Auburn City Council voted to approve the City’s proposed redistricting plan and amendments to the plan at its special called meeting despite almost 20 citizens speaking in support of the NAACP’s alternate plan.
Council members approved the plan in a 7-to-2 vote after two amendments were made by Bob Parsons of Ward 6 and Kelley Griswold of Ward 2.
Parsons’ amendment would move census blocs from ward 5 to ward 4 and census blocs from ward 4 to ward 5 to address the large population of students that make up ward 5.
Ward 5 Council member Steven Dixon said he believed the amendment did not change the large percentage of students that will live in the area. Dixon said he was not in support of the amendment.
Griswold’s amendment would move census blocs from ward 5 to ward 2. The amendment would be to move the rest of the historic district into the same ward. The amendment was submitted on Nov. 17.
The special called meeting started with a public hearing after Council members requested one, and Mayor Ron Anders set a time limit of five minutes for each speaker. Connie Fitch Taylor said she was not in support of the time limit.
Sixteen people spoke in support of the NAACP’s alternative map. Some speakers referred to federal judges ruling that Alabama’s new congressional map violated the Voting Rights Act.
Benard Simelton, president of the NAACP’s Alabama state conference, said that the federal judges that blocked Alabama’s congressional map said consideration of race was “permissible and necessary” when drawing the districts.
“When it comes to your vote meaning as much as my vote, I can tell you Black citizens, in particular across the United States of America, votes are not counted equitable — equal,” Simelton said. “Because of situations like we have here in Auburn where they are packed into either one district or they’re spread out so they don’t have any voting strength.”
Tabitha Isner, a Montgomery-based data consultant and NAACP map expert, said that previous work by Dorman Walker — who reviewed the maps created by city staff as a consultant — had been ruled unconstitutional and provided a history of Walker’s career in drawing maps.
She said that while advising the Alabama House and Senate when drawing the state’s map that changes to the map would take too long to analyze, would be perceived as racially motivated and that the law required race-blind maps.
The map that Walker was advising the state legislature on is the newly drawn congressional state map that federal judges said violated the Voting Rights Act.
Citizens said that they felt the system was broken, the statistics provided at the previous meeting were invalid and many urged Council members to “do better.”
One speaker, Bill Lee, said he felt that he was not persuading the Council members. Joshua Lewis, chairman of the NAACP's ad hoc redistricting demographic committee, echoed this statement and said that they could only be hopeful of the results.
"We expected — we hoped for it to go well," Lewis said. "You can only expect for a broken system to put out broken results. Until you fix that system, everything that comes from that is going to have fragments."
The 17th speaker of the evening was David Massey, who started his time by saying that what he was going to say was going to upset nearly everyone in the room.
Massey said the NAACP was a racist organization and that Black Council members would discriminate and only represent Black people. His rant also included racist remarks and defamatory statements about the NAACP.
The Council allowed Massey to speak for four and a half minutes before members of the audience became unsettled and pointed out that Anders had stopped others from speaking out of turn.
Massey began to object and refused to step down after Anders told him to wrap it up and sit down. Massey refused to leave the building and was forced out by police officers.
Taylor requested a recess to compose herself after the incident. Simelton spoke again in defense of the NAACP after Massey’s comments before the public hearing ended.
After the public hearing, Dixon moved to amend the City of Auburn’s proposed map to the NAACP’s proposed alternative map. Dixon made a motion to amend the alternative map which would move two census blocs from ward 6 to ward 5.
Dixon said the City’s map would change the area of ward 5 which Dixon presides over and referred to a federal court blocking the state of Alabama’s newly drawn congressional map.
“A federal panel of judges ordered state lawmakers to redraw the lines saying, ‘Black voters have less opportunity than other Alabamians to elect candidates of their choice,’” Dixon said. “We don’t want to be on the wrong side of this, I don’t want to be on the wrong side of this.”
The Council did not approve both the amendment to the NAACP’s alternative map and the amendment to substitute NAACP’s map as the map for the redistricting plan.
Dixon and Taylor were the only Council members to vote in favor to both amendments.
Beth Witten of Ward 3 said that she urges people of the audience to get involved in government and run for office despite residents saying during the public hearing that approving the NAACP map would allow minorities to have more opportunities to vote for the candidate of their choosing.
There were references to potential lawsuits from NAACP if the Council did not approve its plan. Lewis said that the NAACP will keep an eye on what the City of Auburn is going to do.
"I can't speak to what the elephant's going to do or what the NAACP on the national or state level is going to do," Lewis said. "But as community, engaged citizens, we are going to engage the process and hopefully there can be something done to ensure that 10 years from now that this is not the process."
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