Redistricting Rec: Keep Neighborhoods Together

Try to keep both sides of the same street in the same ward.

Ensure that a single voter’s polling place doesn’t change every other year.

And please — please, please, please — release a draft map before the final vote so that members of the public can weigh in on proposed new ward boundaries.

Voting advocates and political junkies offered those words of advice Tuesday night during the public hearing section of the latest meeting of the Board of Alders Special Committee on Ward Redistricting.

The in-person meeting took place in the Aldermanic Chamber on the second floor of City Hall.

“Redistricting is a bit like forecasting the weather on TV,” New Haven Votes Coalition organizer Aaron Goode said. ​“It’s something that people only remember when it’s done badly.” 

That doesn’t make it any less important to get this once-a-decade political-line-drawing process right — with the goal of making the city ​“a better place to live and vote.”

Tuesday night marked the second meeting of the 10-alder committee charged with drawing new lines for the city’s 30 local political districts, or wards. 

New Haven’s population has increased by 4,244 — to a total of 134,023 residents — since the last redistricting, according to the 2020 U.S. Census. The alders are now tasked by city law with updating the ward maps to try to fit a roughly equal number of residents into each district. 

According to Hill Alder and Committee Chair Evelyn Rodriguez, that new ward-population goal is 4,467, up from the 4,326 residents per ward that the alders sought to include in the current ward boundaries that were set nine years ago.

Before and after Tuesday’s committee meeting, alders and a dozen members of the public informally broke into groups of three and four. They leaned over large paper color-coded maps of the city and pointed at a digital display of that same map. They squinted at existing ward lines, haggled over which boundaries should shift, which streets should go where, which sections of the city should stay in which wards, and which need to move.

The map itself — which was put together by the City Plan Department and which can be downloaded here  — offered some guidance as to which wards need to expand or contract based on their current political boundaries and their updated 2020-Census populations.

The wards that will almost certainly shrink in geographic size because their 2020 Census populations are larger than the 4,467 goal include Dixwell’s Ward 22 (5,425 residents), Downtown’s Ward 7 (5,171), Prospect Hill/Newhallville/Dixwell’s Ward 21 (5,077), West Rock/West Hills’ Ward 30 (4,996), and Newhallville’s Ward 20 (4,807).

The wards that will likely grow in geographic size because their 2020-Census populations are smaller than the redistricting goal include Ninth Square/Long Wharf/City Point’s Ward 6 (3,595), Beaver Hills’ Ward 29 (3,715), the Hill’s Ward 3 (4,010), Beaver Hills’ Ward 28 (4,111), and Edgewood’s Ward 24 (4,221).

The rest of the wards, meanwhile, fall within the acceptable redistricting population range of 4,243 to 4,690.

Coherent Neighborhoods. Stable Polling Places. Draft Maps

During Tuesday night’s meeting itself, alders and members of the public spoke hardly at all about the specifics of the existing ward boundaries and about which particular lines need to be redrawn where. 

Rodriguez said that committee alders will spend the next two weeks talking with their colleagues and putting together potential new ward boundaries, which will be formally proposed and discussed at the committee’s next public meeting, on April 12.

Instead, the bulk of Tuesday’s meeting consisted of a handful of members of the public offering general guidance to the alders on what they would like to see out of the redistricting process. (The committee will host public meetings on April 12, April 26, and May 10. The full Board of Alders plans to have a ​“first reading” on a new proposed ward map on May 16, and then plans to take up the matter for a final debate and vote on May 23.)

Goode, who is also an organizer with the local chapter of the League of Women Voters as well as the New Haven Votes Coalition, urged the committee alders to consider four redistricting priorities.

First: Try to keep existing neighborhoods intact. While this is likely impossible to achieve for every ward given the 4,467-person population goal, Goode did offer a few ward-specific suggestions. 

The current Ward 7 is mostly downtown — but also includes a small section of East Rock and a sliver of Wooster Square. With the growth of downtown’s population over the past decade, he said, the East Rock section of Ward 7 can likely go to Ward 9, while the Wooster Square section to Ward 8.

