CORRECTION: 1981 redistricting was done to help not punish Mountlake Terrace Republican

Commentary / Evan Smith

By Evan Smith

ShorelineAreaNews Politics Writer

In my Election Day commentary about Washington’s being one of the few states that has taken the process of redrawing legislative and Congressional maps out of the hands of State legislatures, I mentioned the situation in which the 1981 Legislature drew the borders of the District that included Shoreline and Lake Forest Park across the County line to include the home of Mountlake Terrace Republican Bill Kiskaddon.

Former Democratic State Rep. Nancy Rust was right when she pointed out that Republicans, who then controlled the Legislature, were trying to protect then-Sen. Kiskaddon, who was well known in Shoreline because of his being active in the Richmond Beach Congregational Church, where his wife was then Church secretary.

Kiskaddon’s wife, Donna Kiskaddon, tells me that legislators made the move to protect Sen. Kiskaddon by putting him into what was then the 1st Legislative District, which then included Shoreline and Lake Forest Park, as well as areas of north Seattle. She says she thinks her husband had little to do with it.

Then-Sen. Donn Charnley, a Shoreline Democrat who lost his seat after the redistricting, recalls that he had a promise from the then-chairman of the committee working on the matter that he would be protected but that Republican committee chairman (and later Congressman) Jack Metcalf had to apologize because Kiskaddon had insisted that the precinct that included Kiskaddon’s home be brought into the new district, a district that otherwise, was in north King County.

That was the last time that Washington’s Legislature did the decennial redistricting. As Rep. Rust points out, after Democrats took control following the 1982 election, both parties agreed to the League of Women Voters proposal for a bipartisan commission to draw legislative and Congressional district lines.

The 1991 redistricting and the 2001 redistricting were done by commissions made up of four people appointed by the leaders of the Democratic and Republican caucuses in both the State House and State Senate, a group that must agree on a nonpartisan chairman.

The LWV and other good-government groups have pushed such efforts in several other states but have been successful in only a few.

If the census shows that Washington will gain a tenth seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, the bipartisan commission will carve out the new district as well as redrawing other Congressional- and legislative-district lines.

Most states will see scenes like the one that Charley describes from 1981.

In the local district in the 1980s, Kiskaddon defeated Charnley in 1984 by a 52 percent to 48 percent margin, before losing to Democrat Patty Murray in 1988 by a 53-47 margin, making Kiskaddon the last Republican elected from this area.