Supervisors approve new district maps

The Board of Supervisors on Thursday approved maps of the new districts they will run in for the coming decade - districts that Clerk-Recorder Alan Glover said are very similar to the old districts.

"The districts really look pretty much as they did in the 1970s," Glover told the board. "Since we only grew by a half percent a year, we're in much better shape than most jurisdictions in the state."

Those maps pretty much divide the capital into fourquadrants except for Ward 3 on the southeast quarter of town, which Glover called "the most tortured district." Since most of Ward 3 is lightly populated, he had to include a square chunk of urban south Carson to make the four wards roughly equal in population.

That area is between Roop and the bypass route, south of Colorado and north of Koontz.

The other change was to increase the population of Ward 1 by moving residents south of King and north of West Fifth between Carson Street and Thompson out of Ward 4.

Where there was a spread of 804 votes between Ward 2, the most populous, and Ward 3, the least populous, the gap between high and low is now just 11 residents.

Glover told the Board of Supervisors that is well within the requirement that districts be within 5 percent of the same population.

The populations are now:

- Ward One, 13,826, represented by Supervisor Karen Abowd, roughly the northwest part of town.

- Ward Two, 13,815, represented by Supervisor Shelly Aldean, roughly the northeast part of town.

- Ward Three, 13,815, represented by Supervisor John McKenna, roughly the southeast part of town.

- Ward Four, 13,818, represented by Supervisor Molly Walt, roughly the southwest part of town.

The board also voted to begin accepting advertising on passenger bus shelters in the city, and approved the sheriff's office to accept a $43,700 Homeland Security grant to purchase digital forensic equipment for use in crime lab investigations.

Health and Human Services Director Marena Works told the board that Animal Services has received checks totaling $71,773.07 from two Carson estates. The Coleman V. and Billie E. Hughes Living Trust wrote the division a $55,000 check, requesting that half the money go to the fund for construction of a new animal shelter and the other half to the animal care budget. The estate of Arthur Mertzke wrote the division a $16,773.07 check to help cover costs of caring for animals.

Finally, the board gave its blessing to a series of water applications designed to improve distribution of water among Carson City, Lyon County and the town of Minden. Supervisors were assured that if the intertie between Carson and Douglas is ever terminated, Carson City's water rights would return to the capital.

Bruce Scott told the board the changes in those 10 water rights applications are part of the plan to improve delivery of the water and expand the "regionalization of our water system."

The state engineer makes the final decision on those applications, but Scott said no protests have been filed to block them.