As Cleveland City Council Passes New Ward Maps, Only a Few People Are Happy

The League of Women’s Voters presented their own suggestion for Cleveland’s new ward map on Monday, an hour before City Council approved their own 15-2. Credit: Mark Oprea

Months of tension underlying the question of how to properly—and fairly—cut up Cleveland into 15 new wards came to a sour end on Monday, with City Council’s decision to approve by a 14-2 vote the map presented in December, with only minor changes.

Two hours of public comment and a handful of endnote speeches from five councilmembers gave the public a kind of anticlimactic close to a procedure that, for the first time in Cleveland history, allowed Clevelanders to give their two cents. Whether Blaine Griffin and the consultants tasked with drawing the maps took any of that into account or gave the public a proper timeframe and venue for feedback is another question.

As several public commenters claimed Monday, that feedback window was a little too narrow. Despite Council’s three public meetings in October, or their open inbox from the spring to the start of the New Year, the process felt rushed.

“You need to give citizens the chance to respond in time,” Nadia Zaiem, the head of the Cleveland League of Women’s Voters, told City Council during public comment.

“We hope that you can step back, listen to your constituents and allow time for community to reflect,” she added.

Zaiem, who brought with her a revised map that seemed to better include Cleveland’s neighborhoods without slicing them up, represented the majority of the criticism directed to Council President Blaine Griffin since December, when the maps were aired to the public.

The issue, to dissenters present on Monday, seemed to revolve around a vague timeline of how and when the maps would be shown to the public, how long feedback could be given, and when exactly approved boundaries must be sent to the Ohio Board of Elections to meet state deadlines.

Since May, when City Council hosted their public info sessions, City Hall ramped up what some called a speedy condensing of Cleveland’s 17 wards down to 15. A 2008 charter, voted on in a special election, means an odd number of wards with equal-ish populations. In this case, given Cleveland’s current population, roughly 25,000 people.

Last year, City Hall brought on a trifecta of consultants, led by veteran redistricter Bob Dykes, to see if they could objectively best pair Cleveland’s changing neighborhoods, and demographics, with a new arrangement.

The result was a total changeup: Ward 3, which housed most of Downtown, shifted further west to Ohio City, and was changed to Ward 7; East Side wards were retitled and moved west to compensate for population loss; and Ward 12, previously a halved donut on Cleveland’s south end, was diced up into five—wards 2, 3, 4, 5 and 14.

Ward 12 Councilwoman Rebecca Maurer ended her string of dissent regarding the map-making process with a speech suggesting the process wasn’t as transparent—or citizen-involved—as it could’ve been. “First and foremost, politicians should not be the ones drawing our own maps,” she said. Credit: Mark Oprea

These changes mean that, come next fall, tens of thousands of Clevelanders, if not more, will find themselves with new representation at City Hall. Those, like Dean Van Farowe, a pastor at the Calvary Reformed Church in Detroit-Shoreway, said, could signal growing pains for churches and the community development corporations they’ve gotten used to working with.

“This was a rushed process that should’ve been started long ago,” Van Farowe said.

Regardless, Council voted. Only councilmembers Rebecca Maurer and Brian Kazy voted nay. Jenny Spencer, who has announced she will not seek re-election, was not present.

Maurer, who’s grown as the central dissenting voice in Council Chamber for the ward maps, gave a six-minute speech picking out what she found to be anti-democratic maneuvering throughout the ward redraw: hints here and there of possible gerrymandering.

“I’m troubled by [the lack of] transparency, by the broken promises around community engagement throughout this process,” she said, then hinted at the failure of Issue 1 in November’s election: “First and foremost, politicians should not be the ones drawing our own maps.”

Maurer, as she and others have noted, seems to have been distinctly targeted by the new ward map, slicing up her support and current ward.

Maurer also juxtaposed the apparent ease that Council took to vote yay on maps that will, come 2026, change how some Clevelanders bond politically with neighbors with whom they once shared a ward. Legislation that—like the Cleveland Turkey Trot—was passed with just one look-over.

“We had that chance to have a public hearing on this map and instead we did not,” Maurer said. “We passed it, we read it and we passed it at the exact same time. And that is one of the many reasons I voted down.”

Other vocal councilmembers, like Kerry McCormack, Richard Starr and Michael Polensek, showed an it-is-what-it-is mentality to the new maps while expressing a kind of political sympathy for Griffin, who helmed the process. “The whole idea that you’re ruining the city,” McCormack said, “is just ridiculous.”

Griffin himself, who had the last word Monday, spoke pointedly, in tones that echoed his December press conference, asserting everyone that he himself tried his best to redraw Cleveland better than in past attempts.

“I’ll be the first one to tell you that I’m a perfectionist,” Griffin told the room.

“All I will tell you is that we gave it our best effort,” he added. “We did the best that we could, and we believe the process was transparent.”