FORT WAYNE – Just a few months after being elected to office, Fort Wayne City Council members will begin changing the boundaries that determine which constituents they represent.

But residents shouldn’t expect drastic line changing, as several council members said this redistricting process will be relatively minor and incumbents will be protected.

The council last month appointed members John Crawford, R-at large, and Glynn Hines, D-6th, to begin working with city staffers to draw maps for the council’s six districts. The two members were key players during the last redrawing of district lines that accommodated the 2006 annexation of much of Aboite Township.

Crawford said he knows some politicians have been accused of trying to shape districts to gain politically, but he said that has not been the case historically in Fort Wayne and won’t be the case this year.

He said it’s unlikely the districts will be dramatically altered and that any changes made will follow neighborhood or geographic boundaries. The new boundaries would take effect after the next city election in 2015.

“We’ll try to make it as logical as possible and not have unusually shaped districts,” he said.

The city has a total population of nearly 254,000, which means each of the six council districts should have about 42,300 residents.

Despite lines being redrawn fairly recently, there are differences in population across the city’s districts. The northwest 3rd District is the largest with 47,910 residents, while the southern 5th and 6th districts have fewer than 40,000 residents, according to city figures.

Julia Vaughn, policy director with Common Cause Indiana, said that with the computerization of the redistricting process, it’s possible to create districts that are extremely close in population, possibly within dozens of people of each other.

She said it also is important for each community to decide what is most critical in creating the districts – making the population sizes match, keeping neighborhoods together or following obvious geographic boundaries, such as rivers.

“Before you start divvying people up, it really makes sense to have a conversation with the people in your community on what you feel is important,” she said.

Minimizing change

The timing of the council’s redistricting will affect how it draws the new border lines, according to Councilman Mitch Harper, R-4th.

Because it’s coming so soon after residents voted for council members, it makes sense not to change those districts too much, he said.

“The public’s expectation is there is going to be some changes around the edges, not a wholesale movement of council members,” he said.

Harper’s district has 42,035 people and is the closest to the citywide district average. The area that includes Aboite, Waynedale and Time Corners might not need to be altered at all.

There is no rule for how close the districts must be in population, and making exact matches would be impossible because districts must respect existing voter precinct boundaries.

Joe Bonahoom, council attorney, said in the past, revised districts have been rejected despite being only a few percentage points different in population, while others have been validated despite having fairly large differences.

He said plans with deviations smaller than 10 percent typically are safe from challenge.

“We shouldn’t have any trouble getting it a little closer than that,” he said.

Crawford said it might be possible to leave the 1st, 2nd and 4th districts untouched because they are close to the city average in population.

Bonahoom said there are neighborhoods that could naturally be moved from the 5th to 6th District and to move from the 3rd to 5th District to balance the population.

Public notice

After head count, he said the council must also pay attention to minority populations and voting blocs, but he said that is not likely to be a problem in this redistricting.

Harper said it’s important to give the public time to comment on the proposed new districts – and possibly try drawing up their own proposals – before approving them. He said Chicago recently approved new aldermanic districts on the same night they were introduced.

Councilman Geoff Paddock, D-5th, has the district with the smallest population – 38,600. He said he is indifferent to how it is enlarged, but he wants to ensure that the city keeps neighborhoods together. He said it might make more sense for his district to expand to the north, because the adjacent 3rd District is too high in population.

Paddock also said it’s important to present proposed maps to the public for comment before approving them. This could include holding a public hearing and taking the maps to area neighborhood partnerships.

Dramatic changes to the district would likely take more time, and Council President Tom Smith, R-1st, said he would like the new maps to be done by the end of March. He said computers can now quickly calculate districts that balance demographics, so he didn’t believe such a schedule was unreasonable.

Plus, this effort likely will not be contentious, because the city hasn’t grown dramatically since the last redistricting and most people are pleased with the current districts.

This means there likely is little desire to create a central-city district made of the downtown and surrounding neighborhoods, an idea broached in the past.

“I’m expecting minimal changes,” he said. “The six districts we have work pretty well.”

Incumbents

While members of the City Council expressed their desire to redraw the lines without political influence, many admitted one influence will be a factor: where incumbent district council representatives live.

The council has long had a practice of protecting incumbents during redistricting by keeping them in their current district. Not doing so could force two sitting council members to face each other in a future election.

Crawford said he believes this practice will continue this year, noting the council would like to keep representatives with the people who elected them.

While a council member is legally supposed to represent the district that elected him, regardless of any subsequent map changes, several council members said this practice can become tricky or confusing in practice.

In 2006, The Journal Gazette found four of six district council members were proposing projects in their new district boundaries, despite not technically representing those areas.

Vaughn, with Common Cause, said her group prefers that redistricting be done in a way that is blind to where incumbents live and instead reflects what best represents the community.

“When you draw districts around incumbents, that looks like politicians choosing their voters, not voters choosing their politicians,” she said.

The state legislature’s two bodies took opposing directions on incumbents when drawing their lines last year.

The House ignored incumbents, creating districts with multiple sitting legislators and others with none. The Senate, however, drew lines ensuring that incumbents were able to remain in their districts, a practice that Senate President Pro Tem David Long defended at the time.

Paddock, who lives on the border of the 5th District, said protecting incumbents is a good thing because it helps reduce some of the politics of the process. Otherwise, officials could try to intentionally remove members from their districts, giving them more difficult re-election campaigns.

“I don’t think it’s good policy to try to gerrymander somebody out of their district,” he said.

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