Chicago alderpeople are at odds over redrawing the city’s ward map, a procedure that happens every 10 years to account for population changes. The biggest sticking point is the balance of power between Black and Latino Chicagoans.
Chicago Ward Map
By filing the map crafted by the Chicago Latino Caucus with the city clerk’s office, the alderpeople ensured that the June 28 primary election ballot could ask voters to decide what the ward map should look like for the first time in 30 years.
The City Council met briefly Wednesday afternoon, allowing Rules Committee Chair Ald. Michelle Harris (8th Ward) an opportunity to unveil the map drawn behind closed doors and supported by the City Council’s Black Caucus.
The deadline for a city ward map is Wednesday. CHANGE Illinois believes that map should be independently made by community members who reflect the city’s population and not by alderpeople.
Negotiations over a new ward map that will shape Chicago politics for the next decade remained deadlocked Tuesday, with no sign of a possible compromise less than a day before the deadline set by state law.
If 41 alderpeople do not agree on a map, the final decision could be made by voters for the first time in 30 years via a referendum.
The leaders of the Chicago City Council’s Black and Latino caucuses sparred Thursday as a compromise over the boundaries of the ward map that will shape Chicago politics for the next decade remained elusive.
The leaders of the Chicago City Council’s Black and Latino caucuses said Tuesday that they could endorse a new Chicago ward map with 18 wards with a majority of Black voters and 15 wards with a majority of Latino voters.
The online tool will allow Chicagoans to use map-drawing software similar to the kind that members of the Chicago City Council have been using since the end of July — but Chicagoans have less than three weeks to send in their proposal.
Chicago’s racial makeup is often described as roughly one-third white, one-third Black and one-third Latino. Now, alderpeople are battling over how to fairly reflect the city’s evolving racial makeup in how the borders of its 50 wards are drawn.
Members of the Latino and Black Caucuses are still split on how to draw the new city ward map. The Latino Caucus unveiled a map that reduces the number of wards with a majority of Black voters, intended to reflect a growing Latino population in the city.
The Chicago City Council’s Latino Caucus on Friday unveiled a map that would reduce the number of wards with a majority of Black voters by two to 16 wards and add two wards where a majority of voters are Latino.
The final map crafted by the Chicago Ward Advisory Redistricting Commission would increase the number of wards where Latinos make up a majority of residents by one to 14, while reducing the number of wards with a majority of Black voters by three to 15 wards.
With efforts well underway to craft new ward boundaries that could shape Chicago politics for the next decade, Chicagoans on Wednesday got a brief glimpse of the heated debate taking shape behind closed doors at City Hall.
It won’t be smoke-filled, but members of the Chicago City Council will head to a backroom at City Hall later this month to start crafting new ward boundaries that could shape Chicago politics for the next decade.
Members of the Chicago City Council are in the early stages of drafting new ward boundaries, but so too are community members hoping to supplant a map drawn by alderpeople. We check in on the drafting process.
