The contentious eleventh hour redistricting changes that could shape Prince George’s County

The redistricting process of revamping legislative district lines, occurring after the decennial census, can be slow, and sometimes tedious. Sometimes. But the proceedings over the last few months in Prince George’s County were anything boring. Eleventh-hour redistricting plans, accusations of gerrymandering. And while the drama may be real, so are the potential consequences for Prince George’s residents.

Prince George’s County redistricting process was passed from the Redistricting Commission to the County Council

Redistricting is the process of redrawing legislative district lines, following the national census. It takes place every 10 years, at the federal, state, and local level, and each jurisdiction has its own unique rules and processes. The way that district lines are drawn can determine who is eligible to run for office, what political party they are, whether certain neighborhoods or community interests will be adequately represented, and whether some Black, Latinx, and low-income communities will have a fair opportunity to elect representatives of their choice.

In Prince George’s County, the process began with a redistricting commission that held a series of public meetings in the spring and summer before releasing a formal report to the county council on September 1. The report is non-binding and the council can choose to overrule it by passing their own redistricting map, but if they do not take action by November 30, the districts proposed by the redistricting commission automatically become law.

As Bradley Heard and I discussed when the commission’s report came out, the district map proposed by the redistricting commission is a least-change map, keeping the districts very close to their current shapes while making minor changes to account for differences in population growth between districts. The commission’s decision to create a least-change map was a result of the limited time after 2020 Census data came out in late August and the fact that, during the previous redistricting cycle in 2011, the county council overruled the 2011 redistricting commission’s proposal for a major redesign of districts to avoid splitting Census-designated places and substituted a least-change map.

On September 28, the council held a public hearing on the commission’s report. The redistricting commission’s consultant presented the proposal and noted that two of the three changes they had made were constitutionally required and that the third, moving part of Glenn Dale from District 3 to District 4, had received some negative feedback from residents, but that there had been public comment asking for greater equality in population between districts, which moving Glenn Dale would achieve. And then the redistricting process took a turn.

The County Council voted to introduce a redistricting plan submitted by District 6 Councilmember Derrick Davis after a contentious 6-4 vote

On October 14, the council met as a committee of the whole for a work session to consider legislation to be introduced at their October 19 meeting . Since legislation has to be introduced at a council meeting a month before it can be finally voted on, this was effectively the last opportunity for the council to propose alternative redistricting maps for the council’s staff to draft as bills for consideration in time to be passed before the November 30 deadline.

The council work session on the 14th became very contentious after Councilmember Derrick Davis introduced a proposed alternative redistricting map that he had worked on in collaboration with several council members but which others, including Jolene Ivey (District 5), said they had not seen or been informed of before the meeting.

Davis said in that meeting that the main motivation behind his map was to avoid splitting municipalities — College Park was split between Districts 1 and 3 in the 2011 redistricting at the request of the city council and residents of the northern portion of the city — and to ensure that District 2 — which has a 49.5% Latino voting-age population in the commission’s proposal — would have a majority (51%) Latino voting-age population.

Davis’s proposal achieves a Latino majority in District 2 by transferring Edmonston from District 5 to District 2, separating it from the neighboring Port Towns communities of Bladensburg, Cottage City, and Colmar Manor.

It was a change that District 5’s councilmember, Jolene Ivey objected strenuously to, saying “There seems to be a plan to shove this map through that many of us have not seen until we got started today” and “It seems to me that at the time you’re trying to keep municipalities together, you’re tearing apart the Port Towns.”

In turn, the proposal moves the more populous southern portion of College Park — including the University of Maryland campus — from District 3 to District 1, moves the city of Greenbelt from District 4 to District 3, and moves nearly 21,000 residents of the Laurel area to District 4, which is centered in Bowie.

This cycle of movements between Districts 1, 3, and 4 was met with vehement criticism from council members Tom Dernoga (District 1) and Dannielle Glaros (District 3). Dernoga argued that it would harm residents of southern Laurel and eastern Beltsville to be represented by a councilmember from a district “twenty minutes away” on the far side of the Patuxent wildlife refuge instead of sharing representation with their neighbors on the west side of US-1.

Glaros presented an alternative that kept College Park split, with its southern portion in District 3, and argued that it would harm economic development and urban planning along the Purple Line corridor to split it into additional districts.

The council rejected Glaros and Ivey’s amendments to Davis’s plan with Durnoga, Glaros, Ivey, and District 8 councilwoman Monique Anderson-Walker supporting them and the other six council members present (District 7 council member Rodney C. Streeter was absent recovering from surgery) opposing.

The six council members who had opposed the amendments then quickly moved to adopt the Davis plan without amendments; it was formally drafted as a bill by staff and introduced at the council meeting on October 19.

