House Approves Reapportionment Bill

(Host) The Vermont House has given its strong tri-partisan support to a reapportionment bill that will define the geographic boundaries of House districts for the next decade. The vote on the measure was 138 to 4.

VPR's Bob Kinzel reports.

(Kinzel) Every ten years, both the House and the Senate redraw their district maps to reflect changes in population and it's not unusual for the majority party to flex its muscles to change boundaries to benefit their own members. But this didn't happen in the House this year.

Leaders of the Democratic, Republican and Progressive parties said they're pleased that the reapportionment debate this session largely avoided any bitter partisan battles.

Donna Sweaney is the chairperson of the House Government Operations committee. She said her panel was guided by several key principles:

(Sweaney) "We decided that our goal was to keep the current districts intact as much as possible. There are 50 districts that have no change. We also decided to keep towns as whole as much as possible."

(Kinzel) Sweaney says her committee's biggest challenge was to draw a map that reflected population gains in Chittenden County and losses in Windsor and Rutland counties:

(Sweaney) "The committee agreed to add an additional member to the Burlington district making it ten seats. That led us to need to collapse a district in the part of the state that lost the most population. To say this was hard is an understatement."

(Kinzel) Majority leader Lucy Leriche said the House had done something that very few states have been able to accomplish.   

(Leriche) "We have avoided the kind of gerrymandering and divisiveness that seems to have consumed the rest of our country."

(Kinzel) And Republican leader Don Turner said he was also satisfied with the reapportionment process this year.

(Turner) "We appreciate the effort of the majority leadership to work with our caucus to obtain a reasonable resolution to the redistricting puzzle that although not perfect, meets many of the objectives our caucus set forth prior to the beginning of this proves."

(Kinzel) The measure will come up for final approval on Thursday. Meanwhile the Senate is working on its own reapportionment map.

For VPR News, I'm Bob Kinzel in Montpelier.