Council is actually meeting about this right now so it may even be post-determined as I type this. Anyway, the "final" redistricting options were interesting.
The New Orleans City Council has released a second round of proposed changes to its map of council districts, and with a final vote just days away, most of the new maps add a major change to district borders that didn't appear in any earlier proposals.
The Lower 9th Ward is shifted out of District E and into District C in three of the four newly drawn maps, which all aim to redistribute the city's residents among the five council districts based on new population data from the 2020 census.
Moving the Lower Nine out of District E would be a huge practical and symbolic shift. It's no surprise that nobody the T-P could find to comment on it seems to like the idea. That includes current District E councilman Oliver Thomas who says he is "vehemently" opposed. Thomas correctly points out that a lot of New Orleans East residents of the current generation have family roots or ties to the Lower Nine. The two neighborhoods have also been geographically severed from the rest of the city by the Industrial Canal for over a century now and face similar challenges. It's hard to imagine them not sharing representation. (That is in any scenario that doesn't involve expanding the council, which is definitely something they should do but won't consider this time around.)
Anyway, what I'm thinking here is they wrote this controversial shift into three out of the four maps being considered in order to ensure that the one map that doesn't do that is the one that will pass. We'll see. Should know soon.
Update: Seems like this was sort of correct. Here is what happened.
On Monday, the consultants presented the council with four new draft maps based on those public comments. Controversially, three out of four of the maps moved the Lower 9th Ward from District E — which includes eastern New Orleans — to District C — which includes the French Quarter, Marigny, Bywater and Algiers.
Based on feedback — in particular pushback from Lower 9th Ward residents who wanted to remain in District E — the consultants created two new maps that were presented for the first time today. The council ended up choosing one of those two maps.
Some residents complained that because the final maps were only released roughly two hours before the council voted, the public never got the chance to meaningfully comment on it.
“I don’t see us included anywhere in this process,” Morgan Clevenger said on Wednesday. “It’s very, very discouraging.”
They didn't shove the Lower Nine into District C. But they also ended up springing two whole new maps on everyone at the meeting. This was after people complained the four maps that came out on Monday were themselves published too late for the public to respond. In short, nobody is happy with the timeline. I think the reason it went down this way was because the city's new fall election cycle created too many conflicts to get the process started before the new council was installed in January which is way too late.
JP Morrell says he wants to fix this. And it looks like he's going to offer another intriguing fix to an issue we mentioned earlier.
Morrell said currently, the charter only has a deadline, but no mandated start date. He said that his charter amendment would force the council to start the redistricting process as soon as the decennial census is finalized.
Other residents have expressed frustration that the process didn’t allow the council to consider expanding the council by shrinking the existing districts and adding new ones. The current council is made up of five district council members, who are elected by the residents in that district, and two at-large members, who are elected through a city-wide vote.
Some similarly sized American cities have much larger councils. Cleveland, which has roughly the same population, has 17 council members representing distinct geographical areas of the city. But the number of council districts in New Orleans is set in the city charter, meaning the council can’t change it through regular legislation. Charter changes require voter approval through a local election.
Morrell said the second thing his charter amendment would do is give the council flexibility to change the number of districts.
Ideally we get them to expand to enough councilmembers that they are forced to move City Hall into the Superdome. But we'll have time to figure that out later.
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