Lacking the 41 votes needed to avoid a costly referendum, the chairman of the City Council’s Rules Committee on Wednesday called off a showdown vote on a new ward map — dragging the once-a-decade struggle to craft new boundaries past the Dec. 1 deadline.
Ald. Michelle Harris (8th), Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s Council floor leader, said the citywide ward map crafted by Mike Kasper, who served for decades as the election law expert for deposed Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, will be introduced at Wednesday’s City Council meeting, but no vote will be taken.
That will allow for public input while negotiations continue in hopes of reaching the 41 votes needed to avoid a referendum, Chicago’s first in 30 years.
Harris refused to say whether the map being introduced would include 15 majority-Hispanic wards, as the Latino Caucus has demanded, or 14, as her Black Caucus has demanded in order to preserve 17 majority-African-American wards.
Nor would she say where and how Kasper’s map would accommodate an explosion of white population in the downtown area and along the lakefront and whether the positioning of that new downtown ward would protect indicted Ald. Edward Burke (14th).
Harris would only say that Kasper has crafted a “fair map to everybody in the City Council that sat in that room and wanted to draw their map.”
“We’re still leaving the process open so that other folks can come in and negotiate their map and still work on their map,” Harris said.
“It’ll be a living and breathing document. … We are not voting on the map today.”
Earlier this week, Harris accused Latino Caucus Chairman Gilbert Villegas (36th) of running a “separate process on the side” of what’s going on in the map room.
She accused Villegas of sexism and urged him and his fellow Latino Caucus members to “come in the room, draw your map, get a map that you don’t love, but one that you can live with. None of us love our map.”
On Wednesday, Harris was asked what she believes is behind the criticism of her leadership and the perception she has empowered Kasper and favored the Black Caucus instead of crafting a map that is fair for the entire city.
“I won’t be bullied. I won’t be pushed around in this process. I respect everybody. I talk to everybody. And anybody that wants to sit in the room and have a dialogue and a discussion, I’m down for it. But, you cannot bully me and run over me,” Harris said.
Villegas said he’s not at all surprised that Harris has called off the vote. Direct introduction of a citywide map to allow for immediate consideration at Wednesday’s meeting would have required just 34 votes. But, 41 votes are needed to avoid a referendum.
“I’m glad that they’re not having a vote today because it would be very hypocritical to talk about transparency and all of these other things that some of my colleagues ran on, then put forward a map today and vote on it an hour later without allowing at least 14 City Council members the ability to take a look at it,” he said.
Villegas predicted the map he derisively called “Kasper’s Picasso” would include just 14 majority-Hispanic wards.
“What I’ve also heard is that some of these wards that are majority [Latino] are at 50%-plus-one, [or] 50.99. They’re really diluting the ability to elect a Latino and have put Latinos in jeopardy where they could potentially lose their seat over the next decade. So it’s going contrary to what the Voting Rights Act is supposed to do,” Villegas said.
If the City Council does not approve a map by the Dec. 1 deadline, it triggers a referendum if ten alderpersons petition for it and introduce a referendum map to be placed before the voters during the June, 2022 primary.
Villegas hedged when asked whether he believes a referendum can still be avoided.
“We have been following the data and the Voting Rights Act. If people want to negotiate with us and have real discussion about compromise, then we’re ready. But, we’re not gonna continue to meet and be told the same thing over and over again. That you have to draw your maps within these boundaries that have been determined by Mike Kasper and the Rules Committee,” he said.
Villegas noted that non-Latino wards have “historically utilized Latinos to back-fill their wards in order to gain population.” That’s what happened ten years ago when, as he put it, there was a Latino ward “left on the table.”
“We had another increase this decade and we want our fair share of representation,” Villegas said.
“We’re only seeking one new ward this cycle.”
Burt Odelson, an attorney representing the Latino Caucus, said the caucus has created a political action committee to raise money that will be used to “help educate voters on the referendum.”
“It won’t be the precinct captain way. We’re gonna run it like an educational political campaign,” Odelson said.
Ald. Roderick Sawyer (6th), former chairman of the Black Caucus, bristled at the reference to “Kasper’s map.”
“It does a disservice to all of us who worked hard on crafting a map,” Sawyer wrote in a text message to the Sun-Times.
