INDIAN RIVER COUNTY – The Board of County Commissioners Tuesday moved forward proposals to guide the county’s redistricting process now underway and to increase regulation of pain clinics and “pill mills,” but only after altering both proposals significantly in response to informed public input.
The county is required by the constitution to adjust its five commission districts after the census to equalize the population in each district while keeping districts contiguous.
Because of population growth between 2000 and 2010, the districts are now unequal, ranging from a high of 32,000 people in District 1, represented by Commissioner Wesley Davis, to 20,000 people in District 5, represented by Board Chairman Bob Solari, according to Sebastian Councilman Richard Gillmor who spoke at the meeting.
County Attorney Alan Polackwich said a goal of redistricting is to redraw districts so there is no more than a six percent difference in population between the districts with the greatest and smallest number of residents.
Besides the two constitutional requirements, the Commission’s initial draft guidelines for redistricting called for districts to be drawn so that municipalities would be contained as much as possible in a single district, with the idea that citizens would find it simpler to identify and contact their county commissioner if cities were represented by a single commissioner.
Addressing the Commission during the public hearing on the matter, Gillmor said one-city/one-commissioner was a bad idea.
Sebastian is currently divided between District 2, represented by Commissioner Joseph Flescher, and District 1, and Gillmor said he believes that gives the city more clout with the commission than it would have with only one representative.
“Drawing a line around a municipality and saying you are only going to have one representative is detrimental to the city,” he said.
Commissioner Gary Wheeler said all five commissioners are elected at-large and that any one of them can address the concerns of any citizen in the county.
Gillmor said he still felt there was a danger of diminished influence if district boundaries were redrawn to put Sebastian in a single district.
After several other people stepped up to the microphone and voiced the same opinion, commissioners discussed the issue briefly and voted 5-0 to remove the one-city/one-commissioner goal from redistricting guidelines.
The commissioners displayed similar willingness to change positions in response to new information when revising the county’s Pain Management Clinic Ordinance to bring it in line with state legislation passed since the ordinance was drafted in May.
As written, the ordinance limited the amount of Schedule II controlled substances pharmacies could distribute to 20 percent of total prescription drug sales.
Schedule II drugs include OxyContin, morphine, methadone, cocaine, amphetamines and other potent, commonly abused substances.
“If 20 percent or more of total prescriptions were for the most serious drugs, the pharmacy would be in violation of the ordinance,” said Polackwich.
In the public hearing, several independent pharmacy owners argued the ordinance was poorly conceived because some pharmacies might need to prescribe more than the allowed amount if they were adjacent to a hospital or served a hospice. They also raised the prospect of having to turn away legitimate pain medication patients to avoid a violation that could cost them their license to operate.
The owners also pointed out several layers of pharmacy regulation that already exist, along with a new type of monitoring slated to go into effect in the fall, to make the point that the county restriction would be redundant.
In a lengthy and detailed discussion between pharmacy owners and the Commission, Commissioners were persuaded that the 20-percent limit was unnecessary for public safety and detrimental to local business and voted 5-0 to strike the language from the ordinance as part of the revision process.