Nassau district battle destined for court

A rushed Republican proposal to reconfigure district lines in Nassau County drew hard fire at the sole public hearing on the matter yesterday.

The hearing -- where the atmosphere was, at turns, passionate and nasty -- was the opening skirmish in a battle over the proposed lines destined to end up in federal court.

That's exactly where it belongs.

The political party in charge -- in this case, Republican -- gets to draw the lines. But those lines have to pass a variety of legal tests, which makes redistricting a serious business.

It's particularly serious in Nassau, where the old Board of Supervisors was declared unconstitutional by a federal judge in 1994.

The old board -- made up of town supervisors and city mayors sitting as a legislature and using a wildly weighted voting system -- was replaced by a new 19-member legislature.

Under that configuration, voters in newly created majority-black districts elected the first African-American man (a Democrat, Roger Corbin) and the first African-American woman (a Republican, Darlene Harris) to county government.

This time around, Republicans contend, new lines are necessary to create a third minority district to reflect the county's changing demographics.

The problem, according to Democrats, is that the proposed new lines both giveth and taketh away -- by pulling some minority neighborhoods together, while blowing others apart.

"They say they are consolidating minority power when, in fact, they are diluting it," said Frederick Brewington, a Hempstead attorney who worked on a series of federal court challenges that led to a change in the way government operated in Nassau.

They ushered in town council districts to replace at-large elections for town board seats in Hempstead and North Hempstead.

During Monday's hearing, many of the fiery -- and, at times, incendiary -- objections centered on politics.

But the strongest criticisms came from residents who rightly questioned the rush to redistrict.

The proposed maps weren't widely distributed until last week; and there's only one public hearing before lawmakers vote next week.

Some speakers didn't even know whether their communities were left whole or split into new districts under the new lines.

That's a problem, and one that should have been anticipated by lawmakers rushing a process that, in redistrictings of the past, included months of public review and hearings.

Of course, in the end, what the party in charge wanted is what the party in charge got.

That's the way of the political world.

But a rush job isn't necessarily a good job, which is why Brewington is waiting for the legislature to vote before lodging another federal challenge.

If that's the only way to ensure a thorough public airing of the matter, so be it.