David Green, like many of his neighbors, was shocked this month to learn that the proposed redistricting map unveiled by Cleveland City Council President Blaine Griffin would drastically change Ward 12, which would be split into six different wards.
"Six ways? Oh my lord!" Green said. "It's like they took a pie and made it into six pieces."
Green, 68, lives just south of Fleet Ave. with his son, would most likely be represented by a new council person.
"If Rebecca's gone, who we gonna call?" Green added. "That's what I'm trying to figure out."
Green's anxiety -- that the necessary redrawing of Cleveland's wards signals total political shake up -- is bound to be shared by Clevelanders who have grown used to the current ward maps, their current council folk and all the approaches to city services and new legislation that come with such habits.
But some areas of Cleveland are facing more drastic changes than others. Those in the far west side's Ward 17 are just switching to number 15. Ward 16 is losing a sliver when it becomes Ward 13. Ward 1 would give a bit of its northwest edge to the soon-to-be Ward 2.
But Cleveland's new map, set to be voted on and approved by City Council on January 6, hammers Ward 12. What's currently a half-donut shape covering Old Brooklyn to Slavic Village is set to be broken up into six: a new Ward 4, Ward 11, Ward 14, Ward 5, Ward 3 and Ward 2.
Slavic Village will now be split amongst three wards, with three new council reps from a current representation of four.
"I would frankly prefer it to be just one or two," Ward 12 Councilwoman Rebecca Maurer told Scene. "We shouldn't be carving up neighborhoods into this many different slices. So going from four to three doesn't help us very much."
Since November, Maurer has been one of few on council to publicly criticize the proposed map and Griffin, though she said others share her concerns. (Jenny Spencer, who recently announced she will not be seeking another term on council, is another.) Maurer has said Griffin and the consultants targeted her specifically with the elimination of Ward 12 and the gerrymandering of her house into a ward without most of her current voters, along with broader criticisms of the lack of fairness in the process.
Which Griffin himself denies.
At a press conference earlier this month, Griffin said the process was difficult but that the current map, which was redrawn after taking feedback from council members into account, was done without individual animus and solely to accommodate the population and demographic changes in the city.
"We tried our best to draw natural boundaries," Griffin said. "Many people wanted us to draw straight lines and nice clean square circles, triangles and shapes. However, ladies and gentlemen, population loss in distressed neighborhoods and migration to hot markets and hot neighborhoods made this an incredibly difficult challenge."
Griffin seemed to take aim at Maurer and other critics.
"These are not our seats," Griffin said. "I and the consultants tried very hard to un-gerrymander, to pass gerrymandering that past councils have done with this process. False accusations, misinformation and disinformation have been dangerous to this process."
Since the last maps were redrawn a decade ago, Cleveland has lost tens of thousands of people. As consultant Bob Dykes explained at the press conference, ward boundaries had to sort of shift westward, a method of using growing neighborhoods -- like Downtown and Ohio City -- to fulfill the goal of averaging about 25,000 Clevelanders per ward.
"There's no real way to avoid that," Dykes, who had helped Council redistrict three times since the 1980s, said. This "was the most open and inclusive of all the processes that I had the pleasure of working with."
Yet the consultant aim for transparency doesn't seem to really rid worried residents of their anxieties.
"I mean, putting Forest City in [the new] Ward 3 would've just made more sense to me," Chris Skudrin, the head of the Forest City Block Club, said. "But again, I'm not in City Hall. And I'm not the one who designed this map."
Skundrin's talking about her neighborhood of some 700 people, just west of Slavic Village, nestled along Independence Road and below the Industrial Valley. Instead of grouping the Forest City neighborhood with Slavic Village -- its closest sibling, per se -- the new maps group it with Central and the southern half of Downtown.
"We've had Rebecca, we've had Ed Rybka, we've had Ralph Perk on Council," Skundrin said. "I hate to say it: regardless of who the councilperson is, we will always work with them, and try to engage with them."
"In some cases that's successful," she recalled. "In other cases, it's not."
Maurer said she's uncertain whether or not she'll run in Ward 2 or Ward 3 next fall, when City Council holds elections for its new seats -- or if she'll run at all.
She pointed to a $2 million plan to revitalize the Fleet Ave business corridor as example of work still needed to be done and supported by one or two council members who share the vision.
"It will be that councilperson's job to build Fleet up," Shauna Sanders, the president of Slavic Village Development, told Scene, "and work with us to build it up."
Even if there's two on council to work with.
"Hey, I'll have to work with both of them to try and get them to work together," she said.
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