Plan Redraws House Districts in Cascade

Most of the Cascade community and their neighbors in Niskey Lake would be united in a large state House district, under a proposal released Friday by state lawmakers.

But in northern part of the Cascade community, the merging of two districts would force incumbent Democrats to run against each other to stay in office.

The new north Cascade district would result from removing the split between I-285 and I-20 residents and their neighbors toward Donald Lee Hollowell Parkway. Rep. Sheila Jones and Rep. Elly Dobbs currently represent those two areas. Under the new map, their districts would roughly be joined into a smaller area.

The draft maps are a product of the Georgia Legislative and Congressional Reapportionment Office. Once every ten years, Georgia state lawmakers must redraw district borders based on new U.S. Census numbers and population shifts. For the first time in decades, Republicans control Georgia's government and the redrawing process.

The full Georgia General Assembly is scheduled to start debate on the maps for new House and Senate districts in a special session starting Monday.

The shift that would merge the Niskey Lake are with most of Cascade would create a district that snakes a narrow trail to the northeast, ending at the Bobby Jones golf course in Buckhead.

Other proposed changes to House districts would:  

• Split Adams Park from the district held by Rep. Ralph Long (D-East Point). Adams Park would be part of another narrow district ending at Piedmont Park.
• Move the White Park area into a district that extends to downtown, then reaches to Cheshire Bridge Road in Morningside.

On the state Senate side, Cascade is virtually untouched, only slightly shifting the boundary between democrat incumbent Sens. Vincent Fort and Horacena Tate.

In the new House district that includes north Cascade, Jones, who currently represents District 44, and Dobbs, who represents District 53, would have to face off under this proposal. That would likely mean a loss of a Democratic seat in the House.

And because Dobbs is white and Jones is black, Democratic leaders say it’s doubly unfair. Black-white contests mean "some of these intown communities are going to lose their multiracial coalitions," said House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams (D-Kirkwood).

Relatively few state Legislators are of a different race than the majority of people they represent. Dobbs, who represents a majority-black district, is one of them. Abrams said the proposed change amounts to “segregation.”

The GOP denies any gerrymandering and points out that Republicans will lose several safe seats in south Georgia due to shrinking rural populations. Statewide, the GOP calculates they will have four districts that contain two incumbents’ homes.

“Each of these pairings is necessitated by the Voting Rights Act and population shifts,” House Majority Whip Ed Lindsey (R-Buckhead) said in a written statement released through the state House press office.

All maps must eventually be approved by the federal government, to make sure they do not disenfranchise minority voters under that Act.

The Legislature will also redraw U.S. House districts this summer.

Georgia will get a fourteenth U.S. Congress member. Census numbers put that seat somewhere in the heavily-GOP counties just north of metro Atlanta.

That draft map is not expected to appear until next week at the earliest.

In January 2012, the Legislature will take up city, county and board of education districts, as well as the state's utility regulators, the Public Service Commission.