Council members, city governments, and residents of northern Prince George’s County have criticized the Davis plan

To say the council’s meeting didn’t go over well is an understatement. Councilmember Jolene Ivey said “I feel like I’m in Trump County” after Davis moved to close debate while she was waiting to be called on to introduce her motions.

In an interview with the local NBC affiliate, Councilmember Glaros said she believed that “political concerns” had motivated Davis’s plan and the non-transparent manner in which it was pushed through. Because council members must be residents of their districts for a year before the primary election in June 2022, candidates who live in the areas that moved between districts will be ineligible to run for election in the districts they have already started campaigning in.

The NBC report also quoted former councilman Eric Olson, who has been campaigning to replace Glaros, who has reached her term limit and cannot run again, in District 3 as saying that he would fight the proposed changes, which would make him ineligible to seek election in the district.

Accusations that the plan was an attempt to gerrymander certain potential 2022 council candidates out of their districts were bolstered by Maryland Matters’ report that the plan also removes potential primary challengers to the District 7 and District 9 incumbents (Rodney Streeter and Sydney Harrison, both of whom are eligible for reelection) from their districts.

Progressive activist Tamara Brown, who lost the District 9 Democratic primary by only 55 votes in 2018, described the Davis redistricting proposal which would remove her from District 9 as “political gerrymandering” in a public Facebook post and called on her supporters to voice their opposition.

Labor advocate Krystal Oriadha, who lost the District 7 Democratic primary by just 31 votes in 2018 had intended to run for the seat again in 2022. She posted a letter to her supporters on Twitter, criticizing the council’s move, and told FOX 5 DC that she would not be willing to run against the District 5 incumbent, Jolene Ivey, if the council’s proposal passes, as she “wouldn’t just run against another council member if I thought they were doing a good job representing their constituents.”

A number of municipal governments in northern Prince George’s County have opposed the plan as well, with both College Park and Riverdale Park holding emergency city council meetings on Monday, October 18, at which both cities voted unanimously to oppose the redistricting plans.

By Monday afternoon, roughly 85 county residents held a rally opposing the Davis plan in front of College Park City Hall, where the mayors of College Park, Landover Park, and New Carrollton spoke in opposition to the redistricting plan.

At the County Council meeting where the Davis plan was formally introduced, it was amended by Councilmember Mel Franklin without resolving most of the complaints

When the Davis bill (now in the form of a resolution for technical reasons) was formally introduced at the county council meeting on Tuesday, October 19, one of its supporters, at-large council member Mel Franklin introduced an amendment making four substantial changes to the proposal:

• Most of the District 1 neighborhoods in South Laurel and Beltsville that had been moved to District 4 are restored to District 1.
• The populated portions of the City of Greenbelt are restored to District 4.
• The entirety of northern Adelphi is moved to District 2, as in the original commission plan.
• College Park is now divided, with the main portion of the University of Maryland campus, west of Baltimore Avenue in District 3, but a half-mile-wide finger of District 1 extends three miles south from the Beltway between Baltimore Avenue and the Green Line. This finger becomes only two blocks wide as it runs along the Green Line tracks while leaving much of Old Town College Park in District 3 before expanding to contain the entirety of the Calvert Hills, the city’s southernmost neighborhood.

The council spent nearly an hour debating this amendment, with the same divide among members as at the work session. District 8 Councilmember Monique Anderson-Walker again raised her concerns about the changes in the District 8/District 9 boundary relative to the commission plan, and pointed out that there is no substantial demographic or total population change between the two districts because of this change.

The council then immediately voted to approve Franklin’s amendment by the same 6-4 margin and the Davis-Franklin plan was officially introduced. Despite Franklin’s assertion that “Those who think you have not had your say in the process: you have,” the Franklin-Davis plan cannot be amended further after the public hearing on the resolution, which will occur on November 16.

The only options before the council on November 16 will be to accept or reject the plan, and there was no opportunity for the public — or the University and Maryland and the City of College Park, for whose benefit the Franklin amendment was supposedly made — to comment on the amendment before it was approved.

And although Franklin has described his amendment as a “compromise” plan, none of the council members opposed to the original plan or community activists appeared won over.

Davis’s original plan failed to unit communities by its own standards

The main motivation for Davis’s redistricting plan, according to its supporters, is to unite communities by reuniting municipalities split into multiple districts. However, only one municipality, the City of College Park, was substantially divided between districts in the redistricting commission’s proposal, and the city government has strongly opposed the County Council’s attempt to move southern College Park into District 1.

