38th District would take in biggest portion of Rowan

Sen. Stan Bingham, R-Davidson, looks at the proposed changes in N.C. Senate districts and figures he has two choices.

Run for re-election and live with it, or don’t run at all.

Bingham plans to be a candidate again.

“The good point is, I get to make a lot more friends,” Bingham says of the proposal that would add three counties and delete two others in his 38th District.

“The bad point is, all the friends that I’ve made and been able to work for — you hate to lose friendships.”

The N.C. Senate Redistricting Committee has proposed a plan that would reduce Rowan County’s number of senators from three to two.

Rowan County would continue to be part of the 23rd and 38th Senate districts, now represented by Democrat Cal Cunningham and Republican Bingham, respectively.

But it would lose Sen. Fletcher Hartsell, R-Cabarrus, whose 22nd District includes all or portions of 14 southern Rowan precincts.

Bingham, Cunningham and Hartsell all characterize the Senate plan as something they can live with, and numbers suggest that the new configurations would shore up their political positions in those districts.

“It’s very Republican,” Bingham said of the proposed boundaries for his 38th District, which already had favored GOP candidates. “There’s no doubt about it. They certainly gave me a strong Republican district.”

Here’s a general look at how the proposed changes would affect the 22nd, 23rd and 38th districts:

• Hartsell’s 22nd District, which now includes all of Cabarrus, southern Rowan County and a small portion of Stanly County, would get rid of Rowan and Stanly counties, take only about half of Cabarrus County and pick up precincts in Mecklenburg County, including northern Mecklenburg County around Davidson and, much farther south, the Mint Hill section.
• The 23rd District would continue to touch portions of Rowan, Davidson and Iredell counties. Much of the Rowan County portion would remain the same and include Salisbury, Spencer and East Spencer and the northwestern portion of the county, though it would lose the Mount Ulla precinct.

In Iredell, Cunningham’s district loses northern precincts, while picking up precincts it did not have in Statesville.

In Davidson County, the district will add Thomasville, which now belongs to the 38th.

• Bingham’s 38th District sees significant changes. It loses all of Davie County and the few precincts it had in Forsyth County.

The proposal has the district touching portions of Davidson, Rowan, Cabarrus, Stanly and Randolph counties. Among those counties, only Rowan and Davidson are in the 38th District at present.

The Cabarrus County portion would include Mount Pleasant. The district would take in much more of Rowan County than it previously had by gobbling up what used to belong to the 22nd District.

The 38th District would end up with the largest geographical portion of Rowan County. In general, the 38th District would lie south of U.S. 70 and east of Interstate 85, though portions of the 23rd creep over those lines.

Every 10 years, lawmakers redraw N.C. House and Senate lines and U.S. House District boundaries to reflect changes in population measured by the U.S. Census.

The Senate Redistricting Committee proposes a plan of 46 Senate Districts. Plans for the N.C. House and U.S. Congress have yet to be unveiled.

Sen. Brad Miller, D-Wake, co-chaired the committee. He said the plan offers equal representation while trying to comply with the Voting Rights Act and other federal regulations.

Single-member Senate districts, which Hartsell, Cunningham and Bingham now represent, would increase to a target population of 161,000 people. Federal law allows the districts to be as much as 5 percent above or below that number, meaning single-member districts will range between 152,937 and 169,035 people.

The Senate plan also would reduce the number of double-member districts from eight to four and the number of split precincts from 318 to seven. (At present, Rowan County has two precincts that are split between Senate districts: Bostian School and Salisbury’s West Ward II.)

While legislators characterize the Senate committee’s plan as a starting point, they also believe only a minor tweaking and fine-tuning will occur before a final Senate map is approved.

“For all practical purposes, the district is a done deal,” Bingham said.

Cunningham predicted that some of the changes will come in eastern North Carolina where, as of now, some incumbent senators would be forced to run against each other because of the population decline in that part of the state.

If the plan is approved, Bingham would have one of the bigger geographical districts in the Piedmont, but he’s not complaining. He likes the rural makeup and small-town flavor to the proposed 38th District.

Because of his business interests, Bingham already knows a lot of people in Randolph County, and he says driving to Stanly and Cabarrus counties from his home near Denton will be easier than traveling 60 miles to Forsyth County.

A minority member of the Redistricting Committee, Hartsell said he doesn’t like the way the plan splits counties, especially in light of the N.C. Constitution’s long-standing mandate that counties not be split. But the Senate also has to be concerned with one-man, one-vote principles, he said.

Hartsell described the plan as a function of both population and politics.

Hartsell hopes that his district can be tweaked a bit, so that it would include all of the Concord precincts and vote boxes in Midland, which would provide a more sensible link to Mint Hill in Mecklenburg County.

Cunningham believes the Senate proposal makes a bit more sense for his district.

“It’s more contiguous,” he said, adding that a guiding principle was to trade rural areas for urban ones.

Cunningham’s district would include all precincts in Statesville, Salisbury, Spencer, East Spencer, Lexington and Thomasville.

The Iredell County portion of the 23rd District has a strange shape at present, Cunningham said. The Senate plan would help reduce the district’s sprawl into northern Iredell and give Sen. John Garwood, R-Wilkes, some Republican-leaning precincts he had sought, Cunningham said.

Both the Senate and House must approve the final plan, and the federal government will review it for compliance with the Voting Rights Act. If approved, it would be in effect for the 2002 election.

Contact Mark Wineka at 704-797-4263, or e-mail him at mwineka@salisburypost.com .