The redistricting process for New York is as divisive a topic as any in politics.
Fostering discussion of the issue, the League of Women Voters and the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government held a forum last month in Albany - a forum featuring Assemblyman Bill Parment, D-North Harmony.
The panel debate featured several others, including Assemblyman Daniel Burling, R-Warsaw; Blair Horner, New York Public Interest Research Group legislative director; Jeffrey Wice, counsel to Sen. Martin Malave Dilan, D-Brooklyn; and Gerald Benjamin, a political science professor who also serves as director of the SUNY New Paltz Center for Regional Research Education and Outreach.
"We had a good discussion of the issues and problems involved with it," Parment said of the 10-year redistricting process, which is drawing near.
According to Parment, Benjamin was advocating the creation of an independent panel to do the redistricting - a panel which would would be in direct contraposition to the legislature doing the redistricting. Burling agreed with the position while Parment and Wice opposed it.
"It's an interesting topic," Parment said. "Obviously, the legislature is suspect because we have an interest in the outcome, and so people like the League of Women Voters and others who, I guess, would probably not object to being called good government groups, favor a panel being independent from the legislature.
"Quite often they voice it as non-partisan," Parment continued. "For those of us who have been involved, I think we're not convinced that it would ever be independent or non-partisan, for one, because it is very difficult to find people who are knowledgeable about the topic who are in fact dispassionate about it or have no interest in the outcome."
Parment's position is that legislators have a constitutional responsibility under the federal constitution to do the congressional redistricting.
"There is little to now way that you can take the legislature out of it," Parment said. "Now, that's not to say the legislative bodies are without interest or not partisan - they are. But my counter is that the people who know the most about their communities and have been chosen by their communities to represent them are the same ones that are best positioned to create a plan for redistricting that reflects community interests and concerns. If we didn't fight four our communities in redistricting, we would be held in very low esteem, I think, by the public."
Parment said there have been some cases where redistricting recommended by independent panels has been rejected by the public because the new districting didn't meet with the communities.
"Again, rhetorically, who is better to reflect what the community wants than the people who have been chosen to represent it," Parment questioned. "It seems to me that you get a much stronger community input through the representatives."
