Topeka ? With grudging acceptance from minority Democrats, a House committee endorsed a bill Wednesday redrawing the chamber’s 125 districts and sent it to the floor for debate next week.

The new map, approved by the House Redistricting Committee on a voice vote, creates three new House seats in Johnson County and one in Sedgwick County. It also reduces the number of districts in Kansas City and in some rural areas, where population has declined in the past decade.

Eight incumbents just one a Republican would be paired off in four new districts for this year’s elections.

For Democrats, now outnumbered in the House 79-46, that’s an improvement over earlier versions of the map, including one which would have collapsed 10 districts now held by Democrats into five.

Last year, during initial redistricting work, Democrats complained of being shut out of the process. With the latest proposal, the committee’s majority Republicans gave Democrats the final decision on which districts to collapse.

“It got to a point where we had two maps that were acceptable to the majority party, so we deferred to the minority party to decide where the ultimate collapse would be,” said committee Chairman Michael O’Neal, R-Hutchinson.

“We respect the minority party’s decision when anything they might do would not affect the majority party,” he said.

House Minority Leader Jim Garner, D-Coffeyville, said the latest proposal isn’t good for Democrats but is the best of a group of bad options.

“The Republicans had a gun to our head,” Garner said. “We just got to choose the caliber.”

Legislators are redrawing congressional, legislative and Kansas State Board of Education districts to account for shifts in population as shown in the 2000 census.

Efforts to redraw Kansas’ four U.S. House districts stalled in the Senate Reapportionment Committee, which had been scheduled to meet Wednesday for a third straight day but won’t convene again until Monday.

Groundwork for the Kansas House redistricting was done last year by a special, 34-member legislative committee that gathered testimony across the state and drew up preliminary maps.

The final version that emerged Wednesday keeps the cities of Atchison and Hays intact and maintains the same number of seats from southeast Kansas. All three were contentious issues in earlier proposals.

“The Holy Grail of the perfect map is just that, the Holy Grail, and it will never be found,” Rep. Doug Mays, R-Topeka, told fellow committee members. “But what we have found is a workable product with broad bipartisan support.”

When the House debates the bill, any amendments would force a review of the entire map.

“The debate will take some time,” said Majority Leader Shari Weber, R-Herington. “We’ll probably go in early and spend all day on the floor.”

GOP committee members are confident they have the votes to pass the latest map.

“This one will pass,” O’Neal said. “It’s got enough bipartisan support, and we want to get it out of the way early.”