Johnson County Redistricting - Part 3

I just returned from the Johnson County Commissioner's Court where they met in special session this morning to announce tomorrow's public hearings on the proposed map and voted to move forward with the redistricting plan as presented this morning.  Now when I say "presented this morning" I really mean it.  Maps were distributed to the commissioners a few minutes before the meeting began and apparently that was the first time they'd been able to review the most recent iteration of the plan.

Judge Harmon explained an issue that the county had in being able to reproduce the maps from a shape file sent to them by the redistricting consultants hired for the job.  Were it not for the Johnson County Central Appraisal District being able to read the file and order printed maps who knows when the material might have become available.  There must be a massive disconnect between the consultants and the County of Johnson because today's explanation just doesn't add up for me.  As noted in my previous post I took it upon myself out of frustration last Friday to contact one of the consultants about getting a good map to view.  42 minutes later I had a fantastic map of the City of Joshua with city limit lines shown and a great number of street names shown to clearly see how the new boundary would affect my city.  The map came in the form of a JPG file, arguably one of the most universal image file formats in modern computing, and it came from someone I had never had previous contact with.  I'll also add that the file format is universally translated through any internet browser and could have been added to the county website in minutes.

Since we've digressed to Computing 101 it's worth mentioning that a JPG file could have been emailed to the redistricting committee which has not yet seen the map either.  Had Precinct 4 Commissioner Don Beeson not brought them up this morning it seems as though they may have just been cast aside.  Judge Harmon instructed the commissioners to call each of their two appointees to the committee and invite them to the public hearing tomorrow night so they can see the map too.

So to summarize the conclusion of the redistricting process the commissions saw a map this morning minutes before having to vote to move forward with it.  With nearly no way for the public to easily access the map (other than those interested in Joshua and viewing it here) two public hearings will be held tomorrow evening where the redistricting committee will most likely see the map for the first time and the commissioners will vote on final approval minutes later.  Does that sound like open government to you?

A.J.