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The City Council will discuss possible strategies tonight in case a citizen’s group collects enough signatures to challenge the city’s recently-approved redistricting plan. 

The council will have various options, if the newly formed Citizens for Fair Representation gathers the 4,000 valid signatures necessary to place the controversial Blake-O’Malley redistricting plan on the March ballot. 

One choice will avoid a ballot referendum by a council repeal of the plan, which it narrowly approved on Oct. 16. If the council chooses to repeal, the entire redistricting process – which bitterly divided the council – will begin anew. The process, which would begin on Nov. 27, would have to be completed by the council’s last meeting of the year on Dec. 18 to comply with a City Charter deadline of Dec. 31. 

The other choice, which is apparently even less appealing, and more expensive, would be to put the plan before the voters on March 5.  

Several councilmembers said on Monday they would prefer repealing the plan because of the $60,000 to $100,000 price tag of putting the referendum on the ballot. (The cost would be elevated because the city would have to produce its own ballot. At this time, other jurisdictions, but not Berkeley, will be preparing ballots – complete with sample ballots and ballot statements – for the March vote.) 

“The fact is we’ve got to clear up this mess,” said Mayor Shirley Dean, a member of the minority “moderate” council faction. “When we went to the district system in 1986, no one anticipated this problem.” 

This “problem” is a Census Bureau undercount of about 4,500 people, mostly students living in districts 7 and 8. Because the City Charter requires district lines to be redrawn according to the decennial census – whether it’s flawed or not – all of the proposals the council considered had a flawed count of people living in districts 7 and 8.  

According to a report by the city attorney, the Census Bureau has not yet corrected its blunder and has only indicated the city “may receive ‘draft’ numbers” from the bureau by the end of the year.  

The census undercount resulted in a plan, approved by the council’s progressive majority faction, that put nearly 17,000 real people in moderate Councilmember Polly Armstrong’s District 8, while the other seven districts have closer to 13,000 residents. Progressive councilmembers said the approved plan adhered most faithfully to the City Charter, which requires that all districts be changed as little as possible during the redistricting process. 

Soon after the plan was approved, the Citizens for Fair Representation formed to challenge the approved plan, which they said was little more than a power grab by the council progressives. Last week the CFR announced that it had 6,000 signatures, well above the 4,000 required, to place the plan on the ballot. The deadline for submitting the signed petition to the city clerk is Wednesday. 

If the signatures are verified, the council will decide on Nov. 27 whether to rescind the current plan and adopt a new one. A second plan adopted by council would also be subject to referendum, in which case the former district boundaries, established in 1991, would be used for election purposes, according to a background report by the city attorney. 

Mayor Shirley Dean said she favored yet another option – putting an amendment on the March 5 ballot that would extend the redistricting deadline by two years thereby allowing time for inaccurate census numbers to be corrected. 

“We can’t simply ignore this problem and hope it will go away,” she said. “We have to get to a place where we can deal with accurate numbers when we redraw council lines even if it takes a ballot amendment.” 

Progressive Councilmember Dona Spring disagreed saying the council would be better off repealing the Blake-O’Malley plan and working around the inaccurate census data to create another redistricting plan. 

It would be costly to put anything on the ballot, Spring said. “Why not come up with a plan that resolves some of the difficulties posed by the census undercount.” 

Progressive Councilmember Kriss Worthington proposed reworking the Blake-O’Malley plan by including a 5 percent “fudge factor” in each district’s population count.  

According to guidelines prepared by the city attorney, the population count in each district should be within 1 percent of the others. Worthington said if the 1-percent allowable difference was increased to 5 percent, the undercount in districts 7 and 8 could be “fairly and equally spread” among all of the districts instead of just two. 

“All of the other proposals put 90 percent of the undercount into districts 7 and 8,” he said. “The 5 percent allowable difference is the only proposal I’ve heard of that spreads the undercount throughout the city.” 

Moderate Councilmember Betty Olds said the council should be cautious in selecting a new plan. “The council needs to be careful about which plan it chooses,” she said. “If the progressives just tweak the current plan a little bit, the 6,000 people who signed that petition are not going to be happy.”