A funny thing happened when the General Assembly passed new voting districts for the state last week. Lawmakers lost a whole county.

The illustrated district maps looked OK, so both the Senate and the House approved the Senate redistricting plan. But when clerks typed up the final draft, the problem showed up. WPLN’s Joe White reports:

The bill left out Tipton County, home to 61,000 Tennesseans in the bedroom community just north of Memphis.

Senate Republican Leader Mark Norris owned up to the “sponsor error” in passing the incomplete plan. It was a difficult admission – Norris is the senator for Tipton County.

The error opened the door for several Democratic members to complain about the speed of the redistricting process. House Republican Leader Gerald McCormick said he didn’t blame them for being upset.

“I’ll have to say, if the Senate had left my county out of the bill, I’d have been mad, too.”

Democrats say they were forced to vote on the bill last Friday without time to read it.

The House corrected the bill Wednesday, and the Senate is expected to add Tipton County back in on Thursday.

WEB EXTRA
Technically, the “map” lawmakers saw on their desks last week showed Tipton County — the error was in the text of the bill. Unfortunately, the map is just an illustration; it’s the wording in the bill that counts.

The bill is SB 1514 Norris/ HB 1557 McDaniel.

Former House Speaker Jimmy Naifeh, a Democrat, represents Tipton County in the House. Both the House and Senate suspended their rules in order to rush the new voting district bills through the system last Friday. Naifeh complains about the hurry-up attitude that left out his county.

“Things like that happen, and that’s what happens…and it is what happens, when we try to go too fast. And we did go too fast last week.”

Representative Steve McDaniel, the chairman over the Republican “working group” that drew the new House districts over the summer and fall, points out that the two houses traditionally don’t interfere in each other’s maps.

“Of course the House drew the House plan, the Senate drew the Senate plan. And this was an error made when the Senate drafted the text of the legislation.”

It was just a “technical” error, he says.

“The maps that were on your desks last week for the Senate plan were accurate, it was just an omission, a technical omission in the language of the bill.”