Rep. Greg Smith is feeling much better about two new Senate redistricting maps submitted today in the Senate reapportionment committee.

Smith plans on challenging Sen. Tim Owens for the District 8 Senate seat this summer and was upset at previous maps which placed Smith’s house just outside District 8, meaning he couldn’t challenge Owens, who is also the chairman of the committee.

But the two new maps, one drawn by Sen. Carolyn McGinn of Sedgwick and one by Sen. Chris Steineger of Kansas City, leave District 8’s boundaries much closer to how it has been for the last 10 years.

“From what I’ve seen, these two that came out today are much more fair maps,” Smith said. Smith, who has already filed to run for the Senate, testified before Owens and the rest of the committee last week and criticized the maps.

In a separate redistricting issue, the governor’s chief of staff, David Kensinger, testified before the committee urging senators to give Leavenworth County its own Senate district. He argued that Leavenworth was the only one of Kansas’ 10 largest counties that was not made up of a self-contained or predominately self-contained district.

Neither the current map nor any of the proposed maps give Leavenworth County a self-contained district, as most combine it with Jefferson or Douglas counties.

The other main point of contention at the committee meeting was whether any senate district should be collapsed to add another to the Johnson County area, which grew by more than 93,000 residents from 2000 to 2010.

Sen. Ralph Ostmeyer of Grinnell proposed that the committee avoid collapsing any districts during the redistricting process, and Owens said the members would vote on that issue at their next meeting in one week.