DuPage residents can ‘give testimony’ on remap

DuPage County residents should get plenty of opportunities to weigh in about efforts to redraw the county’s electoral boundaries.

Members of the county board’s redistricting committee agreed Tuesday that there should be at least eight meetings to gather input from the community regarding the once-in-a-decade process to remap boundaries for the six legislative districts that county board members represent.

Board member Pat O’Shea, chairman of the redistricting committee, says he’s planning to host a minimum of two countywide hearings. The first meeting is expected to happen on March 3 or March 10.

“We’ll invite everybody who wants to come,” O’Shea said. “Democrats, Republicans, they are all going to be able to give testimony as to what they think the map should be and what should be done.”

The six other board members on the redistricting panel will host at least one, and probably more, public meetings specifically for their districts.

O’Shea said some of the meetings should be done before a proposed map is created so input from the sessions could be taken into consideration. Other meetings are expected to happen after the proposed map is available.

The county board is expected to vote on a new map in June in order to meet a July 1 deadline. Right now, DuPage is divided into six districts, with three board members per district.

Last week, county board Chairman Dan Cronin said that he expects the six-district representation system to stay in place for another decade. Even though Cronin during his recent election campaign talked of adding districts and reducing the number of board members, he now concedes that any effort to change the current system would likely fail.

Cronin will have the opportunity to present his own proposed map by mid-May. In the meantime, O’Shea said work on the county board’s suggested map is expected to begin once newly released census data is analyzed by the consulting firm assisting the process. That census data shows DuPage had “a very slight” increase in population, according to O’Shea.