By John Lyon
Arkansas News Bureau
LITTLE ROCK — Attorney General Dustin McDaniel on Friday submitted a proposal for redrawing state Senate districts that varies only slightly from a proposal submitted two days earlier by Gov. Mike Beebe.
McDaniel spokesman Aaron Sadler said McDaniel’s office has been in close contact with the governor’s office through the drafting process and will continue to be as the process continues. McDaniel’s proposed House map is expected to be ready by Tuesday, he said.
“There are some minor differences between the governor’s map and the attorney general’s map,” Sadler said. “For instance, I believe Garland County and Craighead County, there may be a few differences, but they’re minor. We don’t expect any contentious issues.”
McDaniel’s map, like Beebe’s, adds a new district in growing Northwest Arkansas and eliminates a district in the southeast corner of the state, where the 2010 U.S. Census shows population has declined over the past decade.
“We tried to adhere to legally sound redistricting principles when preparing this map for consideration,” Sadler said. “Those include principles like preservation of communities of interest and political subdivisions and compactness.”
The state Board of Apportionment’s staff and the office of Secretary of State Mark Martin, who serves on the three-person board with McDaniel and Beebe, have released several proposed maps. McDaniel and Beebe, the two Democrats on the board, have been criticized by the state Republican Party for not releasing any maps until this week. Martin is a Republican.
All state Senate and House maps are expected to be made available to the public by Tuesday. The board is expected to adopt new House and Senate maps on July 29.
The board is charged with redrawing the state’s 100 House districts and 35 Senate districts every 10 years in accordance with census data. Ideally, each House district should contain 29,159 people and each Senate district should contain 83,312 people. Variance should not be more than 10 percent between districts.
State Republican Party spokeswoman Katherine Vasilos said Friday the party was still reviewing both Beebe’s and McDaniel’s maps and was not prepared to comment on them.
