MORGANTOWN — In 2017, Morgantown City Council approved a change to the city’s charter altering the timing and data used by the city’s ward and boundaries commission to equalize the population of the city’s seven wards.
Now, the city and the commission hope to further refine the process through the use of Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping.
During a Thursday meeting of the wards and boundaries commission, Morgantown GIS Analyst Marvin Davis provided a preliminary glimpse at what that new boundary map might look like by merging the county tax parcel map with a map of city blocks.
Davis, who started with the city in September, will now set to work refining that map using voter registration data, census data — which was added as part of the 2017 charter change — and respect for neighborhood boundaries.
“That was mentioned during the previous meeting, that we look at neighborhoods, that we don’t want to bisect neighborhoods,” Davis said. “We don’t have a finished neighborhoods map yet. So I’m trying to use that information the best I can to assign those boundaries to match the neighborhoods as best as possible.”
While the city charter says the wards should be equalized “as nearly as practicable,” Davis notes that legal precedent set across the country point to 10% as the upper limit for population discrepancies between districts.
That question was the crux of a lawsuit filed last March by former commissioner Roger Banks, who argued the previous ward map approved by the commission, and ultimately by city council, included deviations as large as 35%, representing “a prima facie violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.” That suit was ultimately dismissed.
Davis said his intention is to equalize all the wards to within the 10% threshold.
“We’ll likely have several iterations of this over the next few weeks,” he said, noting software designer Esri is watching Morgantown as a potential case study in moving beyond mapping private industry market districts and into political redistricting.
Even though the information provided by Davis on Thursday was essentially a proof of concept, the members of the commission were excited by its potential.
“I’d like to compliment this. I think you are moving along quite well and I’d like to thank you for that,” Commissioner Roy Nutter said. “This is the kind of tool I envisioned when we first started this.”
The Morgantown Ward and Boundary Commission will next meet at 2:30 p.m. on July 9.
The commission must present its recommendations to city council by Sept. 30.
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