St. Charles begins redrawing voting boundaries

In a city where two aldermen won their council seats by fewer than six votes in the last election, deciding who votes in which ward is a task with real consequences.

A committee of sitting aldermen met Monday night to redraw the ward boundaries in the city on the heels of the latest census. Aldermen Jim Martin, Cliff Carrignan, William Turner and Dan Stellato sat with a map of the city and a green marker to draw the new boundaries with an eye for balancing the city’s nearly 33,000 residents as equally as possible among the five wards.

Doing so would mean each ward would have 6,595 residents. City Attorney Phil Leutkehans said his reading of legal opinions gives the city wiggle room of 1 percent, 65 residents, on either side of that number.

Aldermen said they want to use natural boundaries, such as major roads and the Fox River, as much as possible. Martin came to the meeting with his own version of a new map. That map had the added rule that no ward boundaries would be changed in a fashion that would force incumbent aldermen to run against each other in a future election.

“The courts have said looking at incumbency is a traditional factor we can look at,” Leutkehans said of that provision. “It isn’t the third rail.”

With that in mind, the committee came up with eight changes to the current map they’d like to see. The problem with those changes is they’d leave Ward 5 with about 300 residents fewer than the other wards. The plan is to plug the eight suggested changes into a new map and have Leutkehans’ law firm come back with a few suggestions for how to make up that difference.

The committee will meet again in December. Any changes to the ward boundaries won’t become official until 2013.