Really ugly sausage making

Redistricting brings out the nastiest — and most entertaining — side of the General Assembly

Usually, state lawmakers spend the winter-long General Assembly session hobnobbing with lobbyists, returning campaign favors and working to please their constituents.
This is the one year in 10 they’ll spend an inordinate portion of time worrying if they’ll have any constituents left during the next election.
That’s because this is the year the General Assembly takes up the dreaded topic of redistricting — a process by which all legislators attempt to brown-nose and backstab their way toward drawing lines on a map that protect their home turf. If, as they say, lawmaking is as ugly to watch as is making sausages, redistricting amounts to the part when the entrails and errant cockroaches are thrown into the mix.
It’s a task lawmakers take up at the start of every decade, when the U.S. Census dictates that congressional, state Senate and state House districts be redrawn to reflect population shifts. It’s also a game that produces winners and losers, depending on who gets to absorb precincts that will help them win re-election, who gets to keep unwanted voters out of their district and who has to endure the most challenging prospect of them all: getting thrown into an unfamiliar territory with a fellow incumbent.
And it’s an issue that will shade every other political battle during the legislative session, heightening the normal partisanship, creating odd bedfellows and straining longtime friendships.
Some of the year’s most popular causes, like teen driving and Gov. Roy Barnes’ water agency, will have Democrats and Republicans holding hands, singing and skipping up the Capitol steps.
“Politicians are keeping their eye on [redistricting] and are trying to make as few enemies as possible,” says Senate Minority Leader Eric Johnson. “The lion and the lamb will lie down together, but the lamb won’t get much sleep.”
But the sounds of “Kumbaya” lofting up through the Golden Dome often will be drowned out by bare-knuckled partisan battles. As usual, legislators won’t muster the will to accomplish all of the things they need to. They’re unlikely, for example, to pay attention to less-sexy issues, like the state’s aging prison population, which threatens to overwhelm the state’s correctional system with sick, expensive-to-care-for old men.
One issue — the potentially explosive effort to remove the Confederate symbol from the state flag — even threatens to rip apart the Democrats’ solidarity during a redistricting session, just when they need to stick together to maintain the party’s power. Here’s a look at the flag debate and seven other issues that may define the session:
The flag
If lawmakers don’t successfully pull the Confederate battle emblem off the state flag this year, the rest of the country’s beliefs about the state may appear true: John Rocker wasn’t an exception and Georgia really is chock-full of rednecks.
Oh well. Despite pressure from civil rights groups and Atlanta business leaders, the flag — adopted in 1956 — probably still will be flying high after the session ends.
Part of the problem for reformers is that changing the flag isn’t very popular outside Atlanta. Rural and conservative suburban legislators couldn’t care less about whether the NCAA, which has threatened to boycott any state that publicly displays the Confederate emblem, or anyone else decides to take their events out of Atlanta.
In 1993, then-Gov. Zell Miller tried and failed to change the flag — and nearly got clocked in the ‘94 election as a result.
Rep. Calvin Smyre, a black Democrat from Columbus who supports changing the flag, concedes that flag-change forces don’t have enough votes in the House or Senate. Smyre may not even have the votes to get the legislation out of the Rules Committee, which he chairs.
Members of the Legislative Black Caucus already are complaining that Barnes, the one man who could give them a big political boost, has so far ducked the issue. But he’s lying low because he’s going to need a job in two years, and since George W. hasn’t asked him to head NASA, Barnes is likely to run for governor again. He knows most Georgians just aren’t ready to remove the Confederate flag to a place where they can’t see it every single day — and he’s unlikely to push for a change until he’s convinced he has the political cover.
One of the burning questions of the upcoming session: Is the black caucus powerful enough behind the scenes to get other Democrats to forsake their pro-Confederate constituents? Another key question: Will the flag debate drive a wedge between rural white Democrats and urban black Democrats that could handicap the party during redistricting and in the 2002 elections?
Redistricting
This year, Democrats again will have the upper hand in redistricting because they preside over both houses with a 30-seat majority in the House and an eight-seat edge in the Senate. But that doesn’t guarantee the right moves.
A decade ago, General Assembly Democrats managed to draw U.S. House districts that helped give Republicans control of the state’s congressional delegation. This year, Georgia will get two new congressional districts. Democrats are likely to have more success because a U.S. Supreme Court ruling won’t force the Legislature to shoehorn as many black voters into just three heavily black districts, and because a current 8-3 GOP edge in U.S. House seats gives the Democrats nowhere to go but up.
In the state House and state Senate, however, South Georgia seats now held by Democrats will have to shift to Atlanta’s suburbs, where Republicans generally hold sway.
