Senate committee rejects ‘Fayetteville to the Fourth’

Editor’s note: Roby Brock, with our content partner Talk Business, wrote this report. He can be reached at [email protected]

Shortly before the Monday (April 4) afternoon Senate State Agencies Committee hearing, several State Senators were huddled outside of the Senate chamber. When asked if a deal on Congressional redistricting had been worked out, Sen. Jim Luker, D-Wynne, said, "We’re either going to be here 15 minutes or for 3 weeks."

A half hour into the committee hearing, it was evident that 3 weeks was the better bet.

The "Fayetteville to the Fourth" Congressional redistricting map was fully vetted in the Senate committee, but in the end, it failed to receive enough votes to clear the 8-member panel.

HB 1322 by Rep. Clark Hall, D-Marvell, was debated for more than an hour with tough questioning — at times friendly, at times combative — from the 4 GOP senators on the committee.

Hall admitted that his map plan, which passed the House of Representatives on a party line vote late last week, was drawn up and amended to cobble enough votes together to make it through the 100-member chamber.

"We took into consideration as many people as we could," Hall told Sen. Bill Pritchard, R-Elkins. Pritchard’s legislative district sits in the area near Fayetteville that would be extracted from the Third to the Fourth Congressional District.

Pritchard complained that an overwhelming majority of his constituents have no desire to be moved, but Hall stressed that 110,000 voters had to come out of the Third District to balance Congressional representation according to the latest population numbers from the decennial Census.

Charges of overt partisanship regarding the map’s composition were made by one opponent from the T.E.A. Party, who claimed the national Democratic Party had drawn the "Fayetteville to the Fourth" map.

Hall denied the allegation.

With the defeat of the plan in committee, the map isn’t dead. State Senate rules allow for a bill to be extracted from committee and considered by the full Senate if 18 Senators agree. Democrats control 20 Senate seats to 15 held by Republicans.

Other plans may be considered on Tuesday when Senators reconvene at 10 a.m. (April 5)