Back to the drawing board
Still lacking a statewide map, and facing problematic precincts within Laramie, the city council postponed its final redistricting vote. The current map will be tweaked, while another is now in play.
The Laramie City Council was expected to finish its redistricting efforts Tuesday, but instead postponed the final vote on its council ward maps until at least March 29.
The redistricting effort will determine the dividing lines between the city’s three wards. Where those lines fall will determine who you get to vote for in the coming 2022 election. The city must redraw its lines now that data from the 2020 U.S. Census has been finalized. All three wards must have relatively equal representation.
The council has been up against the clock since it started voting on maps two weeks ago. The council wards will determine county precincts, which Albany County Clerk Jackie Gonzales must advertise publicly for two weeks before gaining approval from the Albany County Commission. Precinct information is essential for candidates, as it tells them where they may run, and candidate filing opens in May.
Complicating matters, the state still doesn’t know where House districts will fall because the bill determining those districts is sitting on the governor’s desk unsigned. The city wards don’t have to follow House district lines, but they do have to be drawn with them in mind, so as to avoid “sliver” districts. (It’s complicated, and explained here in this earlier story.)
But following a suggestion from Councilor Erin O’Doherty, the council voted 7-2 to postpone their final decision.
“The boundaries of the house districts are not set in stone yet,” she said. “And the county clerk is trying to figure out how to administer this and mentioned that we could postpone for two weeks from today and she could still hit her deadlines.”
So the council will meet probably two more times on the topic, across the next two Tuesdays. They’ll need the first to decide on a map and a second to commission a written description – detailing every twist and turn of the wards’ boundaries – from city staff.
“If a map was agreed upon in a special meeting next week, then we could put that map into words to have it ready for you on April 5,” City Attorney Bob Southard said.
But in the coming week, the maps before council are likely to change. Council advanced a map last week that would, among other things, split West Laramie between two wards, rather than confining that neighborhood to a single ward, as it is now.
O’Doherty – the map’s author, though never its strongest supporter – pointed to a major problem with that map at the outset of the meeting Tuesday.
All of the maps O’Doherty prepared had what other councilors described as a strength – they kept the current location of the University of Wyoming dorms, and the proposed future location, in the same ward. The census block containing the dorms accounts for 1,600 people – O’Doherty said it might be the densest census block in the state – so if it were to hop a ward boundary when UW moves its dorms, one ward would gain 1,600 people while another lost 1,600.
In a city where equal wards would have a little more than 10,000 people each, a sudden 1,600-person shift in either direction is likely to throw the wards out-of-whack and grossly underrepresent some city residents while overrepresenting others.
But wards aren’t the only division that matters when it comes to redistricting, as O’Doherty explained Tuesday.
“I didn’t put it together as I was drawing this map that just because a census district has 1,600 people in it, it doesn’t necessarily have a lot of voters,” she said.
The specific combination of house district and city council representation on your ballot make up your precinct. But as the dorms move, they could move out of a house district while remaining in the same city ward.
Again, it’s complicated. But the result could be a precinct in which eventually only the voters living on Fraternity Row are counted when that precinct is reported. There are currently just 38 of those. Reporting the specific tally of results from only 38 people might violate the privacy of the vote (as someone with local knowledge could deduce who voted for whom).
O’Doherty suggested some fixes for the problem and an updated map will be presented next week. But it won’t be the only map on the table.
O’Doherty also suggested the council take a look at a map that divides Laramie into three wards running north-south. West Laramie would remain whole in Ward 1, as illustrated below.
The complications don’t stop there, but the solutions do. For now. The city and the county are still waiting for the finalized state house districts map. Albany County’s delegation brought a united proposal to the State Legislature ahead of the recent session, and it’s unlikely the boundaries within Laramie would be altered by boundary disputes elsewhere in the state.
But it’s possible.
“We hate to wait until the eleventh hour, but right now we don’t have any direction,” Gonzales said. “So we’re doing the best that we can with what we have.”
Mayor Paul Weaver asked if lawsuits are brought against the statewide map when it’s finally approved, could that put a hold on the local redistricting process?
Southard said he could not say given the various angles one could take with a lawsuit and the various ways a court could respond.
“It’s impossible to answer,” Southard said.