You Austin folks won’t get to vote for Council members next November, but you will get to vote for what kind of Council members you have.
The council approved Thursday a resolution that calls for a district proposal to go before voters in the November 2012 election. That move was endorsed by the advocacy group Austinites for Geographic Representation , which hopes to put its own district proposal on the November ballot.
The city and the Austinites group disagree on the ideal number of districts. The city would like six people representing districts and the mayor and two others representing the whole city; Austinites for Geographic Representation would like 10 districts, with only the mayor representing the whole city.
Both sides had accused each other of trying to sneak their proposal onto the May ballot in hopes of pre-empting the other proposal.
[…]
Thursday’s council vote was preceded by a joint news conference in which Council Members Laura Morrison and Sheryl Cole and members of Austinites for Geographic Representation said they support the same election date.
“We’re all singing from the same hymnal page now,” Peck Young , a member of the Austinites group, said in an interview. “Now we can get back to arguing over whose plan is better.”
That’s a fine thing to argue about. There are legitimate concerns that having only six district Council seats would make it difficult to draw the districts in a way that reasonably guaranteed minority representation. I’m not a big fan of the kind of informal “gentleman’s agreement” that Austin now operates under for that purpose, but given that its track record in that regard is good, you want to be careful about how to replace it. Y’all now have a year to hash that all out. Good luck.