Monroe City Council removes reapportionment plan for special Wednesday meeting
Monroe City Council is expected to decide on a redistricting plan for the city following a special meeting Wednesday.
The council voted 3-1 to remove an ordinance adopting a reapportionment plan for council districts in accordance with the 2020 Census of Population and Appropriate Federal and State Laws, and Section 2-02 of the Home Rule Charter of the City of Monroe from the agenda at Tuesday night's meeting.
The ordinance will be reintroduced at Wednesday's special session meeting 5 p.m. in Council Chambers with intentions of passing the reapportionment plan and meeting the Dec. 31 deadline.
Councilman Doug Harvey addressed concerns about putting off the ordinance, calling it a "failure to perform our duties."
"... by moving this again just because we're probably not willing to tell people what they don't want to hear and then do it again on another night," Harvey said. "We're right up against the boundaries of it. It makes zero sense to move this."
Council chair Kema Dawson addressed Black community members and leaders who asked for a map showing the possibility of a majority-minority district in district 2. Reading an opinion from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Dawson said district 2 could not be a majority Black district that could perform due to low Black voter turnout which could affect majority percentages in other districts 3, 4 and 5.
"Those maps were done and they did say it was absolutely no way it could be... district 2 could be a majority-minority district without affecting 3, 4 and 5, and without putting the entire city at a deviation," Dawson. "The deviation in each district cannot be greater than 10 percent and if district 2 were made into a majority-minority district, it could potentially affect the population of other districts and cause some other districts to be outside of that deviation."
The majority of the council members chose the Plan 5A map, which shows districts 3, 4 and 5 participating in key elections, such as the mayoral races, with preferred candidates at the top of the ballot, Dawson said.
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"The majority choice candidate in each of those elections will be successful from the predictions of that map," Dawson said. "District 4, in particular, under Plan 5A will be successful for the minority choice candidate with about 65 percent of the vote assuming that the mayor's race is on the ballot. What they [NAACP Legal Defense Fund] said about a runoff, they could not tell if the candidate will be successful in a runoff because they had nothing to compare it to they only had the numbers from 2020 because 2016 did not have any race. District 2 and District 3 people went unopposed so they could not compare those numbers."
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This article originally appeared on Monroe News-Star: City council to vote on reapportionment plan at special session meeting
