The Utah Legislature adjourned their special session for two weeks without settling on congressional district boundaries. This is unfortunate. It shows that the plan which was forwarded by the redistricting committee was a bad plan. I have problems with it. Let me list a few.
1. District boundaries should not be set to protect seats are to remove a representative out of office.
2. The plan forwarded by the committee was a one issue plan...public lands. That ignores many of the other reasons we send representatives to Washington.
3. Salt Lake County has such a high percentage of Utah's population, that we can not hope to avoid splitting it. But we should not split cities. There is no reason to split a county other than Salt Lake County.
4. To meet the needs of rural Utah, most of Utah's rural counties be in just one district. The donut-hole plan comes closest to this. Utah is so urbanized that it is impossible to create a rural district.
5. Most of the liberals in the state are in northern Salt Lake County. It would be difficult to create one liberal district. No matter what you did, there were still be enough moderates and conservatives to trump the vote. Jim Matheson appears to be moderate enough to win over middle-thinking voters, but what happens when he decides not to run again? If I was a liberal, I would want the best chance to win in all four districts, not have one carved out for me. If you carve out one liberal district, the other three are bound to be so conservative that you do not have a prayer at winning them. Remember when Utah had 2 democratic congressmen?
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