Divided Boston City Council makes no progress on redistricting

Despite having just two weeks to pass a new redistricting map, the Boston City Council accomplished next to nothing at its latest meeting.

The divided body’s inability to agree on how city lines should be redrawn, or even which of its subcommittees should be tasked with the assignment, prompted further concern from Mayor Michelle Wu’s office, which had filed its own map proposal Monday to try to expedite the process.

“Today’s hearing shows there is still much work ahead to pass a redistricting map that reflects the consensus of the City Council,” a Wu spokesperson said on Monday.

Given the “tight deadlines,” the spokesperson said, the mayor has been in contact with Council President Ed Flynn to encourage the body to set dates for special meetings prior to May 30, the cutoff date for when a new redistricting map can be passed to avoid a delay to the Sept. 12 preliminary election.

It became apparent early on into Monday’s civil rights subcommittee hearing, where a federal judge’s decision to toss the redistricting map passed by the City Council last fall for potential violations to the Constitution was placed, that not much work would get done.

At the outset, city councilors argued about whether they were allowed to discuss any of the map proposals — two had also been put forward by Councilors Ruthzee Louijeune and Kendra Lara — for fear of violating the open meeting law.

City Councilor Ricardo Arroyo said that the day’s proceedings were confined to the federal court order, and that discussing maps was “beyond this hearing order and beyond this committee at this time.”

He said Flynn, as council president, will decide what subcommittee should be tasked with drawing the map at Wednesday’s regular meeting.

The disagreement led to an hour-long recess, which concluded with Louijeune, who chairs the civil rights committee, saying that “out of an abundance of caution,” the day’s discussion would be confined to what councilors generally wanted to see included in a new redistricting map.

The map proposals would not specifically be addressed until Wednesday, to ensure there was sufficient public notice after their filing, the councilors concluded.

Louijeune said the potential violation to the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, as ruled by a U.S. District Court judge, was confined to how race was factored into how city lines were redrawn for Districts 3 and 4, which led to a “domino effect” for the rest of the map.

She said the Council will have to determine how to resolve that domino effect, but is not operating in a vacuum, as there’s data and community discussions from the prior redistricting process to draw from.

However, District 3 Councilor Frank Baker took exception to what his colleagues suggested should be “simple changes” made in the new map.

He pointed out that other councilors were not as impacted as he was in the prior map that was tossed, saying that the past changes he opposed, which moved four majority white precincts from D3 to D4, would have led to “45%” of new voters in his district.

Baker suggested going back to the “baseline map” from 2012 as a jumping-off point, saying that he was “horrified” at the notion of using the rejected map as a basis for new changes.

The crux of Monday’s discussion centered around the need to resolve the overpopulation in District 2 and the lack of population in District 3, to meet redistricting requirements for balanced population within all districts.

However, it quickly devolved to confusion over whether the civil rights committee, which the federal court docket was assigned to after a disagreement last week and an appeal to Flynn’s attempt to place it in the committee of the whole, should handle writing a new map.

Although eight councilors voted in favor of placing the court order in the civil rights committee last week, several of those members said they didn’t think their vote was for placing the redistricting matter there as well.

Rather, Councilor Julia Mejia said, “it seems to me I was voting on the legal memo and that should be in your district, not redistricting.” She said the conversation “should be had all over again,” to resolve the matter of committee assignment.

Louijeune, an attorney with redistricting experience, said it was her understanding that the map writing should be in the purview of the civil rights committee following last week’s vote, and preferred that it stayed there.

“You can’t make this up,” said Councilor Michael Flaherty. “This is exactly why this body is becoming an embarrassment. We have to pull it together, folks. We have a court order. We have an injunction.”

Flynn said he intended to recommend at Wednesday’s Council meeting that the new map’s writing be placed in the civil rights committee, “to give the chair and vice chair a chance to do their jobs.”

The body’s continued divisiveness “is hurting the city,” Flynn said.

The divisions also drew concern from the attorneys for the group of residents that filed the lawsuit against the City Council, leading to the eventual injunction barring the map’s use in the November election.

“It has come to our attention that the City Council appears to be more divisive and combative in this process since the injunction was allowed,” the attorneys wrote in a Monday letter shared with the Herald.

“This is not rocket science following the court order to get this done. Politics needs to be kept out of this process.”