Skokie residents see potential maps that divide village into voting districts

As the village of Skokie continues its process to divide the village into four voting districts so that one village board member can be elected from each, a consultant showed residents the proposed map options at a Sept. 11 meeting.

The move comes after voters approved electoral reforms in a referendum in last November’s election.

Among the measures that voters approved are a provision that, starting in the 2025 elections, voters will elect four of the village’s six trustees at a district level, similar to wards. Two trustees will remain being elected “at large,” meaning they will be chosen byvoters throughout the village.

Patrick Deignan, Skokie’s communications and community engagement director, told the Skokie Review that trustees will need to live in the district they run for.

Institute for Work & the Economy consultant Peter Creticos presented three map proposals labeled Marsh, Orchard and Prairie, and avoided using numbers or letters to avoid creating a sense of hierarchy, he said.

In making the maps, Creticos said he intended to create districts that were somewhat equal in population, contiguous and followed major thoroughfares and known boundaries “that Skokie voters will understand intuitively.”

Creticos said he used census tracts to figure out how many people live in any given location and used school districts as a proxy for where boundaries could work out.

Creticos crossed out stripes, both vertical and horizontal, because he didn’t think communities would feel any connection to people who live on opposite ends. “In other words, if you live along the Edens Expressway on one side, and the district runs all the way over to McCormick [Boulevard], what’s the relationship between two?” he said.

At public comment, some residents thanked Creticos and lawyers from the legal firm Klein, Thorpe and Jenkins, Ltd., who were hired by the village to help implement the referendums. Resident Kimberly Polka said “I just want to say thank you. I’m glad that we were given several choices.”

Carrie Bradean, chair of the Skokie Alliance for Electoral Reform, thanked the panel for fielding questions, but also expressed concerns about proposed districts splitting school districts. School District 69, for example, is split between three districts in the proposals.

“There are major differences in funding for the different school districts, largely because of different developments in different school districts,” said Bradean.

“There are lots of conversations among parents saying, ‘We need a trustee who hears us when we say we need development,’” Bradean continued. “I can see that being really important for our school districts, not [to] be split among three different districts. It’s hard to organize that way,” she added.

Creticos said he would take another look at it, and added context that the Evanston Golf Club makes the map “messy.” He said, “It sits right in the middle [of Skokie] and trying to draw [a district] around it or through it… I didn’t consider that a possibility.”

Creticos said the census block near the golf course “looks like a faucet with a nozzle that comes out,” making it difficult to track where people live. “I had to treat that golf course as a single thing, that sort of just creates all sorts of problems in terms of trying to draw around it,” he said.

Currently, the Evanston Golf Club is split between School Districts, 68, 69 and 73.5. Creticos told the Review that while the School District can make its boundaries using land, “I have to rely on the census [to map the districts].”

Creticos said a simple axis, like the one proposed by the Skokie Alliance for Electoral Reform, doesn’t work for Skokie because the population distribution is not equal among four evenly sized districts.

The village will hold a third public meeting to propose district maps at the Skokie Public Library on Oct. 10. Information on it will be made available. Oct. 3.