Additionally, it is notable that a largely-commercial annexation of Landover Park along Annapolis Road, which is otherwise in District 3, is in District 5 under the 2011 districts, and remains so in the commission’s proposal and in both the Davis and Franklin-Davis plans. If the supporters of these plans were actually concerned with uniting municipalities, they could easily have added this area to District 3 without any significant change in the districts’ populations and demographics.

Meanwhile, Davis’s proposal divided many unincorporated communities — particularly important in a county and region where much of the population lives in unincorporated suburbs — as well as splitting apart municipalities with common interests and borders. It separates southern College Park from the District 3 communities of University Park, Riverdale Park, and Berwyn Heights, which surround it on three sides, and divides the University of Maryland (currently in District 3) between districts 1 and 3, which university officials oppose.

Perhaps most egregiously from a geographic standpoint, almost 21,000 residents of the unincorporated communities of South Laurel, Vansville, and Montpelier were moved out of District 1, which previously contained all of the county north of the large tracts of Federally-owned, undeveloped land that make up the USDA Beltsville Agricultural Research Center and Patuxent National Wildlife Refuge.

These residents were to be part of District 4, which encompasses all of Bowie and extends south of Central Avenue, the county’s traditional north-south dividing line, and would have been separated by six miles of undeveloped Federal land from the nearest of the other 90,000 residents of their district.

While most of South Laurel, Vansville, and Montpelier are again in District 1 in the amended Davis-Franklin plan that is now before the county council, the Franklin amendment actually makes the division of communities in the College Park area worse than under the Davis plan.

Furthermore, as District 3 Councilmember Dannielle Glaros noted during the debate on October 19, the council could have included an instruction to not split municipalities in the redistricting commission’s charge when they named the commission. This, she noted, would have allowed these issues and the necessary compromises they entail to have been resolved through a more open public process.

Instead, she argued, the decision of Davis and his supporters to redraw districts around a goal of avoiding municipality splits after the commission had produced the least-change plan the council requested from them served to prevent public input and was primarily intended to control who residents can vote for.

Franklin’s version of district lines in College Park is particularly inconsistent with the plan’s claimed goal

When Councilmember Franklin amended Davis’s plan to move most of the University of Maryland into District 3 while retaining most of the residential areas of College Park in District 1—a move that Davis described as “patently unfair to all other municipalities” while voting for it—he destroyed any plausible claim that the resulting Davis-Franklin plan keeps communities together better than, or even as well as, the redistricting commission plan.

Franklin and other council members who spoke in support of the amendment said that they were proposing it at the behest of the University of Maryland, which asked to have its College Park campus and Riverdale Park “Discovery District” not divided between Districts 1 and 3. However, the narrow finger of District 1 that Franklin’s amendment retains in College Park runs between these two areas, and includes half of the College Park Green Line and future Purple Line station.

Furthermore, it makes the situation of the Calvert Hills, Lakeland, and Berwyn neighborhoods, which are to be part of District 1, even worse, as they are now not only in a different district than municipalities that surround them on three sides but in a different district from neighboring parts of College Park and from the university that has an enormous impact on their neighborhoods.

In addition, Maxine Gross, the chair of the Lakeland Community Heritage Project, has noted that the removal of Lakeland from District 3 will interfere with the truth and reconciliation process regarding the 1975 bulldozing much of the community during an urban renewal project. The process, which began a year ago, has involved work with county officials responsible for District 3, while the neighborhood is to be moved to District 1, which is centered far north of College Park in the Beltsville and Laurel areas.

While Calvert Hills, Lakeland, and Berwyn are separated from neighboring areas by the plan currently before the council, Old Town College Park is divided in half, with a strip of District 1 along its easternmost two blocks, while the western half of the neighborhood is in District 3.

FOX 5 DC reported that, after hearing of Franklin’s amendment, College Park Mayor Patrick Wojahn said that “the new proposed map would even further break up the areas in College Park that we’re working to revitalize and hinder our efforts to make the city a key economic driver for the county and the region.”

Why the Davis-Franklin plan does not meaningfully change the status of District 2 as a majority-Latino district

While it is true that the Davis proposal does succeed in its other stated goal of giving District 2 a majority-Latino voting-age population, it does so solely under the least-meaningful of several possible ways of calculating the ethnic breakdown of the district.

If one counts the entire population of the district—what the Census does, and the count that is required to be equal between districts—District 2 is a majority-Latino district today, and has a 54.2% Latino population under the commission plan, which the council plans raise by roughly one percentage point, as seen in the table below.

