by JENNIFER BIUNDO
A proposed congressional redistricting map carves up Hays County like a Thanksgiving turkey, dividing the county into three separate districts that slice through city limits and community ties.
Openly designed by the GOP majority in the Texas House and Senate to knock long-term Democrat U.S. Congressman Lloyd Doggett out of office, the proposed map puts blue Travis County into five separate districts, four of which are engineered for Republican victory. Hays County, it would seem, represents collateral damage.
In a statement released Tuesday, Doggett said the proposed map “does a real disservice to families across Hays County.”
“Instead of one advocate devoted to Texas State and other local interests, three crooked congressional districts will make it difficult for citizens to know who represents them,” Doggett said in a statement released Tuesday. “This is just the latest version of efforts initiated by Congressman Lamar Smith to drown the voices of Hispanics in a Tea Party sea.”
The proposal, released Tuesday by the chairs of the Texas redistricting committees, may be approved in a special legislation session this summer. Texas Republicans hold a majority in the senate and a powerful supermajority in the House of Representatives.
The new map ignores the lines of neighborhoods, voting precincts, communities and cities. In Buda, residents of the Bonita Vista subdivision just south of downtown will be represented by District 35, a bizarrely shaped slice of Texas that starts in northeast Travis County, and follows the interstate south through slivers of Hays, Caldwell, Guadalupe and Comal counties, jutting out wherever possible to grab Hispanic neighborhoods, before wrapping around to take in the southern half of San Antonio.
Though their children attend the same elementary school and they vote at the same polling place, residents of downtown Buda will be shuffled into District 21, a GOP safe seat for long-term incumbent Lamar Smith that includes all of Real, Bandera, Kerr, Gillespie, Kendall and Blanco counties, and a portion of Comal County. Meanwhile, skinny legs stretch north and south. A thin strip of Hays County appears to serve as a bridge to Travis County, where District 21 pulls in the died-in-the-wool Democrat wing neighborhoods of south and Central Austin, including the South Congress area and Austin City Hall, apparently diluting the Democratic voters in several hundred square miles of Republican territory. To the south, it grabs the northern San Antonio suburbs such as Alamo Heights.
Most Kyle residents will be represented by the heavily Democrat and Hispanic District 35. But areas west of FM 2770, including Mountain City and Hays High School, will be shuffled into District 21, meaning children in Plum Creek will attend elementary school in one congressional district and head across the street to high school in another district.
San Marcos sees a similar split right through the middle of the historic downtown, with the western part of the city falling into District 21 and the eastern portion going to 35. Unlike the recently released map for the state senate, the congressional redistricting ignores even the lines of voter precincts.
Residents of the western half of the county will remain in Doggett’s 25th district, which has been reengineered beyond recognition into GOP territory. The new district starts just south of Fort Worth in Johnson County, stretching south through Navarro, Hill, Bosque, Hamilton, Coryell, Mills, Brown, Lampasas, San Saba and Burnett counties, then pulling in the wealthy western half of Travis and Hays counties, including Wimberley and Dripping Springs. More than 55 percent of the newly created District 25 would have supported GOP Governor Rick Perry in the 2010 election, compared to just 41 percent in the current version.
Since the early 1990s, Hays County has been tossed around seemingly in afterthought from district to district, often occupying the most remote fringe of a congressional base centered hundreds of miles away.
Since a 2006 judge’s ruling that overturned Tom Craddick’s 2003 GOP redistricting coup, Doggett has represented Hays County in the 25th District, anchored in central Texas. Between 2003 and 2006, Hays County looked to two Congressmen, with Lamar Smith, a Republican, representing the western half of the county under the District 21 flag and Henry Cuellar, a Democrat, representing the eastern portion of the county in District 28, anchored in San Antonio.
Prior to the 2003 changes, Hays County was in Ron Paul’s 14th District, which reached east from Hays County to the Gulf Coast at Brazoria, a Houston suburb.
But for about 75 years before a 1992 redistricting, Hays County was part of the 10th District, centered around Travis County, that was represented by legendary politicians like Lyndon Johnson and Jake Pickle.
