Get the latest Syracuse news delivered right to your inbox.
Subscribe to our newsletter here.

For the first time in 20 years, Syracuse will redraw its Common Council districts. The Syracuse City Redistricting Commission, now in the middle of its process, released its latest draft of the new map to the public on May 1.

Since the release of the latest draft, some citizens have raised concerns with maintaining the cohesiveness of the city’s neighborhoods and the demographics of the new districts.

Grant Reeher, a political science professor at Syracuse University, said in an email that, generally, the new boundaries are more compact and contiguous.

“They seem to more uniformly respect pre-existing community boundaries,” said Reeher, who also serves as the director of the Campbell Public Affairs Institute at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.

On the drafted map, much of the southside of Syracuse will be in District A, which includes neighborhoods such as South Valley, North Valley and Brighton. District B includes the city’s downtown as well as the shores of Onondaga Lake near Destiny USA mall. The northside is split between District C and District D on the drafted map. District C includes the Near Northside and Washington Square neighborhoods while Eastwood, Sedgwick and Lincoln Park make up District D.

The commission placed SU and its surrounding area in District E on the drafted map. While SU currently shares a district with the city’s downtown, the two are split in the draft. Along with the University Neighborhood and University Hill neighborhoods, the draft includes Wescott, Skytop and Meadowbrook in District E.

Independent citizen volunteers oversaw the redistricting process and the subsequent creation of the drafted map as commissioners on the SCRC. The group’s process began in March following the fall 2021 Common Council elections.

Jason Belge, a commissioner on the SCRC, said the commission is diverse and apolitical and all members have an equal voice concerning the maps. Commissioners have worked with the Benjamin Center at SUNY New Paltz, which specializes in redistricting, to create the maps.

In the latest draft of the Common Council’s districts, Syracuse University shares a district with the Wescott and Meadowbrook neighborhoods.”
Image courtesy of Syracuse City Redistricting Commission

The commissioners also invited feedback through public hearings on how the new maps could be redrawn to best preserve cohesion among neighborhoods and communities. The Syracuse City Redistricting Commission held a public meeting on Thursday, June 2 at the Northeast Community Center to discuss the newly drafted maps.

Some shifts between the current and the drafted map include the role of I-81 and the creation of a majority-minority district.

One person at the meeting raised concern regarding the racial demographics of the new districts. She asked members of the commission if keeping minority communities together in the same districts empowers them or further marginalizes them.

Commission members responded that one of the main goals of the redistricting process was to maintain minority community cohesion in order to maximize their voting power instead of splitting communities across districts.

From 2010 to 2020, Syracuse grew in population by 22.4 percent. Along with this growth, the demographics of the city also shifted. While in 2010 Hispanic people only made up 6.72% of Syracuse’s voting population, in 2020 the group makes up 9.11%. Similar upward trends occurred for Syracuse’s Black and “Native American” communities, according to analysis from The Benjamin Center.

Changes in Syracuse’s population and demographics informed the redistricting commission’s process and goals, Belge said.

“We tried to figure out the places of interests, commonalities, things of that nature. What the lines don’t do is they don’t discriminate between neighborhoods,” Belge said. “So those commonalities, the people that have similar interests, will, in turn, hopefully vote for the candidates that would best reflect those common interests to then represent them and local public.”

The commission also used a separate map of voters by race using data from the 2020 census, Belge said. The map, which was shown at Thursday’s meeting, helped ensure that minority voting power was not being diluted and split up among several districts, he continued.

District A, which is on the south side of Syracuse, has a voting age population that is 54% Black, Belge said. District B is a majority-Hispanic area and District C is largely made up of immigrants from Asia, he said.

Several other people at the meeting shared their opinions on the neighborhood impacts of redistricting. People advocated during the meeting to keep the Hawley Green neighborhood together in a district. Some attending also sought to maintain the Sedgwick-James-Highland historic area in the same district since it is split between Districts C and D in the current draft.

I-81 was previously located in the middle of Districts 2, 3 and 4, but, according to the new district maps, will serve as a barrier between Districts A and E.

Belge said the upcoming community grid project and the uncertainty of what its local neighborhoods may look like in the future because of it led the SCRC to use the highway as a barrier between districts.

“(The SCRC is) supposed to work with the population distribution as it currently is, not make future projections,” Reeher said.

The commission also prioritized population distribution between the new districts in its process. The deviations between the districts’ populations are not to exceed five percent of the total Syracuse population, or around 1,500 people from the average, Belge said.

While redistricting is typically read through the lens of political power, Reeher said the process will most likely not have a significant impact on Syracuse’s election outcomes. The new map could potentially favor Democratic candidates, he continued.

“My sense by just eyeballing them is that minority communities are distributed somewhat less strategically in a way that helps Democrats,” Reeher wrote in an email. “Compactness and pre-existing boundaries are now elevated above trying to keep certain ethnic groups together, in order to generate Democratic districts.”

Common Councilor Patrick Hogan said he had hoped for more “radical change” in the form of more districts, with the intention that smaller constituencies would enable councilors to work more closely with their constituents. Hogan currently represents Common Council District 2.

“I represent seven different distinct neighborhoods that all have different needs, and their residents have different ways of looking at things, and I just think we could be way more effective as if we were all divided into quite different districts,” Hogan said.

Attendants of Thursday’s meeting reflected this concern, but commissioners said there are legal barriers to creating more districts. The commission also explained that it believed Common Councilors would best reflect the interests of the constituencies they serve through the creation of districts that don’t dilute the voting power of minority groups.

Thursday’s meeting was held in person and also streamed online. It was the fourth of five scheduled meetings. The final public meeting of the SCRC will be on June 14 to collect feedback before the commission completes its final redrawing of the maps. The meeting will be at 5:30 p.m. at the Southwest Community Center and will also have a virtual option.

The SCRC will hold two more public feedback sessions once the commission releases the new drafted map. Following the sessions, the commission will make any necessary final changes before sending the finalized maps to the Common Council for its approval.

If the Common Council rejects the final proposed map, it will go back to the SCRC for redrawing. If the council approves it, the new map will go into effect for the next Common Council election in 2023. The maps are available for public viewing online.

“We saw (minority community) neighborhoods from the census data, and we wanted to keep those neighborhoods intact the best we could, and I think we did a really good job of that,” Belge said. “We didn’t want to dilute the vote, we wanted to strengthen their vote.”

Published on June 4, 2022 at 9:35 pm

Contact Stephanie: spwright@syr.edu