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Politics & Government

Haverford Split Over Reapportionment

Under the new district lines, longtime Haverford Rep. Greg Vitali (D) will lose Ward 1 and Ward 9 to Republican Nicholas Micozzie.

As it does every 10 years to balance legislative district size in response to information from that year's census, the Pennsylvania state legislature reapportioned its districts this fall, and on Dec. 12 approved a final plan that would, among other changes across the state, separate Haverford's Ward's 1 and 9 from the rest of the township.

Presently in Rep. Greg Vitali's (D) 166th district, if the the plan, as expected, takes effect, they would be absorbed into Nicholas Micozzie's (R) 163rd.

Though the Board of Commissioners has until Wednesday, Jan. 11, to challenge the plan on constitutional grounds—the Pennsylvania constitution bars the splitting of municipalities into separate legislative districts unless absolutely necessary—according to 4th Ward Commissioner Dan Siegel, the state supreme court has struck down every such challenge issued in 2001, the most recent reapportionment, and that precedent will weigh heavily on the board's consideration of a challenge.

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The board, if it mounted a legal challenge to the redistricting, would also have to pay for it, as Vitali has acknowledged that because the leader of his Democratic caucus sat on the commonwealth’s Reapportionment Commission and approved the plan, they would not be providing any funding.

Vitali himself is, if not incensed, perturbed at the prospect of losing parts of the township he's held in its entirety since he took office in 1993. He charges that the reapportionment was done as it was for political purposes.

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"It was done for brazenly political reasons. It was done to shore up the Nick Micozzie seat as a Republican seat," the Rep. told the Haverford-Havertown Patch on Wednesday, Dec. 28.

"They are shoring it up as a safe Republican seat, and it's being done at the behest of the Upper Darby Republican Committee," Vitali alleged.

He went on to say that the Republican-favorable redrawing of the legislative map was made possible because the "neutral" member appointed to the five member reapportionment commission was only nominally neutral. The redrawing would also give Vitali more Democratic voters, he admitted in a .

The state districts are remade every decade by a five-man commission, four members of which are the majority and minority leaders of each house and the fifth and deciding member, ostensibly non-partisan, is appointed by the state supreme court. This year, the court appointed Republican Judge Steven J. McEwan, a former Delaware County district attorney who Vitali views as overly partisan.

He added that the commission made no attempt to constitutionally justify the splitting of Haverford Township. When asked what their pressing reason for the division was, Vitali said, "none, they offered absolutely none."

"It was really just about shoring up Republican seats."

McEwan is currently away on vacation and could not take a call from Patch to respond to Vitali's accusations.

Still though, Vitali did acknowledge that the reapportionment process is always heavily, if not entirely, politically driven, and struggled to explicate how exactly things would have gone differently if Democrats were in charge of the process, other than the obvious fact of the new districts being more favorable to Dems.

"Haverford Township would not have been split," he said, but did not offer much else, other than an objection to the degree to which this decade's gerrymandering was nakedly political.

"One commissioner said to me point blank, 'John McNichol'"—a local Republican leader—"'said it was being broken up to shore up the Micozzie seat.' Our staff person on the reapportionment commission repeatedly said to me, 'This is being done at the behest of John McNichol.'"

McNichol died on New Year's Eve at the age of 75.

Micozzie has not yet responded to Patch's request for an interview.

Vitali added that the political motivations of the reapportionment commission members are usually tempered by objective redistricting standards like "compactness, continuousness, and keeping together communities of interest," but argued that in this cycle those considerations were ignored.

"My hope," he said, "is that we can get back to actually following the law."

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