% Latino Population of District 2

	Total Population	Voting-Age Population	Citizen Voting-Age Population
Redistricting Commission Plan	54.2%	49.5%	24.3%
Davis Plan	55.4%	50.7%	24.5%
Davis-Franklin Plan	55.2%	50.6%	24.7%

It is only when you consider the voting-age population without accounting for citizenship — a number that neither represents the electorate in this immigrant-heavy district nor counts the entire population — that it appears that the council’s proposed plans raise the Latino fraction of District 2 from 49.5% to 50.6% or 50.7%. However, this number can be misleading, since it includes children and non-citizens who are not eligible to vote. By the citizen voting-age population of the district, which better describes the actual electorate that a candidate for office faces, the district is only about 24.5% Latino under each of the three plans. Despite this fact, however, it is worth noting that it has consistently elected Latino council members for the past twenty years, suggesting that the lack of a majority-Latino electorate in the district is not disenfranchising the Latino community.

Gerrymandering the Prince George’s County Council is bad for democracy and the county’s efforts to improve its reputation

One thread that has run through the criticism of the council’s proposed redistricting plan since Councilmember Davis proposed it is that the plan is blatantly motivated by gerrymandering and incumbent-protection. Several councilmembers raised these concerns at the work session where it was proposed, members of the public have repeated them over the past week, and several council members brought them up again when the plan, as amended by Councilmember Franklin, was formally introduced on Tuesday, October 19.

Among other comments, District 5 Councilmember Jolene Ivey said during a vote on the proposal that “we all know this isn’t about some increase in population or density or any of the red herrings we have heard about today.” She went on to observe that “no one who saw last week’s hearing” would agree with Franklin’s claim that the process had been democratic, accused councilmembers proposing the plan of not replying to her emails to prevent her from having input, and said that the real goal of those proposing the plan is to remove any candidates that they don’t like.

Such concerns would be concerning anywhere, but they are a particular issue for Prince George’s County, which has historically had a reputation for corruption, particularly tied to the county council’s relationships withreal estate developers. County leaders have attempted to reform the county’s reputation for pay-to-play development practices, but have also made decisions, such as keeping the controversial “call-up” provision in the county’s new zoning code that tend to drive away developers despite the county’s well-established need for more jobs, better retail, and more density at its metro stations inside the Beltway.

The districts proposed by Councilmembers Davis and Franklin are bad for urbanism

As Bradley Heard and I noted in our posts on the redistricting commission’s plan, the current districts and, by extension, the commission’s least-change plan, are not ideal from an urbanist standpoint. They under-represent the densest and lowest-income portions of the county by putting some of them in districts that extend into higher-income, lower-density areas outside the Beltway.

However, the Davis-Franklin proposal is even worse by these metrics, particularly in its relocation of the densest parts of College Park into the low-density and very suburban District 1. This plan retains the commission plan’s decision to locate only four districts primarily inside the Beltway, does not substantially change the median incomes of the districts, and makes little change to the median densities of the districts other than lowering the median density of District 3.

Furthermore, the Davis-Franklin plan gerrymanders potential progressive and pro-transit, anti-highway-widening challengers Krystal Oriadha in District 7 and Tamara Brown in District 9, both of whom Greater Greater Washington endorsed in their 2018 bids for those seats, out of their districts.

Likewise, the most blatant gerrymander in the Davis-Franklin proposal, the long finger of District 1 that extends several miles south to the Calvert Hills neighborhood of College Park, seems clearly intended to remove former District 3 councilmember Eric Olson from the running to replace the GGWash-endorsed incumbent Dannielle Glaros, who is not eligible for reelection because of term limits.

Glaros is Olson’s former chief-of-staff and Olson has been an advocate for urbanist issues in his role as director of the College Park City-University Partnership, so it would be unfortunate if the county council denies voters the opportunity to even consider him for the District 3 seat.

Furthermore, as at-large Councilmember Franklin mentioned in defending his proposal to maintain Davis’s changes to the District 8 / District 9 boundary, moving the Branch Ave Metro station out of District 9 in 2011 “severed relationships” between the county government and the community around the station. Transferring part of the Purple Line corridor and the city of College Park adjacent to two Purple Line stations from District 3 to District 1 while the Purple Line is still under construction would certainly cause similar issues.

What happens now?

With the Davis-Franklin redistricting proposal formally introduced before the county council on October 19, it can no longer be amended. The council will hold a public hearing on the resolution on November 16, followed immediately by a vote.

If the resolution passes, it will become law. If not, the redistricting commission’s original least-change proposal will become law on November 30.

While the Davis-Franklin proposal currently appears to have the support of the majority of the council, it is possible that enough letters and calls from constituents, and hearing sufficient objections to the bill at the public hearing could make a difference.

Members of the public can register to speak at the public hearing by signing up on the county public hearing portal and then submitting comments on CR-123-2021. The deadline to do so is 3 pm on Monday, November 15, the day before the hearing.