Buffalo, N.Y. (WBEN) - The Buffalo Common Council voted unanimously on Tuesday in favor of a new reapportionment map for the City of Buffalo.
During a public meeting in May, the Commission on Reapportionment drafted a new district map for the City, which is re-drawn every 10 years to better reflect the changes of population around each district in Buffalo. Prior to Tuesday’s vote, the Common Council met last week to discuss the public's input on the proposed map, legal consideration, as well as demographical data relating to the population changes.
Although it was a unanimous vote to approve the new reapportionment map, many from the local public in attendance for Tuesday's session did not approve of the notion from the Common Council.
According to some in attendance, they said the map doesn’t represent the growing changes of population in Buffalo and is gerrymandering.
"I've never seen a district map done where somebody didn't say 'gerrymandering'," said Buffalo Common Coucil President Darius Pridgen following Tuesday's vote.
"It was, trust me, painstaking, because what you have to realize there are some tracts of land that don't have a lot of population. So you might have a big map track, but it doesn't mean it has the population. And especially when you look at Downtown Buffalo, we're just starting to grow out Downtown Buffalo. So it's not just about where the lines are, it's where the people are also. You had to stay within 3% of each other, or else that's challengeable in court. So it was very difficult. I will not pretend that it was something that happened overnight, that it wasn't something that we weren't up at nights talking about trying to figure out and making those changes."
When it came to figuring out the new reapportionment map for the City of Buffalo, Councilman Pridgen says without going all the way back to the drawing board, the only thing the Council could do was continue to massage the middle districts and try to keep communities that were alike together.
"It wasn't done to take anything away from anybody, and it was a very, very difficult process," Pridgen said. "One thing I'm not going to do is to go into a back-and-forth with people and their opinions and what they feel. At the end of the day, there was a public hearing with the Commission, one or two people showed up - that's what the charter says - and that probably was the place where then they could get the attention of those who were on the Commission. There was no elected official on the Commission, they were volunteer citizens who were drawing up the map who brought it back to us."
"When we had the public hearing and we heard from people who are saying, 'We have a new map,' we didn't have to pause the process, [but] we actually paused the process for weeks and went and looked at the map to see if we could even consider that map. Unfortunately, the first map that was sent to us created new districts, which you cannot do by law. To create new districts, you must have a referendum. The people, as a whole, have to vote on that. And [there were] some other issues that were there that would not allow us to use that map."
The next step in this process is for the reapportionment map to be sent to Mayor Byron Brown's office for final approval.
More from Council President Pridgen on the City of Buffalo's reapportionment map is available in the player below: