Tribune staff editorial

It’s unfortunate that rural Minnesota will lose one U.

Wednesday, March 20, 2002

It’s unfortunate that rural Minnesota will lose one U.S. representative under a plan released by a judicial redistricting panel Tuesday, but because of significant population shifts to the Twin Cities area over the last ten years, the result was basically unavoidable.

In recent years, the Twin Cities area has had four U.S. representatives and the rural area has had four; under the new plan, the Twin Cities will have five and the outstate area will get three.

Albert Lea will still remain in the district now represented by Republican Gil Gutknecht, but now, under the judges’ plan, the district will extend all the way from the state’s western border to its eastern border. The district’s representative will now have several extra counties to cover. Typically when districts expand, more geography to cover means it’s harder for one representative to pay special attention to any one area.

Because congressional districts must reflect population, it was inevitable that the more densely populated areas of the state would gain more representation, while areas with shrinking populations would end up with fewer. The other option would have been to maintain four rural districts, but expand them to include larger portions of the suburban area. This would have maintained the four-on-four balance between rural and urban areas, but it would have also caused rural representatives to focus more on suburban concerns as more of their constituents hailed from the metro area.

For Albert Leans and other residents of the rural first district, it’s better to have one representative stretched further over a rural area than to have one who is more and more influenced by suburban interests, whose priorities are often at odds with those of outstate Minnesota.