It probably won’t happen soon, but the new chairman of the Arlington County Republican Committee says he’s amenable to launching a petition drive that would change Arlington County Board seats from at-large to district-based.
“I anticipate the committee will explore this issue and take a position on it in the future,” GOP chair Matthew Hurtt told the GazetteLeader, pointing (in his personal capacity) to two reasons he backs moving forward with consideration:
• “At-large representation essentially allows County Board members to demur on issues; district representation gives elected officials ownership of geographic and neighborhood issues.”
• “At-large representation frequently results in elected officials living near one another, creating a de-facto overrepresentation of certain neighborhoods.”
Hurtt was elected Republican chair – albeit while stuck on the tarmac at a Florida airport trying to get home – at the county GOP’s March meeting. At that meeting, a first-time attendee brought up the idea of promoting a referendum to change from at-large to district-based seats.
The rank-and-file at the meeting seemed receptive, but any efforts to get a referendum on the ballot in 2023 would seem to be slipping away, as the required petition signatures (10% of active voters) would have to be filed with the Circuit Court by summer.
In the early 1930s, Arlington transitioned from the three-member, district-based Board of Supervisors that had governed the community since the 1870s to a five-member, at-large County Board that has remained in place ever since.
There have been several past attempts to switch to districts, including one by the NAACP in the 1970s and another by a coalition of groups more than two decades later. In the first case, advocates lost court battles to get a referendum on the ballot; in the second, efforts to obtain the necessary petition signatures fell short.
In the more recent effort, the Arlington County Democratic Committee and other organizations allied to the existing county power structure opposed the move.
Those with Machiavellian instincts, pay heed and plan ahead: Advocates of a move to district-based seats might be able to avoid going the referendum route altogether.
Advocates for updates to the county’s governance structure are expected to go to Richmond next year to seek approval for some of those changes, such as increasing the number of County Board seats and changing the timing of elections from every year to every other year.
A package of proposed changes adopted by the Arlington County Civic Federation pointedly left out a switch from at-large to district-based seats. But given the division of power in Richmond, if local Republicans can convince Gov. Youngkin to insist upon it as the price for signing whatever package of changes ultimately materializes in 2024, Democrats in the General Assembly might be forced to either go along, or see none of the changes approved.
Because all political power in Virginia flows from the state level down to localities, a General Assembly and governor working in tandem likely could impose any changes they saw fit to Arlington’s governance structure, without necessarily needing buy-in from county leaders.
