Henrico supervisors defer reapportionment vote until Thursday

Adoption of a reapportionment plan that would shift the boundaries of Henrico’s five magisterial districts will have to wait until Thursday, after the county’s board of supervisors delayed its anticipated vote Tuesday by two days.

The deferral, to a special 6:30 p.m. Thursday meeting, came at the conclusion of a two-hour presentation and public hearing about the process Tuesday night. It was prompted by an 11th-hour map submission early Tuesday morning from the Henrico NAACP and subsequent creation of an alternative map Tuesday afternoon by Henrico Planning Department officials that sought to incorporate some of the NAACP’s suggestions.

Supervisors Frank Thornton (Fairfield District), Tyrone Nelson (Varina) and Tommy Branin (Three Chopt) requested more time to consider the proposals, and Pat O’Bannon (Tuckahoe) and Board Chairman Dan Schmitt (Brookland) acquiesced. At its Thursday meeting, the board also will vote to approve changes to a handful of voting precincts that will be impacted by the new district boundaries.

Reapportionment – the process by which the population of the county is divided as evenly as possible among its magisterial districts while incorporating a series of related objectives – is required by state law every decade to reflect updated population numbers from the U.S. Census.

Henrico’s proposal, compiled by county planners, would shift the boundaries of the two easternmost districts – Varina and Fairfield – west to allow each to pick up more residents, while shrinking the boundaries of the Three Chopt District and making minor adjustments to Brookland and Tuckahoe. (Varina and Fairfield each are more than 4,300 residents below the “ideal district population of nearly 67,000, while Three Chopt exceeds that number by about 8,700 people).

But the NAACP, concerned that the county’s proposal would leave Fairfield more than 3.6% below the ideal population and Varina more than 2.7% below it, proposed in a 5:30 a.m. email Tuesday its own map, which would reduce the deviation level in Fairfield to less than 1% and the overall countywide deviation to about 5.4%. The NAACP plan also would better preserve the voting representation of racial groups in each district, organization officials wrote.

About a dozen people spoke at Tuesday’s public hearing, several of them in favor of the NAACP proposal.

“We are not advocating for Black political power to be increased to become a super majority in our Black districts,” Henrico NAACP First Vice President Monica Hutchinson told supervisors during Tuesday’s meeting. “We advocate that no group of people’s vote is diminished through this process.”

State law allows individual districts to be within 5% of the ideal population total, as long as the overall countywide deviation doesn’t exceed 10%. Henrico’s proposal would result in an overall deviation of about 6.5% – about 1% better than the level created in the 2011 reapportionment process.

The alternative map created by county planners Tuesday, at Schmitt’s request following the NAACP’s email, would keep three voting precincts (Randolph, Mountain and Oakview) in Fairfield rather than moving them to Brookland. It also would reduce the average level of population deviation in the Varina and Fairfield districts to about 1.5%.

“I certainly concur with the request of the NAACP in their letter that we could do better, and our planning staff has provided us with an alternative that does just that,” Schmitt said.

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Drawing new boundaries isn’t just as simple as dividing populations evenly, Henrico Planning Director Joe Emerson and Deputy County Attorney Andrew Newby told supervisors.

“It is generally impossible to make the number of residents in each district exactly the same and meet all the other reapportionment criteria,” Emerson told supervisors Tuesday night. That’s because officials also are charged with incorporating a number of other requirements into their proposal, which also sought to:

• create continuous and compact districts that have clearly defined boundaries;
• avoid splitting precincts of census blocks;
• preserve communities of interest and the basic shapes of each district;
• protect incumbent officials and the racial composition of districts;
• maintain political fairness or competitiveness, as well as voter convenience and effective election administration.

The NAACP proposal would shift 13 voting precincts to new magisterial districts in an attempt to reduce the overall population deviation countywide. Newby told supervisors that the proposal would impact more precincts than the county’s plan and do a slightly worse job of preserving the basic shape of the five districts but generally would do a good job preserving most communities of interest and seemed likely to comply with the Virginia Voting Rights Act.

“Essentially what you have here is a plan that emphasizes factors differently,” Newby said. “There’s nothing here that would say this is illegal [or] doesn’t meet your criteria. But it emphasizes different things.”

Newby took issue with several citizen comments made during the process that suggested the county’s plan would move people of color out of the Brookland District in an inequitable way.

“That at least statistically is not true,” he said.

In fact, Newby said, the largest racial change in the district as part of the county’s plan would be a reduction of its white population, followed next by an increase in its Asian population.

State law requires localities to adopt new boundaries by Dec. 31. County officials originally had hoped to adopt theirs Tuesday and then submit its plans to the Virginia attorney general’s office by Thursday for preclearance, a process required by the Virginia Voting Rights Act of 2021 to ensure equity.

But Tuesday, Newby conceded that such a timeline had been overly ambitious. He told supervisors that officials instead would plan to submit the board’s approved plans to the attorney general’s office by early next month instead.