TOPEKA, Kan. — House Speaker Mike O'Neal is floating a new congressional redistricting plan that would split the Kansas City area between two districts and put part of it in a district with rural western Kansas communities 400 miles away.
The proposal from O'Neal was among several plans to redraw the state's four congressional districts that were unveiled this week during a meeting of the House Redistricting Committee. O'Neal, a Hutchinson Republican, appointed himself as the committee's chairman.
Senate Minority Leader Anthony Hensley, a Topeka Democrat, has been predicting for months that O'Neal would try to move Wyandotte County, which includes Kansas City, Kan., in with rural western and central Kansas counties of the 1st District to dissipate the potential influence of the one of the few Democratic-leaning areas of the state.
Hensley even produced a map of what he believed O'Neal was pursuing that showed the 1st District extending across the tier of counties bordering Nebraska then snaking down the state's northeast corner to take in Wyandotte County. Republicans sometimes mocked the Democratic leader's comments, suggesting he was the only one talking seriously of such a proposal.
The plan O'Neal produced is significantly different. It adds more rural northeast Kansas counties to the 1st District and leaves part of Wyandotte County in the 3rd District, but brings in all of Democratic-leaning Lawrence rather than leaving the city split between the 3rd District and the 2nd District, which spans eastern Kansas.
Still, Hensley felt vindicated, saying O'Neal had "shown us all his true colors."
"They want to dilute the Democratic stronghold in Wyandotte County," Hensley told reporters during a Statehouse news conference Friday. "It's a classic case of gerrymandering, and I've talked about it for months."
O'Neal dismissed the criticism. He said the redistricting plan Hensley had attributed to him was "one of the ugliest maps I've ever seen." But he also said that if Hensley were "trying to say that under no stretch of the imagination could you ever put an urban area in northeast Kansas into the 1st District, that's not true."
Legislators must redraw congressional districts to account for shifts in population over the past decade. In considering changes to congressional districts, the 1st District is nearly 58,000 residents short of the ideal population of 713,280 and must gain territory. The 3rd District is overpopulated.
The Kansas Senate has approved a bipartisan congressional redistricting plan, backed by Hensley and all of his fellow Democrats, that moves Manhattan, home of Kansas State University, from the 2nd District into the 1st District and reunites Lawrence in the 2nd District.
That plan is opposed by Manhattan-area officials, O'Neal and Republican Gov. Sam Brownback, who argue that Manhattan has far more in common with eastern Kansas communities than western Kansas ones.
Brownback told The Associated Press earlier this month that he'd reached an agreement with O'Neal and Senate President Steve Morris, a Hugoton Republican who supported the bipartisan Senate plan on congressional redistricting, to keep Manhattan in the 2nd District. O'Neal's plan would split Riley County, which includes Manhattan, but keep Manhattan in the 2nd District.
But there's a more important — and politically volatile — consideration for many Republicans. The Senate plan creates a new 2nd District for Rep. Lynn Jenkins, the senior member of the state's all-GOP delegation in the U.S. House, with a slightly more Democratic district. The Kansas Republican Party's chairwoman has strongly criticized the plan, and some Republicans, noting their large majorities in both chambers, want an all-GOP map, not a bipartisan one.
Mike Taylor, the lobbyist for the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kan., said because O'Neal is speaker, his plan is likely to have more support than others. Unified Government is lobbying against moving Kansas City or part of it into the 1st District.
"It's not that we don't like western Kansas. It's just not a good fit," Taylor told The Kansas City Star. "I don't know what congressman could represent the kinds of issues western Kansas deals with as well as the kinds of issues that urban areas like Kansas City have to deal with."
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Senate's congressional redistricting plan is SB 344.
Online:
Kansas Legislature's redistricting site: http://www.redistricting.ks.gov/