Horry County leaders tweak voting district maps in response to public concerns
Horry County leaders charged with drawing the local voting district maps had a message for residents on Wednesday: We’re listening to you.
The committee working to redraw the district maps — required by law once every 10 years after the U.S. Census count is complete — announced Wednesday that they had tweaked the lines on the map in response to concerns raised by residents at a public hearing last month.
At that public hearing, some residents criticized the maps for breaking up a predominantly Black neighborhood in Myrtle Beach among multiple districts. And Carolina Forest residents criticized the committee for putting the entire area in one district, rather than having multiple council members represent it as it is now.
And other residents who attended the public hearing complained that the committee was soliciting public input in the middle of the afternoon, when many people are working.
In response to those concerns, committee members said Wednesday, they agreed to adjust the maps and set another public hearing for early January. The committee is tasked with redrawing the district lines for county council and school board elections, and must complete its work ahead of the candidate filing deadline for the 2022 elections in March. At this point, the committee is on pace to finish its work by February.
The public hearing in January will be held Jan. 5 at 6 p.m. in County Council Chambers in Conway, located on the second floor of the county’s Government and Justice Center.
“I think it’s important for the public to know that this committee takes very, very seriously the comments that we have received throughout this process, the ones that have been made in public and the ones that have been emailed to us,” County Council member Tyler Servant, who chairs the redistricting committee, said at Wednesday’s meeting. “We’ve taken that into account. We’ve made serious changes to these maps to address all of those concerns that we’ve received to date.”
YOU CAN VIEW AN INTERACTIVE VERSION OF THE PROPOSED MAP HERE.
According to a new draft of the redistricting map published Wednesday, Myrtle Beach’s Racepath neighborhood, which is predominantly Black, is now entirely within District Two, represented by County Council member Bill Howard and Board of Education member Sherrie Todd.
The Carolina Forest district was changed to remove some neighborhoods on the outskirts of Conway, which had drawn concern from residents, though only one person — County Council member Dennis DiSabato and Board of Education member Tracy Winters — will continue to represent the area for each political body.
“The Carolina Forest issue was addressed in a number of ways, primarily because all of those districts had to move,” explained Horry County IT/GIS Director Tim Oliver, who assists with the technical aspects of redistricting. “(Districts) two, three, four and ten were adjusted because of the population shift.”
Oliver and other county leaders explained that changing district maps can be a complicated process because each district, by law, has to have a similar number of people, in Horry County’s case, around 32,000. That means adjusting one district necessitates changes to other districts. Additionally, county leaders said, the smallest unit of measurement when drawing district maps is what’s called a Census Block, and the populations of Census Blocks often vary widely. Redistricting laws say map makers cannot break up or change Census Blocks, county leaders said.
“When you move one line you’ve got to move another, and another and another,” County attorney Arrigo Carotti said. “I’ve heard it described as a wave effect. Once you touch the map in one area, it has ripples all across the county.”
In addition to announcing district changes on Wednesday, Carotti and other committee members also said they had made an effort to share copies of the draft maps and other information about redistricting with residents who don’t have easy internet access. They printed off 1,500 fliers containing information the committee has discussed and plan to distribute those at churches and among members of the community.
“There was a concern raised that a lot of this information was made available electronically and that there were some members of our community that did not have access to the internet,” Carotti said. “So, in light of that, what our plan is, we have made fliers.”
