From today's News-Gazette:
City council members are elected on a nonpartisan basis, though the party affiliation of most council members is generally well known.
"If it's partisan, districts 1, 2 and 4 are Democratic, but that didn't have anything to do with it," McIntosh said.
The new districts are bigger and most of them moved to the west, he said.
Voting against the map were Marci Dodds, who represents District 4, Gina Jackson of District 1, and Ken Pirok, who represents District 5. All are Democrats.
Dodds read a statement saying she wanted a map with "a minimum of change, logically done, since we will probably be doing this again in four years with the regular census." She also said she wanted a map that "kept the council as nonpartisan as possible."
After the meeting, she said she thought her central Champaign district had been changed from a centrist district to one that leaned more heavily Democratic. She said she thought the other districts had also been made more Democratic or Republican than before.
"The thing about District 4 is it's always been the center of the city," she said. "There's Democrats and Republicans. It's always been very balanced. I feel very strongly you have to have a strong middle to have good city government."
Jackson said she was concerned that the neighborhood around Franklin Middle School, which formerly had been split between districts 1 and 3, is now a part of District 4. "I believe we probably could have picked a better solution," she said.
Pirok said he thought McIntosh "railroaded" the map through without sufficient input from council members.
Pirok said his district added territory to the east from Dodd's old district, which was unusual because most districts were growing to the west. Dodds also objected to losing the territory to District 5.
Discuss.
Any link to the new map? I'd like to see what's changed. I'll DVR the City Council meeting that runs at 1am, but a weblink would cool.
I think you can find it here.
Map #1 is the new map.
Isn't Urbana in more need of a new map?
Urbana's not really adding enough new residents to cause things to get so out of balance.
And any new map that comes out of this Urbana Council will be just as gerrymandered as the present one anyway.
gerrymander -- what an interesting word. Accoridng to http://www.thefreedictionary.com/gerrymander
Word History: "An official statement of the returns of voters for senators give[s] twenty nine friends of peace, and eleven gerrymanders." So reported the May 12, 1813, edition of the Massachusetts Spy. A gerrymander sounds like a strange political beast, which it is, considered from a historical perspective. This beast was named by combining the word salamander, "a small lizardlike amphibian," with the last name of Elbridge Gerry, a former governor of Massachusetts
a state noted for its varied, often colorful political fauna. Gerry (whose name, incidentally, was pronounced with a hard g, though gerrymander is now commonly pronounced with a soft g) was immortalized in this word because an election district created by members of his party in 1812 looked like a salamander. According to one version of gerrymander's coining, the shape of the district attracted the eye of the painter Gilbert Stuart, who noticed it on a map in a newspaper editor's office. Stuart decorated the outline of the district with a head, wings, and claws and then said to the editor, "That will do for a salamander!" "Gerrymander!" came the reply. The word is first recorded in April 1812 in reference to the creature or its caricature, but it soon came to mean not only "the action of shaping a district to gain political advantage" but also "any representative elected from such a district by that method." Within the same year gerrymander was also recorded as a verb.