Jersey City will ask a Hudson County Superior Court to postpone mandatory redistricting for the city’s six municipal wards pending the results of an appeal of the city’s census numbers. City Clerk Robert Byrne said Friday the appeal will likely be filed this week.
All cities must redraw the lines of their wards due to population changes revealed by the 2010 U.S. Census. However, Jersey City is currently challenging its numbers, as city officials believe the count overlooked thousands of residents. According to the official count, Jersey City has 240,000 residents.
On Tuesday, the Jersey City Ward Commission gave its blessing to the city’s plans to postpone redistricting. By state law, redistricting of the municipal wards should be completed within 30 days of the Ward Commission’s meeting, meaning redistricting should be completed by Oct. 6.
“What I don’t want to see is us doing this exercise twice.” – City Clerk Robert Byrne
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Census numbers are used to determine the level of federal aid for which municipalities are eligible. They are also used to set electoral boundaries for local, state, and federal political districts.
“There is a little precedent for having this pushed off,” Byrne told the commission Tuesday. “Ten years ago this month, there was a hastily convened meeting of the Board of Elections, one that wasn’t properly [advertised], where ward boundaries were voted on by just the four members of the board, absent any participation by yours truly…Then the [2000] census map was thrown out.”
The ward boundaries, Byrne added, were eventually redrawn and certified in March of 2002.
Byrne noted that since there are no municipal elections until 2013, “I’m hoping the court will look favorably on our application to extend the statutory period [for redistricting].”
There will be citywide elections this year for two at-large City Council seats, representing the entire town. But voters will not elect City Council representatives for wards A, B, C, D, E, and F until 2013.
‘Rectify the numbers’
For the past several months, researchers from Social Compact, the nonprofit group hired by Jersey City to determine whether its population was undercounted, have been doing block-by-block topographic analyses of Jersey City neighborhoods to determine which housing developments were missed during the census count. According to Carolina Valencia, the organization’s research director, there are areas where census data showed no one living on certain blocks even though photos reveal cars on the street or in nearby parking lots.
Two weeks ago, Social Compact shared with Jersey City preliminary results of research that indicated that 19,000 housing units were missed during the 2010 census. Complete data will be given to the city later this month.
The city will use the information from Social Compact as the basis of its appeal to the court for an extension on redistricting.
Hudson County Clerk Michael Harper, who attended Tuesday’s meeting, said, “This is the sixth Hudson County municipality we’ve gone to. And nobody’s happy with their census numbers. I can’t speak for my board, but I think we’re pretty supportive of efforts to rectify the numbers.”
A ‘nonpolitical map’
Should a Hudson County Superior Court judge reject the city’s request for an extension, Byrne said the Ward Commission will be forced to do redistricting with the population numbers the city already has.
“What I don’t want to see is us doing this exercise twice,” Byrne said Tuesday. “Once we cut a map, you’re going to see some people say, ‘Hey, this map favors me. I could do very well in this particular ward. I’m going to run in this ward.’ Then, if we have to come back to the drawing board, and that person is no longer in the ward that they initially thought they were in, they’ll think that we’re acting politically. That’s not something I want to be involved in.”
He added that whatever the new map looks like, it should be nonpolitical and based on the numbers.
E-mail E. Assata Wright at awright@hudsonreporter.com.