Friday, April 5, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.
A West Las Vegas activist and political candidate accused Las Vegas Councilman Michael McDonald of playing politics with redistricting, slicing areas off his ward where he performed poorly in 1995 elections.
Chester Richardson, special assistant to the local president of the NAACP and a Republican candidate for Assembly District 7, said the city's reapportionment plan would help McDonald but hurt voters by packing all the poverty-stricken areas of the city into a single ward.
Richardson, along with local NAACP President Rev. James Rogers, said in a meeting with SUN editors Thursday that the City Council should add two members. In the meantime, however, they advanced an alternative remapping plan that would leave West Las Vegas in Ward 1, a district that also includes upscale neighborhoods such as the Scotch 80s. In exchange, Ward 3 would get the territory near the Stratosphere and Palace Station casinos.
McDonald flatly denied Richardson's charges, saying politics played no role whatsoever in city decisions to put West Las Vegas into Ward 3, which includes many poor, decaying neighborhoods on the east side of the city.
"It never entered the discussion," McDonald said. "This is a numbers game. This isn't about race, this is about where the numbers are growing."
In 1995 elections, former Councilman Frank Hawkins, who is black, carried predominantly black West Las Vegas overwhelmingly, but lost badly in the rest of the central-city ward. McDonald, who is white, carried the election 61-39 percent overall.
Richardson said putting West Las Vegas and eastern Las Vegas together would create an "economic polarization" that would be too much for a single councilman to handle.
"There's a way to do this without lumping West Las Vegas into Ward 3," Richardson said. "There's no benefit to the community to do this" the city's way, he added.
But McDonald said he would continue to represent the interests of West Las Vegas.
"That's an unfair allegation," he said of Richardson's charge. "I'm not leaving West Las Vegas, even if this gets redistricted out. I've got projects in West Las Vegas. I'll never leave West Las Vegas."
McDonald said he's worked on the Magic's Westland Plaza mall, the Moulin Rouge and tried to bring big businesses to invest in the economically depressed area, which is bounded by the city of North Las Vegas, Interstate 15, U.S. 95 and Rancho Drive.
"If I was going to be getting rid of this district, why would I have done all this stuff?" McDonald asked.
The city's first redistricting plan was shot down by City Attorney Brad Jerbic, who told council members last month that it violated the federal "one-man, one-vote" standard. That basically means that populations in each ward should be equal so that votes in one district count the same as votes in another.
Federal court rulings have held that ward populations can vary up to 10 percent, so city staffers drew a revised map that had a 9 percent gap between Ward 2, with the least number of people, and Ward 3, with the most.
Initially, the NAACP plan had a 9.7 percent gap between those two districts, but after a SUN reporter informed Richardson of the disparity, he changed the proposal, which brought the difference to 6.6 percent.
The city will have a public hearing on the redistricting plan at a recommending committee meeting April 15.
archive
