Court Opinion

ID: 9633494
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 11:49:21.65774+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:27:02.418189
License: Public Domain

FADELEY, J.,
concurring in part and dissenting in part.
I concur fully in the disposition and opinions concerning the reapportionment cases but would go further. The dispositions of the petitions actually received challenging the Secretary’s reapportionment are correct, and I concur in them. I dissent, however, from the majority’s unwillingness to go further, because I perceive an additional difficulty with the Secretary’s August reapportionment plan (the Plan). I *224would direct a change in the abominable boundaries of House District 59 also.
After the Plan is returned by this court to the Secretary for correction, the Secretary appears to have no power to change any part of Plan unless the court directs that change specifically. Article IV, section 6(3)(d) of the Oregon Constitution, limits the Secretary’s power of correction to “those particulars” that we spell out “and in no others.”
On the other hand, while a petition for review is required to invoke our review, the governing constitutional provision does not limit this court’s review to the subject matter or the articulated claims of any specific petition. Once invoked, original jurisdiction is vested in this court “to review any reapportionment and the record made by the Secretary of State” without limitation on that jurisdiction. Or Const, Art IV, § 6(3)(b). If this court determines that the reapportionment does not comply with the law, “the reapportionment shall be void.” Or Const, Art IV, § 6(3)(d).
The constitutional criteria for that plenary review are whether the reapportionment complies “with subsection (1) of this section and all law applicable thereto.” Or Const, Art IV, § 6(3)(c),(d). (Emphasis added.)
Questions about the Plan’s District 59 were raised at oral argument. The most substantial change in the configuration and size of a House district under the Plan, as compared with the way the district was constituted after the 1981 apportionment, is in District 59.
House District 59, in the Plan, stretches from the western bank of the Snake River at Farewell Bend, a little north of Ontario, to the south bank of the Columbia River in Wasco County just east of The Dalles. It is composed of seven whole counties east of the Cascades plus a portion of Wasco County that contributes only 1,456 persons to the 46,934 persons making up the 59th District in the Plan. (Exhibits N and L to the Plan.)
The distance in road miles from one end of the proposed House district to the other is comparable to a trip from Pendleton to Albany or from Milton-Freewater to French Glen, or from Klamath Falls to Beaverton, or from *225Portland to the Medford-Ashland area, whether the District 59 traveler takes Interstate 84 or selects a route through Baker, John Day, Fossil, Clamo, and Antelope. Moreover, the district boundaries as drawn in the Plan divide Wasco County into three parts when there is no necessity to do so, because no other provision of law requires a triple division of that county.
The opinion of the majority, with which I concur, returns the Plan to the Secretary, in effect at his request, so that eight census tracts — which the Plan erroneously placed within Multnomah County, but which in fact are located in Clackamas County — may be transferred by drawing new House district boundaries so that those census tracts are part of Clackamas County House districts, not Multnomah County districts. The Secretary explains his request for return of the Plan to make this inter-county transfer as being because he wishes to honor the Multnomah-Clackamas County line, where he can do so, as he can here, without creating any excessive deviation in populations among the various House districts created by the Plan throughout the state.
The Secretary buttresses his request for the return of the Plan, so that he may honor county lines, by pointing to ORS 188.010. That statute mandates that one of the five criteria to “consider” in making a district reapportionment plan is to “[ujtilize existing geographic or political boundaries.” ORS 188.010(l)(c). In my view, District 59 as presently proposed in the Secretary’s Plan also fails to comply with that statutory provision.
In addition, the division of Wasco County into three parts under the Plan will of necessity place the three portions of Wasco County in more than one senatorial district. That is true because any senatorial district may only be composed of two House districts and the three parts of Wasco County are placed in three separate House districts under the Plan. ORS 188.010(4), echoing one of the constitutional purposes found in both Article IV, section 6(1) and section 7, provides: “Two state House of Representative districts shall be wholly included within a single senatorial district.”
*226Multnomah County districts can absorb more population to make up for the loss of population to Clackamas County districts that results from the correction of the United States Census Bureau’s error and still have less than the ideal population. That absorption permits movement of the eastern boundaries of the most eastern districts in Mult-nomah County a bit farther east beyond the eastern boundary of Troutdale.
No practical difficulties prevent moving the district lines for House District 59 to provide a more compact district, one that neither includes Wasco County as its western nether region nor splits that county into three parts. A clockwise shift of population among districts, made possible by the correction of the Multnomah-Clackamas boundary that the majority approves and the pre-existing under population of Multnomah County House Districts of over 2,500 persons in the Plan, will permit solution of the ORS 188.010(l)(c) and Article IV, section 6(1) and section 7, problems found in District 59.
Under the Plan, District 56 includes The Dalles in Wasco County, all of Hood River County, and that part of eastern Multnomah County east of Troutdale extending past Corbett and Bridal Veil Falls toward Hood River. This portion of Multnomah County, now lumped in with The Dalles-Hood River, contains 6,399 Multnomah residents. (Exhibit N.) When one or more of the Multnomah districts are movéd east to pick up the population lost by the subtraction of the population of the census tracts properly belonging in Clackamas County, the Hood River-The Dalles district will have less population because of that shift and, therefore, can accommodate more population south of The Dalles in the area around Dufur, and east of The Dalles toward Biggs Junction, containing 1,456 people according to Exhibit N.1
However, District 59, even with the 1,456 persons residing in Wasco County census tracts contained within it, *227has no surplus of population. When it loses that number of Wasco County inhabitants, the Secretary would be faced with the problem of adding population from somewhere else to District 59, if he insisted upon having all 60 districts come within one percent of the mathematically ideal population.2
District 60, to the south of District 59 along much of District 59’s great east-west expanse, has an excess population under the Secretary’s Plan.3 Population from proposed District 60 easily could be shifted to District 59. No problem with the statutory and constitutional language noted above will occur, because Districts 59 and 60 have been and may, under my suggestions, continue to be within the same senatorial district. Indeed, prior reapportionments approved by this court have included the area around Ironside (in overpopulated District 60 in the Secretary’s Plan) within a district encompassing much of the area of District 59 as proposed in the Secretary’s Plan.4
To summarize in a graphic fashion, the population loss to Multnomah County occasioned by correcting the census bureau error permits a clockwise shift of district boundaries picking up the population from other districts. Moreover, the current K/icZerpopulation of Multnomah County House districts permits, even argues for, moving a portion of the population in Multnomah County east of Troutdale out of the Hood River-The Dalles district back into *228a Multnomah district. By going clockwise, east, this shift can be continued so that all of the boundaries are shifted eastward and then, when one reaches District 59, as described in the Plan, by continuing the clockwise shift in a southerly direction to pick up population around Ironside sufficient to keep the population balance of District 59 within tolerable deviation limits, a deviation much smaller than those that this court approved in prior apportionments.
I would specifically order the Secretary of State to make those changes to correct the abominable boundaries of House District 59 in the Plan.
*229APPENDIX
It is suggested in some quarters that section 7, still printed in our constitution, is a dead letter. Various reasons have been given to support this suggestion. One is the thought that the 1986 amendment works an implied repeal of all or parts of section 7. Another is that part of the protection of county integrity contained in the constitution simply will not work as long as population equality is given primary weight and, thus, may be ignored in construing the reapportionment provisions as a whole. The latter reasoning invokes this court’s holding in Hovet v. Myers, 260 Or 152, 489 P2d 684 (1971). That holding renounced the 1971 legislative reapportionment plan and directed that it be corrected on the grounds that it permitted a level of district population inequality — 28 percent deviation in population between districts in one house of the legislature and a 48 percent deviation in the other — that could not be sustained under the interpretation of the federal Fourteenth Amendment found in state reapportionment cases theretofore decided by the Supreme Court of the United States. Id., 260 Or at 159. These suggestions are not persuasive.
The Hovet opinion does not expressly, or by necessary implication of any words used in the opinion, override ORS 188.010(l)(c) or rip section 7 out of our constitution and discard it. Moreover, Hovet concerned what was necessary under the Fourteenth Amendment, in the view of this court in 1971, to avoid very substantial disparities in the population among legislative districts established by the 1971 reapportionment. We have before us in 1991 a totally different plan, one which strives to and does achieve a variation of less than one percent, plus or minus, from the ideal population goal obtained by dividing the number of legislative districts into the population count of the entire state.5 Following the 1981 reapportionment, the court rendered decisions about it in McCall v. Legislative Assembly, 291 Or 663, 634 P2d 223 (1981), and Cargo v. Paulus, 291 Or 772, 635 P2d 367 (1981). *230The 1981 decisions do not mention section 7. After these decisions, the people amended only section 6 of Article IV, leaving section 7 intact and still printed as a part of our existing constitution. 12 ORS C-14 (1989). The necessity rationale fails, because there is no necessity to divide Wasco County into three parts.

