Spotsy Roundup

Update: I accidentally left off a sentence from the Committee of 500′s position.

It is: However, if the county is unable to reasonably achieve a minority-influence district with seven districts, C500 would likely encourage the county to consider an increase in the number of districts.

Hey! Hope you’ve had a nice holiday. I took a few days off to be with my children while they’re out of school. So, coming back today, I wanted to mention a few things:

In today’s paper, Chris Folger and Beth Malmquist have an op-ed about the county’s trailways plan. The commentary previews a Jan. 5 public hearing with the Planning Commission. The piece does end with a wrong URL for the county website, so here’s the correct one: www.spotsylvania.va.us.

The Tidewater Trail roadwork has been rescheduled. It is now expected, weather permitted, to be Jan. 4 and 5, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Road work will be between the intersections of Josephs Mill Drive and Bend Farm Road. Traffic will probably be backed up on State Route 2, so you may want to find an alternate route.

Also, we’re coming up to New Year’s, so here are the government closings:

Government offices: Closed all day on Friday, Dec. 31

All County convenience sites and the Livingston Landfill:

Closed all day on Saturday, Jan. 1

Finally, in a previous blog post, I wrote about special interests groups and their views on redistricting. At the time, the Committee of 500 had not adopted a position. But they since have:

The Committee of 500 believes that the 2011 redistricting plan should ideally include seven supervisorial districts, as opposed to the nine-district solution other groups have suggested. We think there is little or no benefit to smaller districts, and that the disadvantages outweigh the advantages. Smaller districts would not necessarily lead to better constituent-supervisor communication because a constituent should be able to reach his or her supervisor just as easily in a district of 17,000 (the approximate population with seven districts) as 13,000 (the approximate population with nine districts).  Other Virginia counties operate successfully with seven or even five districts, and most have district populations greater than 17,000.  Adding districts would cost the county money and would have a detrimental effect on operations, because there would be nine “bosses” instead of seven.  Finally, we believe that each of the four identifiable communities of interest (minority, rural, urban, and rural/urban mix) must have fair representation, and that this will hopefully be achievable keeping seven districts.

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