As Cleveland City Council Begins Redistricting, Concerns About Ward Boundaries and Representation Rise

Ward 8 Councilman Michael Polensek recalls 2013 with a slight distaste in his mouth.

It was a year the city's then 19 wards were set to be chiseled down to 17. Cleveland was still losing population, and then Council President Martin Sweeney had to follow a charter amendment passed five years before that required boundaries to be redrawn every decade with the number of seats tied to how many people lived in Cleveland. In 2013, that meant two politicians would lose their jobs.

The result was some high octane in-fighting and crosstalk bickering. Jay Westbrook, the veteran council member who backed the 2008 charter law with enthusiasm, opted to retire to "stand up for the change I sought and let someone else pick up the torch."

Sweeney, accused of influencing the redraw of the wards map to back then Councilman Eugene Miller—who was, at the time, embroiled in a DUI scandal—found himself in a similar pickle as Westbrook. He was thus accused of imbalancing the Black and Hispanic neighborhoods he had supposedly promised to help.

In 2013, Sweeney stepped down from his role, the Plain Dealer reported, to "set the whole record straight on the whole redistricting thing."

"He's a sore loser," Polensek said at the time. "He lost at what he tried to do. And now it's nothing but bitterness."

Eleven years later, Council is six months away from another relook at Cleveland's ward boundaries. With the help of the same consultants who drew the map a decade ago, it will decide how certain neighborhoods should be represented by elected officials. And eleven years later, as those hired guns begin interviewing its members, Council is again approaching the inevitable with feelings of dread in their back pockets.

Especially those who recall 2013.

"I told [the consultants] don't mess up, don't screw up my neighborhood again," Polensek told Scene on Monday.

"You have an opportunity to correct the mistakes that were made, the terrible lines that were drawn," he said. "To disenfranchise east side and neighborhoods of color in the ethnic neighborhoods. That's what they did."

Hired by City Hall three times to re-analyze its ward boundaries—in 1981, 2009 and 2013—the consultant team, led by 85-year-old analyst Bob Dykes at Triad Research Group, will have yet another opporunity to more carefully match Cleveland's changing population numbers and neighborhoods with fairer, more accurate representation.

All while doing its best to steer clear of gerrymandering claims. Some on Council in 2013 accused Sweeney of splintering Ward 14's Hispanic population, curtailing it from 41 to 37 percent, until a successful pushback kept it more substantive. (A move that would undeniably help Councilwoman Jasmin Santana, the ward's first Latina leader, secure her seat in 2017.)

“Two of our primary goals are to have natural boundaries and keep neighborhoods together. Community involvement will also play a key role in redistricting,” Council President Blaine Griffin wrote in a press release. “We are eager to begin the work now to allow us time to get this right—and deliver maps that accurately reflect the needs of Cleveland’s diverse neighborhoods.” (Griffin was out of the office Monday and unavailable to comment for this article.)

As will go the process, Dykes and his team of three, including architect Kent Whitley and former Cleveland State professor Mark Stalling, will have six months to hand over a redrawn map to Griffin. Council will vote on the revision. All minding that two of them, whomever they may be, will either lose their jobs or have to run for election in a different, newly created ward.

That's created a tiny panic in those who both trust their constituents yet find next year's election too vague to pin down.

"I don't know what district I'm running. I don't know what my ward number is going to be," Ward 13 Councilman Kris Harsh told Scene. "I don't know what my boundary is going to be. And I haven't got any indications about what they might be. So I'm kind of waiting to see the map like everybody else."

Next week, on July 11, Harsh said he's hosting his first fundraiser in his council tenure, both as a bid to raise thousands of dollars before next June and to preempt what could be an eventual political threat. In early June, City Council doubled the limit that individuals and political action committees could contribute.

Like Polensek, Harsh had his concerns that the new map could tilt neighborhoods' identities, thus leading to a possible drop in what's an already low voter turnout for council races.

Calls to Dykes and Whitney were not returned on Monday. Salling said that his team vowed to "honor those boundaries" that Polensek claimed were rocked by 2013's redistricting—namely the Black east side wards. He said the trio was committed to following the Voting Rights Act, the 1965 federal law passed to prevent, to the best of its ability, the disenfranchisement of minority communities.

Regardless, Salling was blunt about the inevitable. Two fewer wards meant two fewer councilpeople. Two fewer councilpeople carried a world of implications—more campaign dollars needed to run elsewhere, changed dynamic in Council Chambers and the unavoidable sting when one's job is threatened.

"You know, somebody's going to lose," Salling said. "Hopefully it's somebody that doesn't really mind losing or that obviously maybe doesn't carry the popular vote as strongly as other council people. But, you know, that, that's sort of out of my domain." [content-2]

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