General Assembly works to redistrict

As the April 29 deadline approaches, the Indiana General Assembly has three weeks to pass legislation that will redraw state legislative and congressional district boundaries.

Separate pieces of legislation, which may eventually end up as one bill as the legislative process unfolds, will be authored by the Indiana House of Representatives and the Indiana Senate simultaneously.

The House will be responsible for redrawing Indiana House districts and the Senate will be responsible for redrawing Indiana Senate districts.

Additionally, both chambers will redraw the boundaries for Indiana’s nine U.S. congressional districts.

As of now, none of the pieces of redistricting legislation have come in front of the full House or full Senate chambers. Both remain in House and Senate committees.

On Monday morning the Senate Elections Committee will hold a public committee hearing in the Senate Chamber to present the legislation, said Senate Elections Committee Chairwoman Sue Landske, R-Cedar Lake.

“There will be no vote and there will be no testimony ... because we do not have a printed version of the bill yet,” Landske said.

Landske said there will be a printed version of the bill on Wednesday. Public testimony will be heard at that time.

She said she hopes the Senate will pass the two bills — the Senate redistricting bill and congressional redistricting bill — by April 18.

The two bills will then make their way to the House. Likewise, the House will eventually send its two redistricting bills to the Senate.

Because of population shifts, which are determined by U.S. Census data, the state legislature bears the responsibility of redrawing the legislative and congressional districts every 10 years.

Due to Indiana’s virtually unchanged population since the last census, the Hoosier State will not lose or gain any of its congressional districts, said Senate Elections Committee member Sen. Brandt Hershman, R-Lafayette.

However, the boundaries of the nine current districts will be subject to adjustment according to those population shifts.

The House and Senate election committees are based on proportional representation of both parties in their respective chambers. Because of the Republicans’ majority in both the House and Senate, they are the dominating party in both election committees.

For this reason, some believe Republicans can use this to their advantage in determining district boundaries that can favor them in the next election.

“The difficulty from our end is that we have not seen any maps yet,” said Indiana House Democrats Media Relations Director John Schorg. “It would be great to say that they live up to the standards of being fair that they claim to achieve, but there have been concerns about the exact amount of public input in this process.”

Besides census data, Landske and Hershman said the committees take into account public testimony and judicial decisions before authoring redistricting legislation.

Last month the House and Senate election committees conducted eight public hearings during a two-day period throughout the state to gather Hoosiers’ opinions about the redistricting process.

Landske said many of those who testified said they were concerned about districts being contiguous and keeping communities of interest together.

“Our first and foremost goal is to draw districts that are fair,” Hershman said. “People want districts that are compact as possible, contiguous, maintain communities of interest and respect county lines ... If we take all those concerns into consideration, I am confident that we can draw maps that are fair and representative to the state as a whole.”

But since no maps have been presented, skeptics remain.

“We will adopt a wait-and-see approach to see if the result of their work matches their rhetoric to this point,” Schorg said.