Tension awaits as Legislature anticipates Census 2010 results

A snippet from the DeSoto Time Tribune, a local paper in one of the fastest, if not THE fastest, growing counties in MS. Will be interesting to see how redistricting affects this area...

Little of the same redistricting tension that surrounded the 2000 population census exists now as the Legislature awaits figures of the 2010 census. But that is not to say some angry partisan arm-wrestling — Democrat against Republican — over legislative redistricting won’t break out in the 2011 session.

A few things of consequence to Mississippi are known in advance of the 2010 census: One, though the state’s growth the past decade has been slow (less than 1 percent a year) it is not enough to cause the state to lose a U.S. House seat as it did in 2000; another, that since Mississippi elects officials in off-years, it will be one of the first three states to get the official census figures.

Assuming they will get census figures by March, 2011, lawmakers hope to start early on redistricting the 174 seats in the Legislature, a job that in 2002 wasn’t finished in regular session and required a special session. What clouded the 2002 session, however, was the explosive issue of having to remap the state’s five Congressional districts into four.