A College Park City Council member is proposing the creation of at-large positions and the eventual establishment of a 5th district that would virtually guarantee students from University of Maryland, College Park have a representative on the body.
Council Member Andrew Fellows said the impetus for both ideas is to increase involvement in local government, particularly in terms of voting. “It’s not unique to College Park that voters are not coming out overwhelmingly to vote in elections,” Fellows said, “but it seems to me that cities should do as much as they can to get citizens involved in the process.”
The city currently is divided into four districts. Residents elect two candidates in their district. Under Fellows’ proposal, each district would have one position and there would be four at-large spots.
“There would be more reason to come out and vote because you’d be voting for more people,” Fellows said. “And it’s morelikely there would be contested races.”
Creating at-large positions, Fellows said, would require a public hearing and a charter change. He said having the change in place for the 2007 election would be good but not necessary.
Sometime following the 2010 census, Fellows said he would like to create a fifth district encompassing a large portion of University of Maryland students and have three at-large members.
Fellows plans to discuss his ideas with colleagues at tonight’s council meeting. In the 2005 election, 1,379 of 10,833 registered voters voted. Students from the College Park campus account for approximately 18,000 of the city’s nearly 26,000 residents, according to a city planner.
Council Member Robert Catlin said he won’t support Fellows’ at-large proposal and that it’s too early to speculate about creating a student district. To have a student district and four others, “you might have to carve up the city in ways that would be totally bizarre,” he said.
Catlin said he will present an alternative to Fellows’ at-large proposal today.
