Editorial: School Board Reapportioning Law

What is the reason for redistricting the Rich School Board?

In order to meet the United States Statutes of “One man, one vote”, the Utah Legal Code requires periodic reapportionment of elective office regions.  In particular, the Utah Code requires local school districts that are part of a larger collective district go through this reapportionment process under a variety of circumstances.   The first requirement of reapportionment listed by the Utah Code is that it must occur at least every ten years.  Rich County has not complied with this principle of the reapportionment code, which has been in place since at least 2000.  Hence, each day this task is not completed is an additional day for which the county is not in compliance with state law.

In Rich County the process of reapportionment is to be carried out by the county legislative body, in this case the county commission.  The commission is aware of the current non-compliance and Commissioner Bill Cox is a member of a recently appointed committee created to suggest appropriate new boundaries for the 5 local school board districts.  The committee met November 19, 2014, and has scheduled its next meeting in mid-January.

 By law, the districts are to be apportioned to be equal in population, as contiguous as possible, but the key criteria for reapportionment is population.  Commissioner Cox has properly instructed the committee that population (not children or registered voters), as determined by the U.S. Constitutionally mandated census of 2010, is to be used in the process.  As an exact splitting of a county into 5 identically sized districts often is not completely consistent with the companion legal goal of contiguity, some variance from precise equality is allowed by the courts.  For a U.S. congressional reapportionment the variance from ideal permitted is not more than 1%.  For school districts such as ours the variance from ideal allowed is generally higher but if that variance from ideal in reapportionment exceeds 10%, the courts would likely overturn the proposed redistricting.

Census data available online from the U.S. Census Bureau (which at this late date cannot even be challenged), makes this task arithmetically easy and the process should be completely sterile and apart from personalities, instead it should be based solely on geography, community, and census population.  The current variance from ideal is so large (81% in one case) that the “One man-one vote” requirement is not close to attainment.  It is time for the county to promptly complete the legally required task.  Citizens do not get to choose which United States or Utah State laws to obey.  Neither, especially, should the county government.

Chris S. Coray