The political showdown over drawing new ward boundaries in Chicago reached a fever pitch Tuesday, as the chairwoman of the City Council committee tasked with leading the remap process filed a petition to place their map on a ballot in Illinois’ June primary election.
The move comes after months of failing to reach a compromise with opponents in the council, and is a major signal that voters, rather than aldermen, could decide the final map that shapes political power in the city for the next decade.
“I am confident our fair map will be supported by Chicagoans who want us to move on to addressing other issues impacting their daily lives,” Rules Committee Chairwoman Ald. Michelle Harris said Tuesday.
The map unveiled Tuesday, which was drafted by the Rules Committee, is backed by the council’s Black Caucus, and signals a potential end to an effort to compromise with a group of aldermanic opponents led by the council’s Latino Caucus.
That caucus, led by Ald. Gilbert Villegas, filed a referendum petition for its own, competing map in December.
Both sides have accused each other of failing to work together toward a compromise, which at this point would require at least 41 aldermen to support a single proposal.
“Gil Villegas, let me know when you’re serious about coming into the room and working with us on your map,” Harris said. “Stop playing games, come on into the room and if you really want to do this, come in the room and work with us, not against us.”
In response to Harris’s comments Tuesday, Villegas said the only path to compromise at this point is to “start over” and “ let data be the driving factor,” accusing Harris and the Rules Committee of restricting where Latino aldermen can draw their ward boundaries.
“Here’s the double talk: ‘Come into the map room, we want to work with you,’ ” Villegas said. “And then: ‘No you can’t go over there because those other aldermen are already locked in’ … that’s not going to happen. We have every right as a protected class to be afforded the same opportunity to draw the map.”
Both caucuses are proposing maps that would create the city’s first Asian-majority ward. But the key sticking point is how many wards would be majority Latino: 15 or 14. Currently, there are 13 majority-Latino wards.
Harris said her map has 33 aldermanic supporters. That’s compared to the 15 aldermen who are behind the map drafted by the Latino Caucus, according to Villegas.
At least 41 aldermen need to support a single map to avoid 10 or more from banding together to push for a referendum, which the Latino Caucus and supporters did in December.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who has largely stayed out of the council’s public remap feud, is still not ruling out a compromise.
“Compromise is always the best thing – it’s intrinsic to our participatory democracy,” Lightfoot said Tuesday at an unrelated news conference. “And it’s unfortunate that the battle lines got drawn, I think, very early on in this process … I think there’s still an opportunity [for compromise] but obviously the window of opportunity is starting to close.”
Aldermen have until mid-May to adopt a map. If they don’t approve one, the decision would fall to city voters to decide between the competing ward boundaries in June’s primary election.
Aldermen are in charge of remapping the city’s wards based on new census data every 10 years. Overall, Chicago’s population is 31.4% white, 29.8% Latino, 28.7% Black and 6.9% Asian.
The city’s Latino population grew by 5% since 2010 amid a nearly 10% drop among the African American population.
Mariah Woelfel covers Chicago politics for WBEZ. Follow her @mariahwoelfel.
