Cleveland City Council voted Monday night to approve a new political map that will cut two seats from the 17-member body and redraw ward boundaries across the city. 

The vote came after the League of Women Voters and other critics of the new map mounted a last-ditch effort to send council back to the drawing board. 

Council President Blaine Griffin brought the redistricting plan up for a vote without a committee hearing at the body’s first meeting of the new year. Only two members voted against the maps: Rebecca Maurer and Brian Kazy. The other 14 in attendance voted in favor.

The map above shows boundaries for 15 Cleveland wards that will replace the current 17 wards. Zoom in for a closer look at the new boundaries.

The new map draws Maurer into a ward that is also home to Council Member Richard Starr. After Monday’s vote, she said that council should have held a public hearing on the map first. Maurer also argued that the map unnecessarily cut her Slavic Village neighborhood into three wards when it could have been divided just two ways. 

Council – which endorsed the statewide issue to overhaul Congressional and legislative redistricting – should take itself out of the local map-drawing process in the future, she said. 

“It should be independent,” Maurer said of the redistricting process. “It should be separate from where council members live. It should be focused fully on neighborhoods.” 

Kerry McCormack, council’s majority leader, rose to defend Griffin and the new map. The council president did the best he could with the difficult process of cutting two wards and drawing new lines in an oddly shaped city, he said.

“There is no way for you or any other council president to quote-unquote ‘win’ this process, meaning make every single person happy,” he said. 

Under the new map, four pairs of incumbents will find themselves drawn into the same wards. A new West Side ward and a new East Side ward would be open seats. 

Michael Polensek and Anthony Hairston both live in the new Ward 10, which largely unites the northern and southern halves of the Collinwood neighborhood. The new Ward 5 – which encompasses part of downtown, the Central neighborhood and a sliver of Slavic Village – is home to Starr and Maurer. 

Stephanie Howse-Jones and Griffin both have addresses in the new Ward 6, although much of the Hough neighborhood she represents is in the new Ward 8. Howse-Jones told Signal Cleveland that she would make a decision about her political future after the maps were passed. 

McCormack and Jenny Spencer both live in the new Ward 7, although Spencer has already said she won’t seek another term. 

The filing deadline to run for the new council seats is June 11. Cleveland will hold nonpartisan primary and general elections for the seats this fall. Candidates must be Cleveland residents but do not need to live in the wards in which they run.

Civic groups ask council to reconsider proposed maps

In a letter dated Jan. 2, the League of Women Voters of Greater Cleveland criticized the splitting of Shaker Square and the Cudell neighborhood between different wards. Opponents of the maps held a protest at Shaker Square just before the New Year.

The league proposed a 15-ward map of its own and asked council to reconsider the map up for a vote Monday. The group also raised process objections, pointing out that council held its public redistricting hearings in October 2024, “when many stakeholders were busy prepping for a major election.”

Nadia Zaiem, a co-president of the Cleveland-area League of Women Voters chapter, said council ought to have released its proposed map in a more easily readable format – such as the Dave’s Redistricting app. 

“We felt that it was necessary for us to comment and to make it clear what our position is because we believe that gerrymandering is bad no matter who does it, whether it’s Republicans, Democrats, state officials, local officials,” she told Signal Cleveland.

Council should take more time to hold public meetings and revise its map, Zaiem told council during the public comment session of Monday’s meeting. 

Under Cleveland’s charter, the deadline for passing a new map is April 1. But Cuyahoga County Board of Elections leadership urged council to move more quickly in order to give the board time to reorganize voting precincts for the May primary election. 

Griffin: Drawing new ward maps was ‘grueling and unforgiving’

Griffin has defended his map. At a news conference in December he said the process of drawing it was “grueling and unforgiving,” and that council “did not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” Council tapped a team of consultants for help crafting the new ward boundaries. 

In a brief interview Monday, Griffin argued that the process he oversaw was more transparent than past City Council redistrictings. He said that he made final tweaks to the proposed map based on public input. The Hyacinth neighborhood in Slavic Village is no longer split between two wards, and the Baltic Road area on the West Side is less divided than in an earlier version of the map. Shaker Square remains split.

There was “no way to put 372,674 people in a room and draw a map,” Griffin said. “There are a lot of complications to this and a lot of detail, not to even mention the political side of dealing with all of the personalities of council that advocated, pushed and pulled for borders and boundaries that they thought were important for communities as well.” 

Critics of the map have also pointed out that the new Ward 12 was drawn far enough west to include the home of incumbent Council Member Danny Kelly, who currently lives just outside the ward he represents. But the new boundary does not go far enough south to touch the house of his 2023 opponent, Michael Hardy. 

But Griffin said Monday that he did not consider Hardy’s residence in drawing the map. “I don’t even know where Hardy lives at,” he said. 

Hardy, the Democratic ward leader in the current Ward 11, delivered a public comment at Monday’s meeting. He said he expected that his majority-Black neighborhood on the West Side would be drawn into a neighboring ward. But he disagreed with the fact that his voting precinct was split between the new Wards 13 and 12. 

The dividing line is the I-71 highway, which also cuts through Hardy’s precinct. 

“This is a voting bloc,” Hardy said. “It’s a strong voting bloc, one of the biggest voting blocs in the area. And this is getting divided. Those streets need to stay intact.”

The council president has said that he had to balance multiple competing priorities, including the creation of a largely Hispanic ward on the West Side. He told Signal Cleveland that working city neighborhoods neatly into 15 wards “was like trying to put 30 pounds of potatoes in a 10-pound sack.”

Much of the early debate focused on the elimination of the current Ward 12, which Maurer represents. At a November council meeting, Maurer protested an unreleased version of the new map that drew her house into a West Side ward that included Ohio City. 

Griffin replied that Maurer’s colleagues “don’t trust the council member in Ward 12.” When the council president released a proposed map in December, Maurer’s home was moved into an East Side ward but cut off from much of the territory she currently represents. 

On the West Side, Council Member Jenny Spencer – who is not running for another term – has criticized the way that the new map splits neighborhoods.

The head of the Edgewater North Homeowners Association, on the other hand, voiced support for the map. A few Edgewater residents spoke in favor of the new wards at Monday night’s meeting.