Redistricting on co-op’s drawing board
Wanting to get the word out, Socorro Electric Cooperative officials unveiled a first draft of a plan to realign its district boundaries a day after last week’s board of trustees meeting was canceled soon after it started.
The meeting came to an end when more than a dozen member-owners, who were protesting the board’s resistance to follow the guidelines of the Open Meetings Act, refused to leave the boardroom for executive session.
Amid the chaos, Socorro police arrived at the scene to disperse the crowd from the property.
SEC President Paul Bustamante was upset the meeting didn’t take place, and the board didn’t get to address some important issues, like redistricting.
“You saw what happened last night. We can’t conduct business like that,” Bustamante said on Thursday, June 24, when co-op officials gave El Defensor Chieftain a glimpse at what they admit is a preliminary plan for redistricting.
While the board of trustees has put up some resistance over accepting some newly adopted bylaws passed by member-owners at the annual meeting in April — voting to challenge three of them aimed at increasing transparency with a declaratory judgment requesting injunctive relief — Bustamante said they’ve been working hard to satisfy the members’ mandate to create five districts with as equal population as possible.
“People have said we’re dragging our feet on this; we’re not dragging our feet,” Bustamante said, adding that a survey committee was formed immediately after the annual meeting and has been working on it for two months.
The committee was made up of trustees Leroy Anaya, Jack Bruton, Leo Cordova, David Wade and Donald Wolberg. As president, Bustamante serves on the committee ex-officio.
Wolberg headed the survey committee. He said it was no easy task to divide the co-op’s survey area into five equal sectors.
“The members wanted five districts of approximately equal size. That’s not as easy as it appears,” he said. “People don’t realize that Socorro Electric Co-op covers 11,400 square-miles. We’re reorganizing an area bigger than nine states and the District of Columbia.”
Wolberg said the survey committee used population data in an effort to divide the roughly 10,000 member-owners into five equal districts of approximately 2,000 people. That meant redrawing boundaries to add 440 members to District 1, and 1,285 and 1,355 to Districts 2 and 4, respectively, and reducing District 3 by 2,175 and District 5 by 690.
“The first challenge was to find where people were,” Wolberg said, and added that the population within the service area had nearly doubled in the past 30 years. “As a committee, we made a number of attempts to break down the districts into approximately equal size. In the end, what we came up with is a first try — a working model.”
That model splits Socorro into two districts — with the tentative boundary being Otero Road and School of Mines. It also groups Magdalena and Alamo with the southern part of the service area, moving the communities from the western district.
Wolberg said District 1, which includes northern Socorro County and a southern section of Valencia County, would remain relatively unchanged.
The new District 2 would include the northern part of Socorro and encompass communities along the Interstate 25 corridor up to San Acacia.
District 3 would consist of southern Socorro and territory to the south.
District 4 would keep San Antonio, but absorb Magdalena and Alamo, which would be moved from District 5.
District 5 would include everything in the service area west of Magdalena to the Arizona state line.
“We tried to keep it as neat as possible,” Wolberg said. “We had to use the best estimate of the number of people living in areas, trying to get as close to 2,000 as possible in each of the five districts. That was the challenge.”
Wolberg said boundary lines were loosely drafted for this draft. A final version will have to define boundaries by GPS coordinates.
Wolberg said he regretted that last week’s board meeting was canceled, because there was no opportunity for public input.
“If other people have ideas about redistricting we’ll be happy to entertain them, because it’s their co-op,” he said.
Although the plan may not be perfect, Wolberg said it accomplishes one wish member-owners expressed by voting to adopt several reform-related bylaws — saving money.
“A positive aspect is that we did it internally at no cost to the co-op, and it meets the spirit and intent of the bylaw,” he said.
Trustee Wade said the savings is significant.
“Ten years ago, we discussed hiring a contractor to come in and found out it was going to cost $150,000, up to $300,000 to get it done,” he said.
SEC General Manager Polo Pineda emphasized that the plan is a work in progress and nothing is written in stone.
“It’s doable, but it’s going to take time,” he said, and added that the member-owners will have the final say. “This is just one option. We might want to go back and look at this, and it will still have to go through the full membership.”
Rebecca Apodaca/El Defensor Chieftain
A first draft of Socorro Electric Cooperative’s redistricting plan changes boundaries to look roughly like this.
Contact T.S. Last