A deal has been struck on a new Chicago City Council ward map that will keep the decision from ending up in the hands of voters in the form of a June referendum.
Under the deal, which still must be cemented by a City Council vote next week, the map will create 16 Black majority wards and 14 Latino majority wards, according to Ald. George Cardenas (12th).
Faced with a May 19 deadline to work it out themselves, the agreement calls for one fewer majority Latino ward than the Latino caucus had wanted.
The proposed map also contains the city’s first Asian-American-majority ward.
Demographics are key to ward map negotiations.
The city’s Black population is shrinking while the city’s Latino population is growing.
“There’s no need to bring the house down. We can own the house,” Cardenas said, referring to the next remap — in 10 years.
“Our day is coming for sure. We have to be patient and humble,” he said.
Cardenas offered a “kudos” to Mayor Lori Lightfoot for her work on Monday to facilitate the agreement and getting all sides to sign on to the map.
Cardenas is grateful the map won’t go to a referendum vote — a measure that, he said, would have siphoned energy from council members to deal with pressing issues like crime and approving a city casino.
“At the end of the day, everyone saw it was in everyone’s best interest to try to solve this,” said Ald. Jason Ervin (28th), head of the council’s Black Caucus.
“As a city, we’ve got bigger fish to fry.”
Lightfoot issued a statement praising the deal.
“It is a good thing that an overwhelming majority of City Council members have come together and reached a compromise on a new ward map. The road was difficult and raised a number of issues around representation for people of color who historically have been locked out of corridors of power. Not everyone got exactly what they wanted, but forging a compromise and avoiding a referendum is in everyone’s best interests,” she said.
Lightfoot also thanked Ald. Michelle Harris, chairwoman of the council’s rules committee, “who did a yeoman’s job to bring her Council colleagues together to get this done for the residents of Chicago. ... 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.”
But the compromise map did not sit well with the reform group CHANGE Illinois, which had created a “People’s Map” drawn up by an independent commission. That group eventually forged a partnership with the Latino Caucus, which modified its map to reflect some aspects of the “People’s Map.”
With neither that revised map or the previous Chicago United map getting enough support, the matter appeared headed to a referendum — until the late deal, which involved enough Latino Caucus members agreeing to give up the fight.
CHANGE Illinois denounced the deal as a backroom agreement that benefits p, in a statement
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