Ward 6 also likely needs some neighborhood-focused attention, he said, since that ward consists mostly of the Hill, Long Wharf, and City Point — and then jumps across the highway and railroad tracks to include a small section of Wooster Square.

West Hills resident and Ward 30 Democratic Co-Chair Iva Johnson offered a similar neighborhood-coherence suggestion during her testimony to the committee alders earlier in the night.

“We have a street, Park Side Drive, which is split,” she said. One side of the street is in Ward 30, the other in Ward 27.

“I remember going to the voting polls and residents asking me: ​‘Why on this side of the street is there a different alder, and on this side of the street is a different alder?’ ” Johnson said. 

“Just for the convenience of the residents,” she urged the committee, consider existing discordances like those during redistricting to ​“make sure things work a little bit more consistently and have a better flow.”

The second redistricting priority Goode put forward Tuesday night was to ​“ensure that polling places don’t change” on odd and even years.

“This is the big one,” he said, and affects approximately 10 percent of New Haven voters.

Because of the precarious convergence of some existing ward, state House of Representatives, and state Senate lines, he said, many voters — especially those who live Downtown and in Dixwell — have to go to a different polling place depending on whether it’s an even-numbered state assembly election year, or an odd-numbered municipal election year.

Many times, he said, voters go to the wrong polling place in one year ​“because that was the right polling place a few months before.” This problem seems to have been as bad in 2020 as it was in 2012 when the current lines were first adopted, he continued. ​“It’s very exasperating.”

The best solution to this problem? ​“Do a more careful nesting of wards within the state rep and state senate boundaries,” he advised.

Goode’s third recommended priority was for the committee to ​“release a draft map” before a final vote.

It’s difficult for members of the public to offer informed testimony on new ward boundaries that haven’t been proposed yet, he said.

Everit Street resident and local League of Women Voters President Patricia Rossi agreed. She referred to the recent redrawing of state legislative maps. 

During that process, residents from Ridgefield turned out to public hearings to urge legislators to put their city back together — and legislators heeded their call. But in the process, those same legislators chopped up Trumbull and, by the time that many in that town found out about the new lines, they were already a ​“done deal.”

“Please,” Rossi said, ​“if you can show draft maps so that if anything that makes people nuts happens, you’ll have the opportunity to adjust it in some way.”

Goode’s fourth recommended priority: The committee alders should work with the local registrars of voters on a campaign to ​“let voters know about these changes.”

Send out postcards. Make announcements at community management teams. Collaborate with groups like the League of Women Voters and the New Haven Votes Coalition to do everything possible to inform city residents and voters about the upcoming changes to the local political maps.

“There’s usually a higher percentage of voters going to wrong polling places immediately after redistricting,” he said. That can be mitigated with a strong public education plan.

Finally, he said, the world will not end if the alders do not adopt a new ward map by May 31. That’s not a violation of the charter, he said. ​“That’s allowed. That’s provided for.”

What would happen in such a situation, he and Rodriguez pointed out, is that the mayor would then be tasked with putting together a different 15-person commission to change ward boundaries and, potentially, the number of wards.

Don’t rush to meet that May 31 deadline, Goode urged the alders. If going past that deadline is necessary to allow for adequate time for public comment and review of new boundaries, that’s OK.

What About Transient Yalies?

During her time at the mic Tuesday night, Crystal Gooding raised a college-town-specific concern: How to account for all of those Yale undergrads who come to New Haven for four years, live in dorms, and then promptly leave.

“My concern is with the students coming into Yale, most of them are transient. They’re here for a short period of time,” she said.

“Granted, this should be their city as well,” she conceded, but ​“as far as them making decisions in who wins an official position, I have an issue with that.”

She suggested that their electoral voices should not count as much as those belonging to more permanent New Haven residents.

Beaver Hills/Amity Alder and Board of Alders Majority Leader Richard Furlow pointed out that the alders and the city are required to set new ward maps based on 2020 Census data. 

He said his ward could have 2,000 people move in tomorrow, and that would make no difference on the boundaries the alders can set during this redistricting process.

“We have to use the numbers given to us by the U.S. Census.”

Rodriguez added that the committee will take Gooding’s feedback into consideration as it puts together proposed new ward boundaries, to be discussed at the committee’s next meeting on April 12.