State will require Floyd County precinct changes for new supervisor districts

By Bob Steenson, bsteenson@charlescitypress.com

The Iowa Secretary of State Office rejected new precincts that had been approved by Floyd County late last year, saying they don’t allow drawing new county supervisor districts with equal populations for each district.

And because the deadline for completing the process of drawing precincts has passed, the state will now draw those supervisor districts, changing precinct boundaries as needed to comply with the population requirements.

Whether that can be done in time to get everything needed ready for the March 1 special elections on local option sales tax renewal in the city of Charles City and the rural areas of Floyd County is still a question.

The Floyd County Board of Supervisors discussed the problem at its meeting Monday morning.

The board also offered a contract to a new county engineer and discussed whether the county should take a position on carbon dioxide pipelines proposed to go through the county.

The current precinct situation is the result of three things happening at the same time:

1) Charles City and the county have to draw new precincts every 10 years following the decennial census;

2) Floyd County now has to be divided into three separate supervisor districts as the result of a special election held last summer;

3) The census results and all the information needed for precincts and districting became available significantly later than usual, at least partially because of delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The temporary redistricting committee that was appointed by the county Board of Supervisors came up with county voting precincts that followed township lines, as it was legally required to do, and the supervisors approved those precincts in late December.

The Charles City Council also approved new city precincts, with just a slight modification from the previous map.

But there is no combination of whole townships with the three Charles City city precincts that results in the required number of people in each supervisor district.

Supervisor representation is being divided into districts instead of the current at-large election process because voters in a special election last summer approved doing so, opting for “plan 3,” where supervisors have to be residents of the district they want to represent, and only voters from each district can vote for their own supervisor.

According to the 2020 Census, the population of Floyd County is 15,627 persons, meaning that if each supervisor district held exactly the same number of persons there would be 5,209 people in each district.

State law requires the population of each supervisor district to be within 1% of the ideal, meaning each district must be within 52 persons above or below 5,209, or in a range of 5,157 to 5,261.

The supervisor districts also have to include the three Charles City precincts, which have 2,380, 2,577 and 2,439 persons respectively in Precinct 1, Precinct 2 and Precinct 3.

After the city and the county approved their new precincts, they were sent to the Iowa Secretary of State, which approved them and sent them to the state Legislative Services Agency to draw the supervisor districts.

But then the LSA sent them back to the Secretary of State.

“Specifically, because Charles City can be divided into no more than 2 supervisor districts, 2 of the 3 Charles City precincts have to be combined to form a supervisor district. No combination of 2 Charles City precincts generated a supervisor district with a population between 5,157 and 5,261 persons as required by Iowa law,” the LSA wrote in a message to the Floyd County Board of Supervisors.

“In addition, no precinct contiguous to Charles City could be added to the 2 Charles City precincts to generate a supervisor district with a population between 5,157 and 5,261 persons,” it wrote.

Normally, the Secretary of State Office would send everything back to the county, with instructions to redo the precincts.

However, according to a message the county received from the office of the Secretary of State last week, the deadline to complete reprecincting has passed, so the Secretary of State’s Office and the Legislative Services Agency will now redraw the county precincts as needed to comply with the supervisor districting requirements.

County Auditor Gloria Carr, who is commissioner of elections, said an example of what might happen can be seen in Mitchell County, where the precincts don’t follow township boundaries in three townships.

Carr is especially concerned about the special election coming up March 1. She is supposed to send a card to anyone whose voting precinct has changed, and she has to train poll workers to be ready for the election.

“There’s a lot of work on our end that needs to done to update the I-Voters system to get cards generated to mail out. We’ll probably do our own template for recording results, because that can’t be changed because the ballots are done,” Carr said.

“You can’t postpone the election. They’ll have to have some answers, and it will just be a scramble,” she said. “Postponing the election isn’t even an option. To me, it isn’t an option.”

Also at the meeting Monday morning, the board:

• Offered a contract for the office of county engineer to Jacob Page of Charles City. Page has an engineering degree and four years of experience as an engineer, but does not yet have his professional engineer (PE) license, as is required by the state for county engineers. He currently works as a project engineer with the Iowa Department of Transportation office in Mason City. He was hired by the DOT in May 2018 as a transportation engineer intern in design.

The contract the board approved offering notes that Page intends to take the PE exam in February. It offered him a $90,000 annual salary until he has his PE license, then an annual salary of $100,000 after that, and said certification is required within six months of employment, which is proposed to begin March 1.

Page would replace former county engineer Dusten Rolando, who resigned the position in September after being charged with his second offense operating a vehicle while intoxicated. Rolando later pleaded guilty to the charge.

Rolando had held a shared county engineer position between Floyd and Chickasaw counties, but after Rolando’s resignation Chickasaw County hired its then-Assistant County Engineer Roman Lensing as its new county attorney and Floyd County began looking for a new county attorney.

• Discussed whether Floyd County should take a position on proposed carbon dioxide transport pipelines proposed to be buried in Floyd County, noting that several other counties in the state have taken positions. The board took no action after the discussion.

• Discussed an application process for county departments to apply for part of the county’s expected $3.1 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds. A small part of the funding has already been committed for health-related projects connected to the courthouse update project, such as asbestos abatement and installing hand dryers in the new restrooms.

The board discussed opening up applications to county departments, with an application deadline of June 30, then opening it up to other county groups and organizations after that.