i've never recommended a "facile once-over of the results" (if we're going to start throwing quotes back and forth). the council will make sure that things are handled appropriately. if you believe that GGW's tool is facile, fine. your opinion, plus mine, rubbed together with a quarter won't get either of us far on a bus.

If this weren't an important issue, then-DC Mayor Tony Williams wouldn't have had to sue the federal government back in the mid-2000s to change the count dates from July to October (when the universities are in session).

the census counts residents, their tenure does not matter. the fact is that more than 1/8 of the city's residents live in what is currently ward 2, so its boundaries will have to shrink. there's no debating that or trying to spin the numbers.

IMHO, there is no need to redistrict, particularly in Ward 2, because the population boom is largely an artifact of the 70,000+ private university undergraduate students--90-95% of whom don't participate in DC civic life--moving in and out of DC twice a year. My voting precinct, for example, is home to 3500+ college students and had the lowest voter turnout in the city for the last two elections.

If Alma Gates were an elected or public official, or a journalist, I would agree that her comments should be more circumspect, but she's not.

Much more troubling to me is Ms. DePillis' choice--one she has made several times in the recent past--of taking a lazy, inflammatory potshot at the C-100 rather than digging in and researching the important issues,

the law says that the wards are to follow census tracts as much as possible. with that in mind, we figured tracts would make more sense to use, not just for simplicity, but because it made sense to attempt to adhere to the law.

whether gates was speaking for the cmte of 100 or not is somewhat irrelevant. as a public figure, you have to think that what you say has the potential to reflect on groups you represent, whether on or off the clock. especially when you're commenting on a topic that is in the wheelhouse of said organization.

additionally, she chose to be somewhat nasty towards "bloggers," and david alpert in particular. it was unnecessary and personal the way she handled it. if she feels bad about the negative attention she's received in return, perhaps she's learned a valuable lesson.

If you had spent a bit of time reading the responses to Gates' post--rather than "gerrymandering" her words to suit your own purposes--you would have seen that everyone disagreed with her about David Alpert's tool and its usefulness.

Regarding the redistricting tool, IMHO it would be much more useful at a census block level. As I posted on a Georgetown Dish article about "G'town's Population Boom," most of the population increase is GU students, which were undercounted (and considerably fewer in number) in 2000. (http://www.georgetowndish.com/thedish/georgetown%E2%80%99s-population-didn%E2%80%99t-boom-much-afterall#comments) To an even greater degree, a similar situation has occurred with GWU.

For five months in 2010, I was a Crew Leader supervising a total of 30 Enumerators and we covered parts of Census tracts all over the city, including Georgetown, American University Park, Southwest, and Capitol Hill.

We discovered many of the new condos in Lower G'town are second (or third) homes, and while DC gets the property tax benefits, it doesn't get to count folks residing there as part of the DC population--forgoing federal matching payments and income tax revenue from them.

Prior to our May 1st start (Non-Response Follow Up--NRFU--or nar-foo), there was a huge push to enumerate all of the college students living in DC on April 1st, 2010, to assure that DC would receive the benefit of Federal matching payments for each warm body. Although federal payments are simply transfers of federal tax dollars to DC coffers, this shell game provides a fig leaf of justification for the massive subsidies these non-profit educational behemoths receive from DC in forgone property taxes.

This is why a "block map game" of the statistics is crucial.

As a result we now have the southside of U Street right across from the 3D police headquarters, reporting to Georgetown and an entire blog "Borderstan" and associated neighborhood identity were created to overcome the artificial boundaries that were made to conform to the census tracks.

That said, I really want to thank David for putting this tool for examining the options out into the public, so they can see what goes on at the committee level sooner than later. We did not have enough time in 2000 to let the public know about the impacts of the Ward change last time, so Ward 1 lost part of U Street, and kept part of Woodley Park west of Rock Creek Park, which immediately opted out of Ward 1, to be represented by a Ward 3 ANC.

As a member of a Ward taskforce in 2000. We cut out pieces of paper and had to do calculations on the fly to balance the SMD's. This tool will be extremely useful for both the Ward and Citywide taskforces to be able to use to visualize the impacts of these decisions.

Bravo to David Alpert and shame on Alma Gates.