Fort Worth council maps a mistake

The Fort Worth City Council's approach to redistricting has been an open and deliberate process with abundant time and opportunity for public input.

But now, as the council prepares to vote Tuesday on the eight-district map drawn and refined through that long process, there is very serious reason to find fault with it.

As critics have repeatedly told the council, the new map fails to provide sufficient opportunity for the city's already large and still fast-growing Hispanic population to elect a candidate of its choice to a second council seat.

Hispanics make up 34 percent of Fort Worth's population, and by a strict apportioning of the eight council seats they would be expected to fill at least two. Yet Councilman Sal Espino has reminded the council over and over again that the city has never drawn more than one district dominated by Hispanic neighborhoods.

Much of Fort Worth's Hispanic population is spread throughout the city in diverse neighborhoods, but there is a concentrated segment on the south side that could easily be drawn into a council district of its own. The United Hispanic Council long ago presented exactly such a map that meets all the criteria set by the council when the redistricting process started last year.

The council is not required to allocate seats along racial or ethnic lines. Even if the council did so, it would be wrong to think only a Hispanic could be elected by Hispanics and serve them well. Former Councilman Jim Lane amply showed the folly of such thinking when he represented the north side from 1993 to 2005.

Nor should anyone doubt that a Hispanic resident could get elected in another part of the city and serve every resident there well.

The key word here is opportunity. Does a person who lives in the predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods of south Fort Worth have a fair opportunity to be elected to the council under the map to be considered on Tuesday?

The answer is, not sufficiently so.

Council District 9, represented since 2007 by Joel Burns, encompasses those neighborhoods. It also includes several predominantly white and significantly higher-income neighborhoods along Eighth Avenue and in the area around Texas Christian University.

Fernando Florez, representing the United Hispanic Council, has pointed out that in the 2007 runoff in which Burns defeated Hispanic candidate Juan Rangel for the District 9 seat, those wealthier neighborhoods held just 14 percent of the district's population yet delivered more than 37 percent of the votes, providing Burns with the margin he needed to win.

Traditionally, low Hispanic voter turnout is partly to blame. That's a problem that Hispanic political leaders will have to solve if they want those voters to have an impact.

Still, the problem remains: The part of town most likely to produce another Hispanic member of the council is unlikely to do so as District 9 is currently drawn.

That problem is worth solving, and this is the time for the council to do so. The solution is to move the neighborhoods west of Eighth Avenue out of District 9 and into Councilman Jungus Jordan's District 6. Burns doesn't like that idea.

Jordan has also objected. Although the people from the wealthier District 9 neighborhoods might look a lot like those who live in the more suburban-like areas of District 6, Jordan said they look at the world differently because they live in the inner city. That's worth considering but shouldn't control the decision.

Mayor Betsy Price has said she believes the council is ready to adopt the map without changing District 9. That would be a mistake, a disservice to Hispanics and a failure to properly celebrate the diversity of Fort Worth.

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