by BRAD ROLLINS
In a once-a-decade political spectacle starring self-preservation, Hays County commissioners are in the early stages of redrawing precinct lines that determine who represents whom in county government.
In the last decade, Hays County’s population has grown by more than 60 percent, from 97,589 to 157,107. Much of that infusion has been clustered around Kyle and Buda in the northeastern portion of the county currently encompassed primarily by Precinct 2. With more than a third of the county’s population, Precinct 2 will have to shed 12,000 to 14,000 people in redistricting. Much of the jockeying centers around who gets moved to Precinct 4, with a Dripping Springs center of gravity, or Precinct 1, which consists primarily of eastern San Marcos.
The county’s redistricting committee, chaired by Pct. 3 Commissioner Will Conley and Pct. 1 Commissioner Debbie Gonzales Ingalsbe, produced four maps which generally seek to reduce Precinct 2’s population by extending Ingalsbe’s territory as far north as Rohde Road between Kyle and Buda and carving out various subdivisions from the western end including Hometown Kyle and, farther north, Hays Country Oaks and Huntington Estates. But Pct. 2 Commissioner Mark Jones wants to keep friendly subdivisions west of FM 1626 and, on Tuesday, presented a map that allows him to do that by giving Steeplechase and Amberwood to Ingalsbe and Hometown Kyle to Precinct 4 Commissioner Ray Whisenant, who submitted his own map. (Earlier maps also moved Mountain City and Meadow Woods to Precinct 4 but that configuration has not surfaced in any of the current options.)
Meanwhile, a coterie of activists lead by former State Rep. Bob Barton, who is the majority owner and publisher emeritus of the Hays Free Press, has been agitating for weeks for a radical transformation of the county’s precincts that would group Wimberley and Dripping Springs together in a western precinct and divide the remaining three seats between the population centers in San Marcos, Kyle and Buda. (That map would leave Conley and Whisenant fighting for the same seat and so presumably starts out with two votes against it.)
“Water is wet. The sky is blue. And interests will have opinions about redistricting,” Conley said at commissioners court on Tuesday without any discernible sign that he appreciated the irony. “The interests could be in the form of neighborhoods. The interests could be in the form of political parties and they could be in the form of people who just like to stir things up in the county.”
The redistricting process began spilling out into the open June 30 when Conley asked Lila Knight and Mark LeMense, both Kyle political activists, to leave a redistricting committee meeting. At the committee’s third and final meeting – held in an out-of-the-way conference room at the county’s transportation department building on Yarrington Road in Kyle – LeMense again attempted to attend and was asked to leave.
By last weekend, redistricting committee member Sandra Tenorio, appointed as the Democratic counterweight to GOP chair Bud Wymore, was denouncing the process in an email to other Democratic Party leaders that got leaked to political blogs. Tenorio wrote, “I did my best to raise the issues that are important to us all – communities of interest, minority representation and, especially, a sense of fairness. ... Transparency, on the other hand, was sorely missing in this process and I completely disagree with the policy of closing the meetings to the public.”
At Tuesday’s commissioners court session, Kyle Mayor Lucy Johnson joined the chorus of disapproval, saying, “I would also like to stand with the residents of Hometown Kyle today and request that you reconsider any map that would place Hometown or any other neighborhood in Kyle within Precinct 4. Besides depriving residents of access to the far more convenient Kyle Precinct 2 offices, residents feel very little in common with the needs and lifestyles of residents in northwest Hays County where the bulk of Precinct 4 is located. Geographically or demographically, Dripping Springs has little in common with Hometown Kyle and it seems inappropriate to me to include them in the precinct.”
Whatever the outcome of redistricting, it will certainly impact Kyle or Buda or both. Said Conley, “By definition, by pure mathematics, Precinct 2 will have to change. I know Mr. Jones would like to have everybody that he currently has in Precinct 2 but that’s just not feasible or possible.”
