On paper, Tooele County would seem to have a disproportionately loud voice in the state Legislature. After all, four senators represent pieces of the county, with two more representatives carrying the county’s banner into the House.

Take a closer look, however, and you’ll see that of those six representatives only one — Rep. Jim Gowans, D-Tooele — actually lives in Tooele County. One of the six, Sen. Ralph Okerlund, lives in Monroe, roughly 200 miles from Tooele. The county’s other three senators are virtually unknown to their constituency here, with their main focuses on the Wasatch Front (Sen. Brent Goodfellow, D-West Valley City), Utah County (Sen. Mark Madsen, R-Lehi) and Box Elder County (Sen. Peter Knudson, R-Brigham City) respectively. Only Rep. Ronda Rudd Menlove, R-Garland, is visibly active in Tooele County, and she also answers to Box Elder County voters.

How the rapidly growing Tooele Valley came to be represented by folks from the much-smaller communities of Monroe, Brigham City and Garland is a question with one simple answer: gerrymandering.

The Legislature has been drawing its own boundaries for years with the main goal of each redistricting being getting members of your own party elected to seats they might not otherwise get elected to. The practice has worked out well for some politicians but not so well for Tooele County, which has been carved up without rhyme or reason and now finds itself, in practice, relatively underrepresented in the Legislature.

It’s time for this to stop.

We applaud the efforts of former state representative Merrill Nelson, of Grantsville, in working to create an independent redistricting commission. Nelson, a Republican with the Fair Boundaries Coalition, is bravely taking on the entrenched political establishment by pushing for a 2010 ballot initiative to give voters the opportunity to create the 11-member commission. If he’s successful and voters approve the measure, Utah would join 21 other states across the nation with similar independent bodies regulating redistricting.

We encourage voters to and elected leaders to get behind the Fair Boundaries Coalition and support the idea of impartial redistricting. This isn’t a move intended to benefit one party over another. But it is an excellent move to ensure that Tooele County, as well as many other parts of the state, get adequate local representation.