FORT SMITH -- Mayor George McGill asked the state to try its best not to disrupt the Fort Smith legislative delegation, telling staff of the state Board of Apportionment the existing delegation is both diverse and effective.
The state Board of Apportionment will try to draw new legislative districts as close to equal in population as possible, staff said at a public hearing Tuesday at the Smith-Pendergraft Campus Center at the University of Arkansas, Fort Smith. Equal districts will mean 100 state House districts with about 30,000 residents each. The state's 35 Senate districts will have about 85,000 each.
Protecting incumbents is a factor in redistricting decisions, board coordinator Betty Dickey told McGill. "The people elected them," she said. The board will avoid drawing two sitting legislators into the same district and having them run against each other, she said, but no promises can be made this early in the process.
The apportionment board's job is to redraw legislative districts every 10 years, using federal census data to ensure each district has roughly the same population. The board consists of the governor, the attorney general and the secretary of state. Dickey is a former Arkansas Supreme Court chief justice appointed by the board. She presided over Tuesday's meeting, one of a series of public hearings around the state to hear resident's requests and to answer questions.
McGill also took the opportunity to ask that Fort Smith remain in the 3rd Congressional District, although the state Legislature will draw those boundaries. Fort Smith is part of the fast-growing Northwest Arkansas region, shares many of the same issues and wants unified representation, he said.
Mireya Reith of Arkansas United, an immigrants rights group, asked the board to render more of its information in Spanish and other languages to accommodate the state's non-English-speaking residents in the process. Shelby Johnson, board staff member and state Geographic Information Officer, said the latest census data shows a 70,000-person increase in the state's Hispanic population since the last census. The staff is working on getting out information in Spanish but he could not give Reith a estimated date.
The census shows the number of people in Benton County's legislative districts has grown even more lopsided than originally estimated by the staff, Johnson said. For instance, the ideal House district size is a little more than 30,000, but House District 90 has 43,865 residents and House District 93 has 43,653 and District 91 has 43,643. All three are in Benton County. Those are also the top three overstuffed House districts in the state, according to these latest figures.
The board will not make districts in high-growth areas smaller now because equal representation after the census is required by the state constitution, board staff said in Tuesday's meeting. State Rep. Denise Garner, D-Fayetteville, asked if that was an option. It is not, staff told her. Equity and legal requirements for equal representation preclude such adjustments, Dickey said.
Legislative district boundaries get redrawn after each U.S. census. The census takes place every 10 years. Census Bureau estimates show that Northwest Arkansas gained the most population while population declined in most other areas of the state outside of the areas surrounding Little Rock and Jonesboro. So, the state's northwest will gain seats while other parts of the state lose some seats or hold steady.
Drawing district boundaries requires detailed census data and maps showing where people live. The difficulties of census-taking during the pandemic, along with court battles over attempts to include citizenship status on census questions held up the tally for months.
Fayetteville surpassed Fort Smith as Arkansas' second-largest city after Little Rock, recently released census figures show. The census tallied Fort Smith's population at 89,142 and Fayetteville's at 93,949.
Still, Fort Smith's population grew by almost 3,000 since the last census. Jarred Rego, a member of the Fort Smith Board of Directors, asked at the hearing how it was possible for Fort Smith to grow like that and yet the population of Sebastian County overall has grown by only 2,000. Johnson answered that the city grew while the surrounding rural area of the county declined at a faster rate -- a pattern of rural population decline and urban growth that took place in much of the state overall.