This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.

Politics & Government

Tame Town Hall Pits Carnahan Against Legislature's Redistricting Plan

The St. Louis congressman's meeting was tame compared to a 2009 meeting that ended in six arrests. He'd lose his district in the redistricting proposal before the governor now.

U.S. Rep. Russ Carnahan expected the Republican-run Missouri Legislature to create bad redistricting maps, which he says it did.

The St. Louis Democrat expects Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon to veto the most recent map, which he hasn’t—yet. Rolla native Carnahan expects to run for Congress again in 2013. He just didn’t say from what district, as the squabble over redrawing congressional boundaries continues to unfold.

This is happening thanks to slower Missouri population growth in the 2010 census relative to other states. The state will lose a seat in the 435-member U.S. House of Representatives, dropping from nine to eight congressional districts by 2013. Carnahan’s district, the third district, would disappear, swallowed up by the remaining districts, which would each grow by about 100,000 people.

Find out what's happening in Hazelwoodwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Carnahan's third district includes south St. Louis, South County, Jefferson County Webster Groves, Clayton, Richmond Heights, University City and Maplewood.

Carnahan spoke about redistricting and a new compromise plan to a crowd of approximately 130 people Thursday night at a town hall meeting at the St. Louis Senior Center, 5602 Arsenal, St. Louis.

Find out what's happening in Hazelwoodwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

The audience was less interested in redistricting during the 90-minute meeting, but the friendly crowd asked about topics ranging from Medicare and payday loans to gasoline price relief and a flat tax proposal.

It was a stark contrast to a town hall meeting he hosted in 2009 in South St. Louis County that was attended by more than 1,000 Tea Party members and erupted into confrontations and six arrests.

Carnahan briefly broached the topic of redistricting before accepting audience-supplied questions that he randomly pulled from a glass bowl.

Clearly he doesn’t like the compromised plan just sent to the governor and did not want to talk at length about it either.

“Our Republican legislature has laid out a plan to draw six Republican majority districts out of eight, and leave only two for Democrats,” he said.

“Missouri is famous for being a 50-50 state, split down the middle. So it’s not really a fair division to say that 75 percent of the people in your state live in a Republican district,” Carnahan said.  “In order to draw a district like that, they had to draw some fantastic, crazy lines and they had to divide a lot of communities.”

He said there are better alternatives than splitting St. Charles County in half and Jefferson County into three districts.

"If you draw a ring around the greater St. Louis area, you’ll find you have exactly the population (needed) for three whole seats,” he said.

And that’s what Carnahan wants: three Congressional districts to represent the St. Louis region.

Making reference to his father, the late Gov. Mel Carnahan, he said, “if you give people the facts, you’re going to get a good result.”

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

The views expressed in this post are the author's own. Want to post on Patch?

More from Hazelwood