White: Let's put off redistricting until the next Census

The Chronicle reports this morning that Mayor Bill White has decided to delay the addition of two City Council seats until the 2010 Census, saying none of the recent population estimates are accurate enough to trigger the potentially messy redistricting process.

The question of whether to add the new districts has been kicked around since late 2005, when people began wondering whether the flood of hurricane evacuees had pushed the city of Houston's population over 2.1 million. That's the point at which the City Charter specifies that more City Council members should be added, the result of a 1979 lawsuit to improve minority representation on the council. The latest city estimates put the population at 2,231,335, including 107,579 evacuees, but officials agreed that those numbers — which are based on changes in occupied housing units — aren't conclusive enough to make changes in the City Council. "The 10-year census figures have a presumption of correctness, and that's a hard burden to overcome," White said. "If somebody challenged our redistricting, they would prevail under federal law."

The issue with the population estimate doesn't only have to do with the overall number of people living in the city: There's also the question of exactly who lives where, data that would be essential in redrawing council districts to ensure equal populations and fair minority representation. "We don't have numbers of that detail," White said. But that shouldn't matter, according to former Councilman Carroll Robinson: "The city discriminated in the past. To remedy that past discrimination, they put together a single-member district plan with room for growth in the future," he said. "You can use the best available data, and it's not just the census."