Panel may be asked to draw council districts
A citizen commission may be appointed by the Columbus City Council and the mayor to draw district boundaries if voters adopt a plan to expand the council and divide the city into nine wards.
That is part of the recommendation from Edward Johnson, the council’s director of legislative affairs, who led the research into how the city could draw those lines.
Johnson called it a starting place for the council. “There might be things they like or don’t like,” he said.
Council members are considering whether to ask voters to add two seats to the seven-member council and elect one member from each district. Elections still would be citywide for all members.
A charter review committee that Mayor Andrew J. Ginther and Councilman Shannon G. Hardin appointed last summer concluded that the city needed to add seats and adopt a “district at-large” system that is more common among smaller governments in the western United States.
In a special election in August 2016, voters overwhelmingly rejected a citizen-led effort to add council members and create district representation.
Under the current proposal, the council and the mayor each would appoint two members to the commission. They would jointly select a fifth member. Elected officials, registered lobbyists, candidates for elected office and city employees would be ineligible.
That group would come up with three proposals to deliver to the council, which would either choose one or reject all of the plans.
It would host at least nine public meetings in different areas of the city and release the proposals to the public at least 30 days before submitting them to the council. Data used to draw the boundaries also must be released to the public.
Redistricting would happen after each census, every 10 years.
The council scheduled a public hearing to discuss the proposal at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday at City Hall, 90 W. Broad St.
“I’ve asked staff to present a thoughtful, fair and inclusive process for drawing the boundaries of residential zones,” Hardin said in a statement. “I look forward to a thorough discussion at the hearing.”
Johnson said the recommendation is based on best practices from research done at New York University, Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and the Congressional Research Service, among others.
The council does not have to accept Johnson’s recommendation. It can change the plan before deciding to place a proposal on the ballot.
The council members must decide before their summer break at the end of July whether they want to put a proposal on the November ballot.
The charter review committee did not suggest how the city should draw its boundaries, only that it adopt them and continue to elect candidates at-large. Committee Chairwoman Stefanie Coe said she likes using a citizen commission instead of leaving it to council alone.
“It’s pretty clear that drawing boundaries and district lines is one of the things that gets litigated a lot,” she said. “I don’t think we felt like we had the expertise or time to delve into the best way of doing that.”