A U.S. district judge will draw a new district map for Cobb County this week. If the plan stays on track, it would keep July elections on schedule and prevent the need for county residents to pay for a special election.
Cobb officials were in court Monday for a hearing on the county's current map, which had been challenged by a Marietta attorney for not accurately reflecting the latest census numbers and for violating the one person, one vote principle.
The state Legislature, which has the job of setting district maps, failed to reach an agreement on a map during the most recent legislative session, leaving Cobb with a decade-old map. Attorney Jonathan Crumly filed a lawsuit last month to delay elections until a new map could be drawn.
The contested map issue directly impacted the upcoming July district elections for commissioners in districts 2 and 4 in southeast and southwest Cobb. (The map issue had no impact on the at-large chairman's race, also on the ballot in July.) If the district elections were to be pushed back, a special election for those two areas could cost taxpayers about $200,000, Commission Chairman Tim Lee said.
To prevent the delay and extra costs, Judge Steve Jones plans to have a new map completed and to the county's board of elections by Thursday. Because Jones' map is original and not an adaptation of a previously submitted map, it would not require approval from the federal Justice Department, according to the judge, Crumly and other experts. However, state legislators could change the map again when they reconvene next year, Crumly said.
Jones presented a draft of his map in court Monday, which was drawn with help from the state reapportionment office. His map divides the county into four commission districts, doing the best job of evenly dividing the population and representing the minority population increase, Crumly said after the hearing.
The lone point of contention that attorneys had with Jones' draft was the dividing line between the northwest and northeast districts. His version would move the area including the Town Center Area Community Improvement District, Kennesaw State University and McCollum Airport out of its current area long represented by Commissioner Helen Goreham, and move it farther east to the district represented by first-term Commissioner JoAnn Birrell.
"I was part of their past. I would like to be part of their future," Goreham said about the area.
Attorneys plan to submit proposed changes to only that area of the map by Tuesday afternoon.
Jones is also scheduled to decide on Tuesday whether he will consider a separate intervening suit filed by northeast Cobb resident Viveca Famber Powell. Powell, represented by Jeff Jeter, an attorney for the state Democratic Party and chief of staff to state Sen. Doug Stoner, charged that previous versions of the map approved by chambers of the Legislature and by the Board of Commissioners disrupted communities of interest. Powell's grievance also charged that the maps did not adequately represent Cobb's increasing minority population, and in some areas diluted the minority vote.
Although the Legislature is charged with adopting reapportionment maps, any legal challenges are defended and paid for by the county. Thus far, Cobb has been able to use in-house attorneys for the work and has stayed within its budget for the challenge, Lee said. A decade ago, the county spent about $11,000 in a similar map challenge.
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