Aurora City Council to vote again on new ward map
The Aurora City Council must vote again on a new ward map for the city.
While aldermen, after weeks of discussion, adopted a new map earlier this week, it turns out a last-minute amendment took too many people out of one ward.
So, City Council members will try again at a special meeting at 1 p.m. Monday in the council chambers, second floor, City Hall, 44 E. Downer Place.
Aldermen considered several maps at this week’s council meeting, settling on a map known as 2A. It was seen as a compromise between all the considerations City Council members had to take into account in making new wards.
At the last minute, aldermen made an amendment to map 2A to take several census blocks out of the 3rd Ward, and put them into the 9th Ward. The blocks in the Summerlin subdivision had been in the 9th Ward under the old map.
The amendment would have changed the 3rd Ward from having 42% voting age Latinos, to having 43%. It slightly strengthened the ward as having Latino voting strength.
But in so doing, it actually took enough people out of the 3rd Ward to mean it did not meet another necessary guideline, a Constitutional guideline keeping the wards as close to each other in population as possible.
Court guidelines over the years have said representative districts must be within 5% of each other in total population, to adhere to the one man, one vote doctrine.
The problem was discovered as the city’s redistricting consultant, Frank Calabrese, was finalizing the analytics for the final map, according to a press release from City Hall.
To rebalance the map, the census blocks must remain in the 3rd Ward, as denoted in the original map 2A, the release said.
The map continues to be available for public review on the city’s website at www. aurora-il.org/ProposedWardMaps.
In addition, the City
Council will consider technical amendments to the ordinance adopting the map that reflect the council’s position on disputing the 2020 U.S. Census results, efforts to conduct a special census, direction with respect to a subsequent redistricting of the wards of the city following a special census and other matters related to the implementation of the new map.