Shady redistricting plan leaves only 1 voter in a tax referendum

(Image credit: iStock)

published 28 August 2015

This past spring, the city of Columbia, Missouri created a very gerrymandered community improvement district (CID), a special designation of territory within which voters can levy extra taxes to fund projects like roadwork or landscaping of public green spaces. Per state law, if there are no voters registered in a CID, property owners get to make the tax decision instead.

That was property owners' plan in Columbia until they found out that a single University of Missouri college student, 23-year-old Jen Henderson, is actually a registered voter in the new district. While the CID was carefully designed to exclude residences, Henderson lives in a guest house in the area and registered to vote at that address.

Now, Henderson is the sole deciding voter in a referendum to impose a 0.5 percent tax on goods — including groceries — sold within the CID. She's leaning toward a "no" vote, especially after the CID's director asked her to unregister and forfeit her vote. "Taxing [nearby residents'] food is kind of sad," too, Henderson says, particularly when the CID director "is going to be making like $70,000 a year off of this whole deal. These people make a quarter of that. They can barely afford to go buy food, and you’re taxing their food."

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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