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Next week the city of Berkeley will step a little closer to reconfiguring its eight electoral districts to better agree with new census information using a plan submitted by Elliot Cohen of Nuclear Free Berkeley. 

Other plans were were also presented by Tim Hansen, University of California Berkeley student Josh Fryday, Nick Rizzo, a 16-year-old Berkeley High School student and Councilmember Dona Spring. 

Council unanimously agreed to further study Cohen’s plan at midnight Wednesday morning after some two hours of heated debate. Rizzo’s plan was also approved for further study by a 5 to 4 vote. 

“My plan draws from the one vote/one person principle which is base don the idea that you want each district to have the same number of voters,” 

Cohen said. “This is not a plan that goes along with my political biases. I did it because I saw what happened last time. 

“So, if there was fighting this time around between council about who gets what, and no one was able to come up with a compromise, I hoped my plan could be used to bridge things and create peace on the Council.” 

This was Cohen’s second shot a creating a plan, and he says this success is based upon a lot of lessons he learned from previous failures. 

A call for redistricting plans was put out to residents in January after the council could not decide on an appropriate plan. 

The City Charter requires new district lines to be drawn every 10 years, following the U.S. Census Bureau’s population count. But because of the bureau’s undercount of about 4,500 residents in districts 7 and 8, a fair redistricting plan was difficult for the council to settle upon. 

Citizens for Fair Representation, who protested against an early plan, commented during the meeting Tuesday night about the fairness of Cohen’s plan in relationship to other plans. 

They were specifically moved by Cohen’s 1 percent deviation from the actual numbers. They also applauded Cohen for being able to put his own legal agenda aside. 

But essentially, the redistrciting is about numbers, communities and politics. 

“I too was looking at this process and trying to figure how this might work out best for me,” Councilmember Linda Maio said. “But I just don’t agree with this.” 

In the end Maio voted for Cohen’s plan because it seeemed to be the most honest of all the plans. Citizens for Fair Representation sokesperson agreed that the plans brought forth this tiem around wer9e much better than previous years. 

“All the plans do much more in an attempted to be nonpartisana,” a spokersperson for the Citizens for Fair Representation said. 

“Do not use the term of community of interest to further narrow political goals,” said John Curl. “The only two that I can see that really equitably distribute the undervount is Nick Rizzo’s and councilmember’s Springs.”