Redistricting suit nears resolution

by Carey L. Biron

It is a controversy seemingly forgotten by the public and the media. But in the coming weeks, the federal lawsuit of Minneapolis City Councilmember Natalie Johnson Lee vs. the City of Minneapolis will be back in the news — and the resolution, whatever it is, will be sure to cause a stir.

On Friday, June 25, lawyers for the City, as well as those for Johnson Lee, fellow Councilmember Dean Zimmerman and 14 additional plaintiffs gave final oral testimony in a case that dates back to the 2002 redistricting of City wards.

Although those redrawn boundaries are not scheduled to go into effect until the election cycle of 2005, the new maps caused an instant furor upon their unveiling. Not the least of this was due to the fact that the new lines technically left two wards without the representation they had just elected to office, while two other wards were straddled with multiple council members of similar political dispositions.
In South Minneapolis, Robert Lilligren was drawn right out of his Eighth Ward and into the Sixth. Meanwhile, Sixth Warder Zimmerman suddenly lived in the Ninth Ward, home of Gary Schiff. At the same time, in North Minneapolis, Johnson Lee’s Fifth Ward was drastically redrawn such that it lost all of its influential downtown regions and picked up more disadvantaged neighborhoods. Finally, after 2003’s special election in which Don Samuels was elected to the Third Ward, the new maps would stipulate that the Council’s two African-American members would be forced to run against one another.

Got it?

Some frustrated citizens see a political conspiracy in the changes; Zimmerman and Johnson Lee are Minneapolis’ first Green Party City Councilmembers; Schiff, Lilligren and Samuels have to be considered the Council’s other three progressives and the most ready Green allies.

“The old DFL establishment was really stung by the 2001 elections,” said Bruce Shoemaker, one of the plaintiffs named in the suit. “Basically most of the old guard got tossed out and I think it was very clear that there was some payback that went on.”

Shoemaker is a resident of North Minneapolis’ Holland neighborhood — a neighborhood that has been redrawn from the Third to the First Ward.
“We are basically one of the largest and demographically one of the poorest neighborhoods in Northeast,” explained Shoemaker. “We felt that our interests were a lot more with the other Third Ward neighborhoods — we had a lot more identification, traditionally, long-term, with the river-flats neighborhoods than the up-on-the-hill neighborhoods in Northeast.”

Others are concerned that traditionally unified areas will be politically isolated or even pitted against each other.

“We would lose our natural allies in North Minneapolis,” protested Jose Valez, a community organizer with the Hawthorne neighborhood. “The new district would leave us isolated as the only North Minneapolis neighborhood and that is a concern.”

While many groups in the city share these concerns, minority groups are particularly affected. With the loss of the downtown districts, Johnson Lee’s new ward is 82 percent nonwhite — more than double the demographics of the city at large. In gerrymandering lawsuits, this situation is known as “packing.”

Don Samuels’ Third Ward has seen some of the most drastic restructuring. As things stand now, Samuels and Johnson Lee — the only two nonwhite representatives on the 13-person Council — would be forced to run against one another in 2005. While Samuels was in fact elected after the ward map was redrawn, the situation led the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder’s Isaac Peterson III to muse last year, “Is what is lawful always what is right?”

Johnson Lee vs. the City of Minneapolis is now set to decide at least what is lawful.

The process of redistricting is stipulated to take place two years after every national census. By ensuring that every ward has roughly the same population and mix of demographics, the hope is that every City Councilmember — and, by extension, every citizen — will have about the same voice in citywide decision-making.

The old process involved council members redrawing the wards themselves in committee. Ostensibly to take the politics out of the procedure, Minneapolis’ new process involved an appointed redistricting commission. “Which essentially leaves no accountability,” notes Councilmember Dean Zimmerman.

It also has skewed Minneapolis’ redistricting commission drastically to the right. Due to the complex way in which the commission’s personnel are chosen, the Green Party of Minnesota was represented by only one member — the only commission member to vote against the final plan. The rest of the 13-person commission was made up of DFLers, Republicans and Independents, the last two of which do not have a representative on the Minneapolis City Council.

“This may just be one of the craziest redistricting commissions ever,” laughs Councilmember Gary Schiff. “The one critical thing is that this redistricting commission was made up of major and minor parties in the state of Minnesota, which is not reflective of what’s in Minneapolis.”

Schiff, a DFLer who votes frequently with Zimmerman and other progressives, hasn’t been shy about his disgust with the current situation. “This redistricting I think clearly had a goal of screwing the Green Party. The process was open to the public and the meetings were all held in public meetings. But the map that was finally adopted suddenly appeared the night before — that kind of process I think opens up accusations of impropriety and that there were veiled agendas … it’s hard to defend a system that allows that to happen.”

For all of the ideological hand-wringing, the lawsuit’s best bet may rest on a simple technicality. The Minneapolis charter stipulates that wards cannot be more than “two times longer than they are wide,” while an independent study found Don Samuels’ deformed Third Ward to be far from this proportion.

Bruce Shoemaker says that at Friday’s hearing there was extensive discussion on this point. “We feel that we have very strong arguments in our favor on that issue,” he said. “Some of the issues are harder to define; they involve intent … the Third Ward shape issue is very clear-cut.”

After more than two years of discovery, U.S. District Judge John Tunheim will now decide whether to throw out the complaint, throw out the commission’s map, or retry the entire case before a jury.

“As far as the City goes, they’ve been forced to try to defend the map that this redistricting commission came up with retroactively,” Shoemaker said. “I think they’re trying to do the best they can to defend it with the only legal argument that they could come up with.”

For more information on the lawsuit, checkout the website of the Friends for Redistricting Evenly and Equitably, at www.freempls.org.