, which encompass much of Tacoma, to keep pace with the increased population density east of Sumner in Roy, Orting and Bonney Lake, which largely make up Districts 1 and 3. District 2 (Puyallup and Fife) and District 6 (Lakewood and Steilacoom) also had to decrease in size because they now have higher population density than a decade ago. District 7 (Gig Harbor and Key Peninsula) remained largely the same.
District 3 strayed farthest from the goal of 131,590 residents by 2.07 percent, with 128,870 residents. Committee member Justin Leighton said he was OK with the variance because the members had done their best to keep communities together.
“This is a puzzle and when you take one piece away, you have to balance it on the other end,” he said on Thursday evening.
The committee, made up of two Republican-recommended members, two Democrat-recommended members and a fifth nonpartisan member, passed the new map in a 3-2 vote.
The two Republican-recommended members are former Pierce County Council Chair Doug Richardson and Republican candidate for state treasurer and the former chair of the 2016 Charter Review Commission Sharon Hanek.
Both voted against the map, saying they did not agree with the committee’s decision to vote on items before holding time for public comment.
“We had a lot of great comments. But part of the process of inviting the public to comment on what we are doing is so that we could incorporate some of the comments into the maps. What I found was that a couple of times the districting master said he would not be creating certain versions of the maps to accommodate some of the scenarios,” Hanek said.
Committee Chair Frank Cuthbertson, who is also a Pierce County Superior Court Judge, responded to the comments, saying the districting master provided the committee with a map, as he was tasked to do, and the committee needed to listen to public comments to make changes.
Leighton’s amendment to move Sumner into District 2 and take part of South Hill into District 1 was approved after several public comments asked the committee to do so.
Leighton pointed out that more than 120 public comments had been received by the committee.
“If we go back to 2011, when we actually did things in person, there were just a handful of people, and it was the same people going to each meeting commenting. I think that that alone calls for how well and transparent this was,” he said.
Richardson also claimed that the committee chose the least politically objective map master.
“I made it very clear that evening, that of the three candidates for that position, the district team master that we hired was the most overtly political of the three firms and or individuals who were qualified and applied,” he said Thursday.
In previous meetings, the committee addressed social media posts made by Garrett, who made comments opposing former President Donald Trump. He addressed the concerns on Dec. 6, saying he was not given data on where elected officials reside.
“If it had been part of this, that would be political,” Garrett told the committee. “I didn’t have to make radical changes because the map was doing what it was supposed to do. My goal was to do as little change as possible.”
This story was originally published December 19, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
