Changing the state’s redistricting process obviously isn’t going to be easy, but it has to happen.

Kansas House Speaker Doug Mays apparently is trying to sell the idea that the state’s redistricting process doesn’t need to be fixed because it isn’t broken.

“The redistricting process last year was messy, but I don’t know that it needs to be thrown out,” Mays reportedly told a Topeka writer.

Calling last year’s process for redrawing legislative and congressional districts “messy,” may be the understatement of the decade. The “mess” created by internal party bickering and the raw political tactics aimed at punishing individual legislators created bad feelings that not only stalled progress on important issues in the last session, but feeds continuing divisions this year.

Mays reportedly has declared already that a Senate bill to revamp the system has “zero” chance of passing. If that is so, Kansans should demand that Mays put another plan on the table. It simply shouldn’t be an option to allow last year’s redistricting debacle to be repeated after the 2010 Census.

The Senate plan put forth by Sen. Derek Schmidt, R-Independence, and Sen. Christine Downey, D-Newton, calls for an appointed commission to redraw district lines and submit its plan to the Legislature.

One criticism of the plan is that because members of the commission are appointed by top leaders in the three branches of government, politics still wouldn’t be removed from the redistricting process. That may be true, but the plan provides for political balance and at least removes the map-drawing process one step from the people (legislators) who will directly benefit or suffer from redistricting decisions.

Mays also makes the weak argument that legislators should handle redistricting because, as regional representatives, they best understand how communities should be divided. Anyone who watched last year’s redistricting process knows that preserving so-called “communities of interest” was an almost nonexistent priority for those drawing the maps. That was well illustrated by the final congressional maps, which, for better or worse, split the city of Lawrence almost equally between two U.S. House districts.

The point of having an independent commission, Schmidt explains, is to put the process in the hands of a commission “that everybody believes is composed of fair-minded people without an ax to grind… that’s in stark contrast to allowing legislators to draw our own districts where everybody has an ax to grind.”

There’s no doubt that the Kansas Legislature still is recovering from the wounds that were inflicted by the finely ground axes wielded during last year’s redistricting process. It’s a spectacle that shouldn’t be repeated. Keeping the current process just isn’t good enough. If Mays and others don’t like the plan proposed in the Senate bill, they should offer a better idea, but doing nothing shouldn’t be an option.