This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2011, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Mike Waddoups says he is losing his taste for pizza. By that he means he's losing his fondness for the Republican idea for creating four Utah congressional districts by slicing Salt Lake County into four pieces and tacking each piece onto a huge chunk of rural Utah.
We're glad that Waddoups is stepping back from the pizza-slice idea. We've never liked it because Utah's population distribution makes a different approach much more sensible. Three-quarters of the state's population is concentrated in just four counties along the northern Wasatch Front: Utah, Salt Lake, Davis and Weber. Divide those four counties into three horizontal bands of population, and your redistricting job for Congress is done. Put all of the remainder of the state into the fourth district. Instead of pizza, you get a doughnut.
The best thing about the doughnut plan is that it would group voters with similar geographic interests together. City and suburban folk along the Provo-Salt Lake City-Ogden axis would be in three districts, rural voters would be in the fourth.
By contrast, the pizza is an excuse for the majority Republicans in Utah's Legislature to draw districts in a way that gives Republicans the best chance of winning all four districts. The outward justification for the pizza plan — that every district should combine a mix of urban and rural voters because public lands are so important in Utah — has never passed the sniff test. In most of the redistricting committee's 17 hearings statewide, rural voters have asked to be grouped together in one large district rather than being parceled into four.
Waddoups' opinion carries weight because he's the Utah Senate president.
Unfortunately, despite his waning taste for pizza, his latest proposal for a congressional district map still does not evince a strong appetite for a doughnut. He deserves credit for not hacking Salt Lake City into pieces, but he tacks the city onto a district that also takes in all of eastern and southern Utah. Southwest Salt Lake County gets joined to western Utah County and a Danzig corridor that runs all the way to the Nevada line. Northwest Utah makes up another district. The most compact district comprises southeast Salt Lake County and all of eastern Utah County. You can find the complete map on the redistrictutah.com website.
On the same site, you can also see no fewer than six doughnut plans that make far greater sense, many of them submitted by private citizens. That's the direction the Utah Legislature should go.