New council districts look to shake up 2023 election
While it’s not a switch to voting “wards,” where residents of a section of a community elect a representative for that specific area, the new Columbus City Council Districting map still threatens to shake up the council’s membership for the next election in 2023.
For one thing, the new map, chosen from three options proposed by a fivemember citizen advisory group known as the Council Residential Districting Commission, divides the city into nine council districts. That means two new members will be added to the current seven-member council.
For another, the move to the new districting system — approved by voters in 2018 to achieve more geographic diversity — allows only one council member to reside in each district, even though the entire city can vote for each candidate as they do now.
That will potentially force Council President Shannon Hardin, President Pro Tem Elizabeth Brown and member Shayla Favor to run against each other in a race only one can win. That’s because all three council members currently reside in District 7, which encompasses Downtown, Franklinton, the Near East Side, the Short North and other areas south of Ohio State University.
Although it never came up during debate at the Dec. 13 meeting that three current council members reside in the same district under the map the council unanimously approved, “surely they knew,” said Paul Beck, professor emeritus of political science at Ohio State University.
All three versions of the districting commission’s proposed maps had Hardin and Favor — neighbors who live blocks from each other on the Near East Side near Franklin Park — in the same district. Only the one chosen by the council also put Brown into the same district, creating what now appears would be a three-way race to retain a council seat.
Beck said it is very interesting “that they opted for this particular map,” because Hardin and Brown “are both high fliers,” progressives who appear to have ambitions for higher office.
Hardin’s name regularly is mentioned in speculation as a potential future Columbus mayoral candidate, Beck said, while Brown could someday seek a federal office, following in the footsteps of her father, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat who is Ohio’s senior senator.
Council member Brown launched a bid earlier this year to get appointed to the Franklin County Board of Commissioners. However, Democratic state Rep. Erica Crawley edged out Brown by gaining more votes for the appointment from the Franklin County Democratic Party Central Committee, 63-54.
Hardin and Brown are currently the highest-ranking members of the city
council. Hardin is president, and his political mentor is former Columbus mayor and Democratic powerbroker Michael B. Coleman. Brown is president pro tem, meaning she assumes Hardin’s leadership role when he is absent. She also is chair of the finance committee, perhaps council’s most important committee, as it oversees the city’s spending.
Favor was appointed to the city council on Jan. 14, 2019, to fill the unexpired term of Jaiza Page, who was newly elected as a Franklin County Court of Common Pleas judge. Before joining the council, Favor worked in Columbus City Attorney Zach Klein’s office as an assistant city attorney assigned to environmental lawsuits involving nuisance properties in a certain zone of the city.
For Hardin, Brown and Favor, being packed into the same district leaves them with options: Run against fellow incumbents in District 7, as well as any other resident who can gain enough signatures to get on the 2023 ballot in the district; move to another part of the city into a politically less-crowded district; or not run for city council, which could include running for some other political office.
Neither Hardin, Brown nor Favor would address their plans for 2023 at the current time when contacted by The Dispatch.
“I’ve not begun to think about the 2023 election,” Hardin said in a statement, adding that his immediate concerns include the holidays and the city’s 2022 budget.
Favor said in a statement that she is currently “squarely focused on addressing Columbus’ housing crisis and making our neighborhoods safer.
“The districting commission had one clear task as laid out by the city charter, which was to draw nine districts that were the best geographic representation of the city of Columbus,” Brown said in an email.
“We are a large and diverse city, and the guardrails of the charter amendment had only the most narrow allowance for population variance, so all the final maps had some incumbent members drawn together,” she said.
Just as intriguing about the new district map is that no current or memberelect taking office next year lives in four of the nine new districts. That means those areas are wide open for any resident there to seek election to the council.
If someone is not elected from a district by voters, the other council members would appoint a resident of that district to serve on the body.
While it would seem unlikely that no one from those districts would seek election, Columbus — Ohio’s largest city with more than 900,000 residents — could muster only four candidates on the November ballot for three open council seats. And that was after the city had gone through COVID disruptions and mandates, a fatal shooting of an unarmed Black man by a city police officer, a second straight year of record homicides, multi-million-dollar settlements paid over police abuses of force during the 2020 protests, and other controversies.
The currently open council districts are Districts 2 and 6, generally located on the Far West Side between Grove City and Hilliard, with a thin slice of the city’s District 2 splitting through Hilliard and Upper Arlington along Route 33 to include areas to the north of those cities.; District 1, which surrounds Worthington to the west, north and east; and District 5, which generally stretches from the Northeast Side between New Albany and Westerville and extends southwest around Gahanna to Interstate 670 near John Glenn Columbus International Airport.
The other four city council members — current incumbents Rob Dorans and Emmanuel Remy, and members-elect Nick Bankston and Lourdes Barroso de Padilla, who will take office next month after winning in November — each are the sole members living in their new districts. That means they won’t have to run against each other, but still could face a future opponent.
Dorans and Remy live in Districts 3 and 4, respectively. Members-elect Barroso de Padilla and Bankston live in Districts 8 and 9, respectively.
To view the new map showing the nine council residence districts online, go to https://bit.ly/3yhwmqt. By checking boxes on the side, you can add layers to the map to include public places, Columbus City Schools, city police and fire stations, Franklin County voting precincts, city communities/ neighborhoods, and area commission boundaries.
You also can view the three maps (A, B, C) and the three rounds of changes that were made to them before the council finally chose Map A, Round 3. The final map approved by council changed the labels on the nine council districts from letters A-I to numbers.
If you click on each of the districts on the map online, you get a breakdown of the population within that district, the deviation from the target population goal to even out the nine districts, the population of voting age and the racial make-up of that district. wbush@gannett.com @Reporterbush