Putnam Redistricting Committee Looking At 3 Options For County

The Putnam County Redistricting Committee will explore three possible options to bring before the county commission.

One plan is to maintain the current 12 districts with two commissioners each. County Technical Assistance Service Consultant Ben Rodgers said that the other two options affect both county commission size and school board size.

“Seven commission districts, three commissioners per district,” Rodgers said. “Which would be 21 commissioners and that’s a reduction of three commissioners. The school board districts would have to change along that line through a private act, which can be tricky. The third plan is two do nine districts, two commissioners per district.”

Rodgers said that the private act currently states that there are six school board districts containing two county commission districts each, representing the county’s current 12 districts. He said that the 1989 act has the potential for adjustment should the commission move forward with changing the districts.

Committee Chair Bob Duncan brought up the idea to reduce the number of commissioners. He said he believes 24 commissioners were too many. That idea was met with mixed reactions.

Committee members who also served as commissioners said that an ideal situation would be an odd number of commissioners.

“We have, over the last four years or three years of this term, the good fortune of having a group of commissioners and a group of school board that generally gets along even when there are disagreements,” District 1 Commissioner Jonathan Williams said. “So county government has functioned really smoothly during this term. But some who have been around longer have seen when it has not functioned as smoothly, and where there have been even tied votes and impasses and things like that. So having odd numbers on both of those bodies, the seven and 21 plan provides minimal decrease in county commission and minimal increase in school board while getting both bodies to an odd number that will facilitate movement of legislature going forward.”

Rodgers said that changing the number of districts would affect the current deviation number the county is trying to meet. Rodgers said the end goal is to bring each district as close as possible to the current 6,655 target population.

District Nine and District 2 are the two regions that need to be addressed. According to the data, Rodgers said District 2 is over the target population by over 420 individuals, and District 9 is under by over 549 individuals. Rodgers said that the county will need to reduce its total deviation in population by about five percent.

District 9 consists of the Double Springs area, District 2, the Northeast corridor.