COW Instructs City Staff to Draw Up Two More Proposed Maps for Redistricting

Amid a packed crowd at City Hall this past Wednesday evening, the Committee of the Whole met in a special session to rethink ward boundaries, and ultimately, voting district lines, to reflect population changes in the 2010 census.  

Voting lines must be redrawn by law once every decade when the census is completed.

said that while the boundaries proposed at the City Council Meeting on July 12 did rebalance the population between wards, they broke up neighborhoods and should be reconfigured to address the legislative priority of keeping neighborhoods intact.

Alderman Noah Fiedler and Alderman Tracy Snead agreed that they would like to see neighborhoods kept together if possible.  

"I'm good with neighborhoods," said Alderman Keith Werner, "but I'm also good with staff handling it," he said of efforts to revisit ward boundaries.

The Committee instructed Finance Director Sharon Mueller to create two more proposed maps, bringing the total to three, and to e-mail them to all aldermen by Friday, July 22, if possible.

The original plan will remain on the table for the upcoming Common Council Meeting on July 26.

"We were trying to keep it as simple and clean as possible," said Mueller of the initial proposal, which required three draft attempts to get all the proper numbers and formulas to line up correctly before a workable solution emerged.

The resulting plan, which successfully balanced population counts but may have fallen short by splitting neighborhoods and creating oddly shaped districts, will eliminate one ward, dropping the City from 17 wards down to 16.  It also impacts districts 2 and 3 by eliminating 1 alderman out of the 3 currently representing Lake District residents. 

Snead complimented Mueller's work on the project and said she believed the Finance Manager's team "objectively do their jobs."  

Following typical protocol for COW meetings, Mayor Kathy Chiaverotti explained to the audience that public comment would not be permitted during the meeting, but that there would be an opportunity to comment at the next Common Council meeting on Tuesday, July 26, at City Hall.