Ravenna’s effort to equalize the population size of its four wards is moving forward as City Council’s committee of the whole on Oct. 19 approved a new ward map.
Ward boundaries are more than lines on a map. Council members who represent voters in a ward must actually live in that ward. Residents vote for them because they are familiar with the issues that particularly affect them.
(There are also at-large council members who are voted on by the entire city electorate and who represent the entire city.)
Council had intended to review the new map during its regular Nov. 2 meeting and to preside over a public hearing in mid- to late-November. City leaders would review the map again during their regular Dec. 7 meeting, with possible adoption at the end of December.
Turns out, though, that Ravenna’s candidacy petitions require would-be office holders to list their ward and precinct. Precinct lines are set by the Portage County Board of Elections, which can’t get to work until they’ve got the new map in hand.
(Precinct boundaries determine who votes where, and who votes for what local liquor options, such as Sunday sales.)
If council approves the new map in late December, county Board of Elections Director Faith Lyon said her office would be hard pressed to draw new precinct boundaries in time for Ravenna candidates to meet the mid-February filing deadline.
That left Ravenna City Council President Rob Kairis with two choices: continue as planned or ask council to review the map Nov. 2, hold a public hearing Nov. 16 or 23, and approve it Dec. 7.
How we got here
State law requires cities to review their ward boundaries every decade to ensure the populations are more or less equally distributed. Stats from the most recent census provide the needed numbers. Somehow, though, Ravenna’s ward maps have not been redrawn in more than half a century.
(Kairis said council reviewed the city’s ward maps in 1991, using population stats from the 1990 census. They concluded that the wards were even, or at least even enough, and proposed no changes.)
Fast forward 35 years: Trevor Martin, League of Women Voters of Ohio program coordinator, provided hard numbers in March: Ravenna’s average ward population should be around 2,831 residents, he said. But with Ward 1’s population at 2,203, Ward 2 at 3,214, Ward 3 at 3,827 and Ward 4 at 2,079, Ravenna’s population deviancy is closer to 62% than it is to the generally accepted 10% threshold, he said.
Council members turned to Jennifer Mapes, a Kent State University assistant geography professor who teaches classes like Mapping, Space & Power and Urban Sustainability, to help them even things out.
She did, providing the city with five possibilities that council members narrowed down to one.
Move the decimal points: the new map sets the maximum deviation between wards at 6.2%, well below the current 62%. It redraws ward boundaries so some people who are now in Ward 3 will be in Wards 1 and 4. Others who are in Wards 2 and 4 will find themselves in Ward 1.
Regardless of when the process is finalized, the Board of Elections will notify voters of their new polling locations.