The votes are still close on the Shelby County Commission as the group takes the first vote Monday, Feb. 6, on its third try at redistricting.

The plan that’s up for the first of three readings is a conversion of the 13-member, five-district body to 13 single-member districts covering all of Shelby County.

It takes a seven-vote majority to pass any plan on the first two readings of the ordinance. It takes a nine-vote, two-thirds majority to approve any plan on third and final reading.

“It’s put up or shut up. We had seven. We might not,” said commissioner Wyatt Bunker, an advocate of the five-district plan that lost its seven-vote majority two weeks ago. “You pontificate like you’ve got all the answers. But you don’t have the votes.”

Backers of 13 single-member districts had just enough last week for a committee recommendation after the Memphis branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the local Democratic Party began calling publicly for such a plan.

“It seems to have the prevailing sentiment,” said commissioner Walter Bailey. “We need to give this process some traction.”

The commission is also likely to amend the single-member district lines. But the proposal’s basic structure would guarantee four commissioners for four suburban districts and seven districts with a 60 percent or greater African-American voting-age population.

Each result is an increase of one seat for each constituency, and each corresponds to the percentage of each constituency in the county in the 2010 U.S. Census.

There are some hurdles. The four suburban districts include an African-American population that is 25 percent of the total suburban population outside Memphis. One of the two Rossville election precincts holding the bulk of that population is in a “city” district, the other in a “suburban” district.

“That is being suppressed,” said Josh Whitehead, the Office of Planning and Development official working with the commission on the lines. “There is no way to capture that population as a suburban black district.”

Election precincts are the building blocks for districts. A precinct cannot be split between two districts. And precincts are of varying sizes in terms of voters, meaning some large precincts have had their own influence on district lines.

Commissioner Mike Ritz still wants to see changes that would put all of a suburban municipality in one district as well as the annexation reserve area for that city or town.

Commissioner Brent Taylor argued that the Cordova area he represents would be divided among four single-member districts on the current map.

He also said single-member districts are “hypersensitive” to migration because of their smaller populations.

“It doesn’t take much migration to really move the needle,” Taylor said. “A decade is a long time.”

His example is the proposed District 7, which is 63.7 percent African-American voting-age population. If 7,000 people moved out of the North Memphis-Uptown-Downtown district in a decade, that would be a 10 percent deviation from the optimal size of a district.

Ritz said it is unlikely that such a migration would be all black or all white, which would affect the racial percentages that are a key element in redistricting plans being constitutional and meeting one person-one vote legal standards.

The other debate likely to surface Monday is a general discussion about the best kind of representation.

“There are people out there who don’t know who we are,” said former county commissioner Edith Moore. “How do we represent people like that?”

But the current commissioner who beat Moore in the 2010 county elections disputed that.

“I’ve heard that a million times,” said commissioner Justin Ford, the most vocal advocate of tweaking and keeping the current five-district structure. “That’s so cliché.”

“I can put it to the test,” Moore replied.

“I don’t need you to pick someone at random,” Ford shot back. “That’s insulting to me to say people don’t know who represents them. There are leaders in this community that people don’t believe in anymore.”