Cleveland City Council is poised to redraw the city’s political map after the holidays, cutting two wards to keep up with falling population.
After weeks of argument over the redistricting process, Council President Blaine Griffin unveiled a proposed new 15-ward map on Tuesday afternoon. Griffin plans to ask colleagues to vote on the new wards on Jan. 6, council’s first meeting in 2025.
This was the first public release of the map that council leadership and a team of consultants have been working on this year. Council members saw an earlier version of the map in late November, but the boundaries have changed since then.
City Council redistricting: See council’s proposed 15-ward map here.
If all incumbents were to run for reelection in the wards where they live, there would be two showdowns: Richard Starr vs. Rebecca Maurer and Michael Polensek vs. Anthony Hairston. In Cleveland, council candidates don’t have to live in the ward they represent.
Maurer protested the map she saw in late November, saying in a floor speech that her Slavic Village house had been drawn into new territory that included Ohio City, on the other side of the Cuyahoga River. She has since endorsed the idea of a charter amendment “removing politicians from the map-drawing process.”
The map revealed on Tuesday places her house in an East Side ward that also includes Starr.
Griffin will need at least 12 votes to pass the maps on one reading Jan. 6. Otherwise, council must read the map legislation at three separate meetings. The council president signaled on Tuesday that he believes he has the votes to pass the map.
At Tuesday’s news conference, Griffin said redrawing the map was “grueling and unforgiving,” but maintained that the city’s dwindling population, rather than council politics, drove the ultimate shape of the wards.
“No council member was targeted for elimination,” he said.
For decades, Cleveland City Council had 33 seats. In 1981, voters approved a charter amendment cutting that number to 21. A charter amendment passed by voters in 2008 ties the number of council seats to the number of residents.
The 17-member council must slash two wards because the city’s population fell to 372,624 in the 2020 census. No cut would have been required if the city had stayed above 375,000 people.
Each of the 15 new wards must be about equal in population, comprising around 24,800 people. Council candidates will run for those new ward seats in the 2025 elections.
East Side matchups possible in new map
The deadline to file for City Council races is not until June 11 next year. But as it stands now, four incumbents could face off on the East Side next year.
The new maps place much of the Collinwood neighborhood into a single ward. The new ward also contains both Polensek and Hairston’s current addresses. Griffin said it was important to both council members that Collinwood stay together. Under the current map, the northern and southern halves of the neighborhood are split into different wards.
The two incumbents would run a “gentleman’s match” if they end filing to run in the new ward, Griffin said. Signal Cleveland was unable to reach Polensek and Hairston on Tuesday evening.
Maurer and Starr both live in the new Ward 5, which links a slice of Slavic Village with Central and parts of downtown and Kinsman. In a Facebook post, Maurer objected to the fact that the new map cuts up Slavic Village.
“I’ll tell you the same thing I told the Council President when I saw it: I don’t think this map did right by our neighborhoods,” she wrote.
Starr previously told Signal Cleveland that he wanted to see some changes to the ward, though he didn’t specify exactly what. He said he was prepared to run for another term, no matter where the ward boundaries ended up.
“I want all the smoke,” he said. “I’m here to do a job. I ain’t run to be a one-term council person. I ran to make sure to get results to whatever area that I represent in the City of Cleveland.”
A local redistricting commission?
Griffin said it would be premature to weigh in on the idea of taking the map-drawing pens out of the hands of City Council – a notion similar to the statewide redistricting amendment that voters rejected this year. City Council unanimously passed a resolution supporting the amendment, known as Issue 1.
The council president said he was open to the conversation, but for now was focused on the map-drawing task at hand. He offered one criticism of the idea that opponents of the statewide redistricting amendment also raised.
“The only thing that I would question is, what makes some of these folks more competent, more trustworthy, more capable to do a redistricting process than the folks that were elected to serve the people of the City of Cleveland?” Griffin said.