 Another part of Wasco County is already in District 55 in the Plan, and District 55 contains less than the population ideal, as presently constituted. The northerly line of District 55 can be moved farther north to absorb the remainder of the high-plateau portion of Wasco County not absorbed by moving the portion of District 56 in that county east and south. Movements of that kind will clearly improve the compactness of District 59.

 Neither the Attorney General nor this court, by its prior decisions, has required the one percent deviation limit. The Supreme Court of the United States has permitted substantially greater deviation in an approved state legislative plan, applying the strictures of the Fourteenth Amendment. As pointed out in the Attorney General’s letter of August 2,1991, to the Secretary of State:
“The federal constitution does not come into question, because the federal standards for population equality are not strict. Essentially, the state need not justify any deviations lower than 10%. Gaffney v. Cummings, 412 U.S. 735 (1973) and White v. Regester, 412 U.S. 755 (1973). In fact, in 1981 the Oregon Supreme Court upheld a plan which contained deviations in overall range of 5.34% in the House districts and3.73%inthe Senate districts, finding those to be within limits approved by the U.S. Supreme Court. McCall v. Legislative Assembly, 291 Or 663, 634 P2d 223 (1981).” (Emphasis added.)

 A population surplus of 377 persons is already found in House District 60 in the Plan. (Exhibit L to the Plan.) It has at least that many to spare to augment District 59 population.

 Donald Oakes of Ironside represented the Baker City area and, the John Day area in the House of Representatives during the 1970s. Oregon Blue Book, 1973-74, pp 89, 92.

 Indeed, the Secretary’s Plan provides district population equality much more nearly than has any past reapportionment plan. The average deviation plus and minus from the ideal population figure is only .56 of one percent. The shifts proposed herein, ante, will leave the maximum House deviation between the most and least populous districts well below three percent and the average deviation well under one percent.