Bigger districts would make Pennsylvania lawmakers
less responsive to their constituents

By state Rep. Daylin Leach

The concept of "political reform" received a good deal of attention in recent Pennsylvania election campaigns. Certain reforms are necessary and long overdue, such as those dealing with campaign finance and legislative redistricting. But some ideas being touted as reforms would have a pernicious effect. One stark example is the momentarily popular but actually terrible proposal to shrink the size of the Pennsylvania Legislature.

The only claimed benefit of a smaller Legislature is that it would be cheaper. But even if we eliminated a third of the Legislature, each of us would save a mere 65 cents per year (about $8 million in salaries divided by 12 million Pennsylvanians). Even if you want to assume generous savings in staff salaries (although reducing the number of legislators would not lead to a proportional reduction in staff), office space and what are called "perks," at most you would double the savings to about $1.30 per year. The question then becomes: What would we give up in return for such a meager discount?

We would give up a lot.

Legislators have extensive responsibilities to represent their districts. We help thousands of constituents a year with state issues; we arrange town meetings, informational hearings, veterans' trips, etc. We go to dozens of municipal meetings, senior centers and civic associations, and mediate neighborhood disputes. Most of us work in excess of 60 hours per week and still have difficulty keeping up with all of our district obligations.

If the size of our districts grew by 30 or 40 percent, I obviously would have much less time to spend in each of my municipalities. The inescapable fact is that smaller districts equal better service and more responsiveness, and that alone is easily worth the extra buck or so per year it costs each of us to have a full complement of legislators.

More troubling is the damage that shrinking the Legislature would do to our political system.

First, larger districts would significantly increase the cost of campaigns. This would mean more begging for money from special interests, and it would make it more difficult for people of average means to even consider running.

Reducing the Legislature also would work against redistricting reform, which will be difficult enough to accomplish without the massive concurrent gerrymandering scrum that inevitably would result from throwing dozens of incumbents into the same districts to run against each other. Plus, whichever party is in power would draw the new and fewer district lines to ensure that they gain seats, resulting in far less political competition.

Further, certain types of voters effectively would be disenfranchised. That's because some groups tend to be geographically concentrated (Democrats, African Americans, urban-dwellers, etc.). Others tend to be widely dispersed (Republicans, rural-dwellers, farmers, etc.). With bigger districts, it is more likely that certain groups of voters would be marginalized within their districts, either innocently or intentionally through gerrymandering. Whichever the case, individual citizens would have a harder time being heard.

I also have spoken to a number of my colleagues from rural districts who adamantly oppose making districts bigger. Some now have to drive three hours or more to get from one end of their district to another. How much larger should these districts be? Would making them four-plus hours from end to end provide better representation to those living in rural areas? I don't think so.

Those who advocate fewer lawmakers often argue that we have more than most other states. This assertion is strictly true but misleading. It is unfair to compare the size of our Legislature to states like Idaho which have only a tiny fraction of the people we have. The fact is that in terms of the number of constituents per legislator, we are among the smallest legislatures in the nation.

Without unleashing a blizzard of statistics, let me point out a couple of facts. The average state representative in America represents 56,864 people. In Pennsylvania we represent 61,283. The average state senator represents 148,733 people; our senators represent 248,812. Thirty-six other states have House members who represent fewer people than we do, and 42 have senators with fewer constituents. The notion that our districts are so unusually small as to require a change in our constitution is just not supported by the facts.

Shrinking the Legislature would mean poorer service, less contact with your legislator, more expensive campaigns, greater redistricting mischief and more voter disenfranchisement, all to save a little more than a buck a year per person. This just doesn't seem like a good deal to me. Worse, the time and energy spent arguing about changing the number of legislators distracts from the real reforms that actually would make a difference in people's lives.