Census data that will determine how the city of McAllen redraw their districts showed that the city’s District 1, 2 and 6 are over populated and residents there will have to be redistributed to the other districts.
The results of the 2020 Census showed that McAllen’s District 1 is overpopulated by about 7,332 residents which Attorney C. Robert Heath said means the city will have to redraw the maps with the goal of redistributing those residents to the other, less populated, districts.
District 2 is also overpopulated by 811 residents while District 6 is overpopulated by 650 residents, though they are only over the ideal population by 3.42% and 2.74%, respectively.
To assist with the redistricting process, the city hired Bickerstaff Heath Delgado Acosta, a law firm with offices in Austin, El Paso, Houston and McAllen.
Heath, one of the law firm’s founding members, met virtually with city commissioners during a special meeting Thursday to present an initial assessment of the city’s redistricting process.
He told the commissioners that under redistricting law, one of the principles is the idea of “one person – one vote,” which means that districts essentially have to be equal in population.
A rule of thumb to ensure that districts are approximately equal, Heath said, is that total deviation — or the difference between the actual population and the ideal population — should be less than 10%.
Currently, the entire city of McAllen has an overall deviation of 48%. District 1, alone, has a deviation of about 31% while the city’s smallest district, District 5, has a deviation of -17%.
“There are roughly 7,000 in District 1 that are going to have to come out of there and be moved,” Heath said.
He said the extra residents in Districts 1, 2, and 6 will have to be moved to District 5 which is under population by about 4,000 residents, District 3 which is under by about 2,300 residents, and District 4 which is under by about 2,400 residents.
Heath presented the commissioners with an example of what the new district maps could look like for the city which brought the overall deviation down to about 6.15% while maintaining the residences of the incumbent city commissioners in their current districts.
“All the incumbents stay in their districts and it maintains voting precincts,” Heath said.
District 1 City Commissioner Tony Aguirre Jr. said he was concerned about residents’ ability to recognize which district they belonged to, which he said wasn’t easy to do with the current map.
However, he thought the new maps should be drawn regardless of where the commissioners resided.
“We can be here today and gone tomorrow,” Aguirre said. “What’s going to stay here is going to be district lines. Whatever makes sense for the city.”
City Manager Roel “Roy” Rodriguez acknowledged that the goal of keeping each commissioner in their district complicated the process but said their first attempts at drawing up new maps would still aim to do that.
City Attorney Isaac Tawil said another sample map will be put together before their first drawing workshop which has yet to be scheduled.
The deadline for the city to complete their redistricting is three months before the next general election in May 2023.