The real business of redistricting will be completed this summer during the special session. But the groundwork will be laid during the January-March regular session, when alliances will be made, deals will be cut and House Speaker Tom Murphy and Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor dole out assignment to their respective reapportionment committees.
Water quality
The metro area’s water-quality problems threaten to restrict Atlanta’s favorite pastime: development. And business leaders would lose out on some serious Benjamins if they let that happen.
In November, the Clean Water Initiative, a task force comprised mainly of executives and politicians, proposed creating a regional water agency to come up with a plan to bring local waterways into compliance with federal and state clean water standards.
The big sticking point: Will state bureaucrats or local politicians control the agency?
Under the task force recommendations, local elected officials would control the agency and local governments would enforce the water-quality plan the agency came up with. That certainly pleases Republicans and some Democrats, who are wary of power mongering by a governor who has created at least three new state agencies that report directly to him.
While politicians seem content with the Clean Water Initiative proposal, environmentalists are anything but. The Sierra Club and the Upper Chattahoochee RiverKeeper would rather create a new state agency to enforce the water plan. They say it was local governments who got Atlanta into this mess in the first place by ignoring water laws that have been on the books since 1975. They also wonder if the plan will have enough teeth to clean up the more than 1,000 miles of waterways in the metro area that aren’t safe for fishing or swimming.
Expect Barnes to propose an agency along the lines of the task-force proposal, and Republicans and Democrats generally to unite in support of it.
Appropriations
To spend or not to spend. Here’s where the Republicans’ gloves will come off and where they stand to score the most points of the legislative session.
Democratic Secretary of State Cathy Cox wants to bring the state’s voting system into the 21st — in some cases, even the 20th — century. Noting that the state’s “undercount” of presidential votes exceeds the national average, she wants to replace a smorgasbord of ancient, flawed polling systems by 2004 with new technology that works something like an automated teller machine. But that could cost up to $200 million.
Barnes plans to ask legislators to spend $450 million on new classrooms as part of his education reform plan.
Republicans would rather give Georgia’s budget surplus back to taxpayers and may find allies in fiscally conservative Democrats concerned about the economic slowdown.
Some other perceived needs may not even make it into Barnes’ proposed budget, which — on account of slower growth in the economy — is likely to be a little tighter than the last few years. One proposal that may be on the bubble: The Georgia Rail Passenger Authority, the Georgia Regional Transpor-tation Authority and the Department of Transportation have teamed up to ask for $46 million in both this fiscal year and the next to match federal grants to establish commuter rail service from Atlanta to Athens, and from Atlanta to Macon by 2003.
Teen driving
Talk about bipartisan cooperation, who in their right mind would stand in the way of efforts to save the lives of teenagers?
There’ll be no fireworks here. More than 20 teenagers died on suburban Atlanta roads over the last year. Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor, once considered by Republicans to be the most rabidly partisan Democrat, is working with state Sen. Phil Gringrey, R-Marietta, to come up with a proposal that would make driving tests more rigorous and re-institute driver education courses in public schools. The legal driving age would remain 16.
Keeping the low driving age is a concession to rural lawmakers. But it remains unclear whether the Taylor-Gringrey proposal would address the root of the problem: Most teens have to drive to get anywhere, and parents simply don’t have time to chauffeur them around.
Natural gas
This year’s sleeper issue may be natural gas deregulation. The roar of consumer complaints about billing problems that sprung up as residential gas service was deregulated over the last year was too loud for the Public Service Commission to absorb by itself. Legislators got wind up of it.
The question is whether it would be better for consumers if the gas market was re-regulated, or de-regulated even more.
Legislators are sure to cast blame for the problems toward the mainly Republican PSC, even as they prescribe the solutions themselves. Ironically, some Democrats are most eager to take deregulation a step further, while Republicans — usually the Legislature’s free-market enthusiasts — are talking about reining in the market.
MARTA
Facing another year of operating in the red and severe criticism for increasing its fares, MARTA officials are left with two choices: mugging their own passengers or getting much-needed help from the state. Fat chance for either.
Name-calling between Fulton County Chairman Mike Kenn and Gov. Barnes has all but stopped the dream of state funding for MARTA in its tracks. That means Atlanta and Dallas are likely to remain the two only cities with subway systems that don’t get a penny from the state.
Outpatient surgery
CL reported before the close of last year’s session that at least three Georgians have died at the hands of outpatient plastic surgeons.
Surgery clinics in physician’s offices are unregulated in Georgia, and records of complaints against physicians are difficult for the public to access.
The Medical Association of Georgia took up the issue after last year’s session, but has become immersed in its own internal sniping between hospital-based surgeons and surgeons who operate out of their own offices.
michael.wall@creativeloafing.com