I didn’t realize how much city expansion and growth are academically studied until I had the opportunity to visit The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was invited to speak on April 21 to national journalists about Utah’s 2011 redistricting process.
My presentation was for the afternoon on Day Two, so I had time to listen to other speakers, including former Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, and to chat with the Institute’s leaders and several prominent journalists.
The good news for Utah is our state is a topic of land policy conversation for primarily three things. Our progressive UTA light rail system, the EnvisionUtah.org program to plan for growth, and the new City Creek mall. For EnvisionUtah and its importance, Utah will gain an additional one million residents in the next thirty years along the urban Wasatch Front, two-thirds of which will come from internal growth from large families. Utah is trying to plan for this with open source software many other cities are also interested in since projections show a fleeing to urban areas across the world over the next fifty years.
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| Lincoln Institute of Land Policy Journalists Forum |
After presenting Represent Me Utah’s side of the issue, I suggested a solution for our nation’s redistricting; one that takes partisanship, bias, human emotion, and political agendas out of the process. My idea is to define a set of prioritized quantitative parameters, including the consideration of current political boundaries, then use the same sophisticated software programs that are now used behind the scenes to dilute unwanted minority party votes, and instead use these parameters to calculate fairly and nonpolitically new compact boundaries that keep cities and counties together as much as possible.
For journalists, redistricting is last year’s news. Professor Michael McDonald of George Mason University, whom I consider our nation’s academic guru on redistricting, seemed intrigued by my presentation. However, my suggested solution may require a major change in our state and/or country’s government process. It's a good thing we have nine years to work on this.
While touring Boston and Princeton battlefields where George Washington fought the British, visiting gravestones so old names had eroded away, and viewing historic architecture from the eighteenth century, I had a thought: I don’t believe forefathers and American revolutionaries foresaw American politics today. I think they would shudder in their graves at our two-party system that veers toward political ideology rather than pragmatism, common sense and a vision of fairness and progressiveness for all people.
Why are equal rights even an issue in Utah? How can corporations be people too? Why is it okay for leaders to choose voters in redistricting? Democracy is running amuck. It’s a game where powerful political parties see how much they can stretch the intent of the Constitution for their own self-serving purposes.
Even our U.S. Supreme Court is divided into conservatives and liberals and vote based on their biased interpretation of a tool of good intent, the Constitution.
Politicians sometimes respond with “Well that’s the way our country operates.” As an entrepreneur, I can’t help but ask, “Why? Why do we just take what’s given without analysis and critical thinking? Why do we need to continue archaic and polarizing processes?”
I realize democracy is a slow moving political system, and there is great benefit to that. But why not change the way our country is redistricted? Considering reapportionment, George Washington didn’t foresee sophisticated computer systems being used to dis others politically, or didn’t see that the majority in the middle would find it extremely difficult to obtain millions and millions of dollars in funds to create an option to only two powerful party choices. We need to make this fair again.
Represent Me Utah! wants to expand the horizon and go after the root of the redistricting problem nationally. We’ll keep you posted.
