Keegan Garrity
A report was presented to the Logan city council late last week and officially on Tuesday night at the council meeting on how Logan elects council members.
There are different types of representation, in Logan the idea was to explore the difference between at-large elections, meaning someone can live anywhere in Logan and you’re elected to the council based on the number of open seats each election cycle, the counter-proposal is a by-district election.
Where you create districts then a representative from each district is elected to the council in a municipal election year.
A member of the committee charged with studying the issue, Keegan Garrity was on KVNU’s For the People program on Wednesday and talked about how they went about the process.
“There are a lot of factors that go into this and a lot of research. The committee has been meeting for about a year, and so we had access to twenty years of historical voting data that includes primary and general (elections). We had city demographic information, we talked to legal. Got the legal requirements for making a change, found out the costs of a change. We invited a local poly-science professor to give us the pros and cons,” he explained.
Garrity said they also did interviews with their neighbors and tried to be really thorough in their investigation. He said they found that candidates for city council tend to come from 2 areas of town.
“If you dig in a little bit deeper, you’ll find that two neighborhoods specifically, Hillcrest and Wilson, have produced the same number of candidates as all other four neighborhoods combined. Furthermore of that dynamic, of those four outside of the neighborhood, there’s only been five people to serve from those neighborhoods since 2009, and three of those served by appointment to fill a vacancy.”
He said it’s not just geography that is an issue, it’s also socio-economic status, it’s income, it’s owner-occupied vs. renter-occupied.
He said it’s not about bad representation, Garrity said they believe that council members do their best and he’s grateful for their service.
But not living in a certain neighborhood, they may not understand all the particular challenges the residents from that area might experience.
AUDIO: Keegan Garrity talks with For the People host Jason Williams on KVNU