Mayor Michelle Wu has signed the brand new redistricting map into regulation, codifying the brand new map precisely one 12 months earlier than the following municipal election and placing this hot-button subject to mattress for the following decade.
“Mayor Wu has signed the redistricting ordinance approved by the council last week after being advised that it complies with the Voting Rights Act,” her workplace mentioned on Monday.
So ends a very caustic redistricting cycle that additional enflamed and highlighted the deep divisions on the council.
Or at the least does so for now, as a number of officers have mentioned they anticipate the map to finish up in court docket in a roundabout way or one other. Even now, it goes into impact as neighborhood teams problem the method, suing on open-meeting grounds with a listening to slated for Wednesday.
The map, handed by a 9-4 rely within the council, most notably strikes a number of the southern Dorchester precincts round Cedar Grove and Adams Village from District 3 to District 4 and a number of the precincts across the Old Colony and D Street tasks in South Boston from District 2 into District 3. These modifications infuriated D2 City Councilor Ed Flynn, who’s the council president, and D3 Councilor Frank Baker, in addition to a few of their allies.
This final model signed into regulation is a frivolously modified iteration of the hotly debated “unity” map first launched by redistricting chair City Councilor Liz Breadon and City Councilor Ricardo Arroyo together with progressive activist teams.
These modifications are slated to enter impact for the following council time period, so the councilors working within the Nov. 7, 2023, native election can be doing so to symbolize these districts. Until then, the present councilors maintain representing the districts they have been elected to, those set final redistricting cycle in 2012.
The subsequent will happen in 2032, two years after the following decennial U.S. Census, as is typical. By then, if all goes in response to plan, booming new developments — primarily new neighborhoods — will exist within the likes of East Boston’s Suffolk Downs, Columbia Point’s Dorchester Bay City and the brand new Harvard-driven redevelopment of Lower Allston, bringing hundreds of latest residents to those neighborhoods and sure inflicting the kind of trickle-down sweeping redistricting modifications that the arrival of the Seaport delivered to D2 this time.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”