The Kansas City Council faced a frustrating dilemma Thursday — start redrawing council districts and make a lot of people mad, or delay the process and violate the city charter.

Council members and more than a dozen community leaders debated the contentious issue of redistricting, which the city charter indicates should occur before the next city general election in March 2011.

The charter says the city council must draw new district lines when a third consecutive general election would be conducted with the same districts, and those districts have already been used for the 2003 and 2007 elections.

But most city council members and many of the community representatives weren’t happy about that, saying this is the worst possible time to try to redraw the lines — just as a new election season is heating up.

“It’s not good government for us to sit here and draw these lines with everyone’s re-election looming,” Councilwoman Cathy Jolly said.

Critics of redistricting at this time said they don’t have enough reliable racial and ethnic demographic data to redraw the council districts in a way that will give all residents fair representation to make sure they’re not disenfranchising minority voting blocs. They also complained that the city will just have to redo the whole thing when formal 2010 census data become available, probably in April 2011.

But Councilman Ed Ford said the council needs to follow the charter and confront the issue.

“It makes more sense to bite the bullet and do this now,” Ford said. “What other sections of the charter do you want to ignore that you find inconvenient?”

Several Northland community leaders noted that the population has grown most dramatically north of the river in the past decade. It’s time, they said, to shrink those districts geographically, while increasing the size of other districts, to make sure the voting representation is fair and to make sure that the money that the city distributes between the six districts is split equitably.

The council late Thursday directed the city manager and city attorney to develop alternatives for redistricting, including the possibility of an advisory committee, and to report back by next Thursday.

via KC redistricting becomes contentious issue with council members, community leaders – KansasCity.com.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 23rd, 2010 at 9:05 pm and is filed under City Council, Elections, Kansas City, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.