Editorial: Chicago’s ward remap fight yields a backroom deal. Biggest losers? Voters.
The battle royale over Chicago’s ward remap appears to be over. The City Council’s Black and Latino caucuses had been tussling for months about the decennial redrawing of aldermanic boundaries, but it seems as if both sides have reached a compromise.
The new map lays out 16 Black-majority wards along with a ward with Black plurality, Ald. Walter Burnett’s 27th Ward. The proposed map also establishes 14 Latino wards, one less than the Latino Caucus had sought, as well as an Asian-majority ward, a first for the city.
These once-a-decade exercises are supposed to be grounded in demographic changes reflected in the decennial census. The latest U.S. census results show a 5% jump in the city’s Latino population and a 10% drop in Chicago’s Black community. That’s why the Latino Caucus fought for a fairer remap that accurately reflected major shifts in the city’s population.
Yes, they fought. And then, their caucus fragmented and enough Latino aldermen caved. To what, you ask? The lure of the backroom deal, where self-interest and, in this case, strong-arming by the unions took over. The compromise allowed City Hall to avoid a referendum that would have put the fate of the competing Black and Latino caucus maps into the hands of voters, which should have been the destination.
The compromise speaks to what really motivates too many on the City Council — the ceaseless quest to accumulate more clout.
Before backroom wheeling-and-dealing prevailed, the Latino Caucus appeared to embrace the ideal that everyday Chicagoans should play an integral role in the remap. The caucus aligned itself with Change Illinois, a civic advocacy group that led an effort to craft a remap that incorporated citizen input. The caucus had hoped to pit that document, known as the “People’s Map,” against the Black Caucus’ map in a referendum that would appear on the June 28 primary ballot.
When the Latino Caucus failed in that bid, its members still had a choice: Put an earlier Latino Caucus map up against the Black Caucus map in the referendum and let Chicagoans decide the democratic way, through a vote. Or, put themselves first, shut voters out of the process, and cut a deal that gives them a more favorable set of ward boundaries ahead of the 2023 city elections.
Enough of them chose self-preservation over people power, and that backroom deal was done. They fell prey to arm-twisting from clout-heavy labor groups, including the Chicago Teachers Union. Pulling the levers behind the Black Caucus map was Michael Kasper, longtime election law adviser for former Illinois House Speaker and state Democratic Party chief Michael Madigan, now facing trial on racketeering charges.
The City Council still must vote on the compromise remap before May 19, but the deal appears to have more than enough votes to get approved and negate the need for a referendum.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who for months had tried to stay out of the remap fracas, sounded relieved. “With this compromise, the City Council can now devote its full attention to the more immediate needs of our city like keeping our communities safe and driving our equitable economic recovery from the pandemic,” Lightfoot said in a statement released earlier this week.
We don’t buy that rationale for a second. The people inside City Hall are supposed to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.
Focusing attention on crafting a fair, sensible ward remap that incorporates the will of voters doesn’t have to mean that all other aldermanic work and City Hall functioning must stop, or even get short shrift. City Hall is supposed to multitask. And if giving voters a say in the remap puts another task in each alderman’s in-basket, then so be it.
The disappointing outcome of this year’s remap debacle exposes a core problem in how Chicago redraws its ward boundaries every 10 years. The process is never going to be fair as long as it remains the sole purview of the politicians who stand to benefit from keeping the effort behind closed doors, where they can carve up whole communities into gerrymandered fiefdoms.
Aldermen should, for once, put the interests of everyday Chicagoans above their own and work with Springfield to craft legislation that would put the city’s decennial remapping in the hands of an independent citizens commission. That would take the process out of its current Star Chamber environment, and give voters a voice that has been muted for far too long.
This year’s remap must be the last in which Chicago voters get shoved to the side.
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