An end to gerrymandering?
-
- April
- 11
 Just how committed is Gov. Eliot Spitzer to reform New York politics? Good-government groups think they’ll find out this spring.
  Authorization for the Legislative Reapportionment Task Force, the body that has done the technical gerrymandering work on Senate and Assembly districts for decades, expires at the end of June.
  Governors have routinely agreed to extend authorization for the panel, although it has always been unclear what it does between reapportionments, which happen only once every 10 years, after the federal census. The next headcount is set for 2010.
  This year, Spitzer is being urged not to approve extending the commission unless the Legislature agrees to changes to make the districts, now drawn to maximize the number of Republicans in the Senate and Democrats in the Assembly, more rational.
 “If that doesn’t happen, the governor should veto reauthorization of the task force,’’ Russ Haven of the New York Public Interest Research Group said today.
  Of course, the biggest hurdle is the Senate, where Republicans have held onto power for decades despite a growing majority of Democrats in part by carefully crafting districts in their favor.
Stay tuned.
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, April 11th, 2007 at 3:06 pm by Jay Gallagher.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Print This Post
| 
Email This Post
Jay Gallagher has covered Albany for Gannett News Service since 1984 and has been Albany Bureau chief since 1989. He`s a native of the Boston area and likes to point out that in this millennium, the score is Red Sox 1 championship, the Yankees 0. 
Cara Matthews has been a statehouse correspondent in the Albany Bureau since August 2005. Prior to that, she covered Putnam County government and politics at The Journal News for nearly five years. Before that, she worked at newspapers in Connecticut and covered the state Legislature for one of them. 
