City Council Adopts Final Redistricting Map and Ordinance

After a nearly year-long, very intense process of drawing new boundaries for the city’s 15 City Council districts, the Council today voted unanimously – with no further discussion – to adopt its “hybrid” map outlining those new districts, and the ordinance that will implement them.

It was a very quick and quiet end to a process that has been anything but, through scores of draft maps, hundreds of hours of meetings, and thousands of public comments over the last few months.  The process also resulted in more than 30 Buzz stories since July, as our own neighborhoods figured prominently in several boundary battles, including the requested unification of Koreatown in CD 10, and many proposals to significantly re-shape the current CD 4.

And while the lists of divisive issues did get significantly whittled down in the last few weeks, some issues have been harder to resolve, most prominently a fight between CDs 8 and 9 over which would get to claim the USC and Exposition Park areas.  In fact, CD 8 Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson recorded a final protest vote against the proposed map and ordinance just last week, registering his frustration that the Council did not honor his many passionate requests to restore the two “economic assets” to his district after they were moved to CD 9 ten years ago.

Today, however, the vote to approve the final map and ordinance was nearly unremarkable, as the new districts passed into reality as part of an uncontested consent vote with 44 other agenda items.

The final map is shown below…and the new districts will go into effect on January 1.  Under the new boundaries, most of our local Greater Wilshire area will be located in CD 5 (purple area), as requested by many local community groups citing other communities of interest to the west, and the rest will  be in CD 13 (gold area), with a number of denser, more urban-feeling areas to our east.

But while the City Council has now concluded its redistricting work, other redistricting processes are still in the works and also rushing toward their December 31 deadlines.  The next meeting of LA County’s independent Citizen’s Redistricting Commission, now down to a choice of three possible maps for new Supervisorial districts, will hold its next meeting tonight at 6:30 p.m., via Zoom…and the Citizens Commission working on California state legislature and U.S. Congressional districts is now meeting daily at 11 a.m.  (Click here for meeting details and Zoom links.)