{"id":2778,"date":"2009-10-06T14:57:00","date_gmt":"2009-10-06T18:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2009\/10\/against-lowndes-county-commission-expansion-dennis-marks.html"},"modified":"2009-10-06T14:57:00","modified_gmt":"2009-10-06T18:57:00","slug":"against-lowndes-county-commission-expansion-dennis-marks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2009\/10\/against-lowndes-county-commission-expansion-dennis-marks.html","title":{"rendered":"Against Lowndes County Commission Expansion: Dennis Marks"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n\n<\/a>\n
\nImage by flickr user wiccked<\/a>\n<\/small>
\n\n\n\n\n<\/a>\n<\/td><\/tr><\/table>\nHere is one person’s opinion on the current expansion plan for the Lowndes County Commission. LAKE is also making available a\nweb page<\/a> and an OpenOffice<\/a> version of this statement.\n

\nLAKE will be happy to post other opinions on either side as part of citizen dialog for transparent process.\n<\/td><\/tr><\/table>\n
\n

Vote NO on Expansion Referendum<\/h1>\nVoters in Lowndes County are being asked in a referendum to vote YES or NO on expansion\nof the Lowndes County Board of Commissioners by the addition of two\nsuper-districts:\n
\nShall the governing authority of Lowndes County be\nchanged to a six-member board of commissioners to be composed of a\nnonvoting chairperson and five voting district commissioners, three\nof whom shall represent the existing three districts created by\ndividing Lowndes County into three districts and two of whom shall\nrepresent additional districts to be created by dividing Lowndes\nCounty into two districts which shall overlay the three existing\ndistricts?<\/em>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Here is my\nexplanation of why I am voting NO and why I think you should vote NO\ntoo.<\/p>\n<\/td><\/tr><\/table>\n\n\n
\n

The problem that the\nproposed expansion is supposed to cure is that each of the current\nCommissioners represents too many constituents. The current Board has\njust three Commissioners and a Chair for all the residents of Lowndes\nCounty. The population of Lowndes County was 92,115 in the 2000\ncensus, on which the current districts are based. Thus each\nCommissioner represents over 30,000 residents \u2013 too many people for\nany one commissioner to represent effectively. (The situation will\nget even worse after the 2010 census, which will show that the\ncounty\u2019s population is in excess of 100,000.) One step forward then\nis to expand the number of commissioners.<\/p>\n

However, the\nproposed expansion being voted on by referendum expands the County\nCommission from three districts to five districts with the addition\nof two super-districts, covering half the county each. Whoever is\nelected from each super-district would have to represent over 45,000\nresidents! Thus the proposed method of expanding the county\ncommission make the problem of representing too many residents worse,\nnot better. The two super-districts are two steps backward.<\/p>\n

It really doesn\u2019t\nhelp that each resident will have two county commissioners. That\ncould have been achieved by doubling the number of commissioners in\neach of the existing county commission districts. Indeed the County\nCommission had several alternative proposals for expanding the county\ncommission to choose from. Expansion is a good idea, but this\nparticular proposal for expansion is not the way to go.<\/p>\n

In particular, the\nproposed expansion is not reflective of the demographic diversity of\nLowndes County. Lowndes County is about 34% African-American. The\ncurrent three-district commission reflects that demographic with one\ndistrict out of three (33%) containing a majority of residents who\nare minorities (a so-called \u201cminority majority district\u201d) Neither\nof the two proposed super-districts is majority minority. Proposed\nSuper-district East is 49.66% African-American by total population,\nbut only 45.04% by Voting Age Population. If voting in the\nsuper-districts follows racial lines, as has too often been the case,\nthe Lowndes County Commission is likely to go from having one\nminority member elected from three districts (33%) to one minority\nmember elected from five districts (20%).\n<\/p>\n

It is more difficult\nand more expensive to campaign for election in a larger district. To\nincrease participation in the political process, we need smaller\ndistricts, not larger ones. That was the rationale for expanding the\nCounty Commission in the first place. So let\u2019s vote NO on the\nproposed expansion with super-districts and send the issue back to\nthe County Commission to come up with a better plan for expansion.<\/p>\n

Dennis W. Marks<\/p>\n

Resident of Lowndes\nCounty<\/p>\n

The opinions\nexpressed are the personal opinions of the author and are not\nexpressed on behalf of any of the organizations of which he is a\nmember.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/td><\/tr><\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Image by flickr user wiccked Here is one person’s opinion on the current expansion plan for the Lowndes County Commission. LAKE is also making available a web page and an OpenOffice version of this statement. LAKE will be happy to post other opinions on either side as part of citizen dialog for transparent process. Vote […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[11,88,22],"tags":[2224,4408,505,2667,8701,7,1486],"class_list":["post-2778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lake","category-lowndes-county-commission","category-politics","tag-census","tag-commission","tag-dennis-marks","tag-expansion","tag-georgia","tag-lowndes-county","tag-referendum"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-IO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2778"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2778\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}