Author Topic: Voting Districts  (Read 4834 times)

Offline itsme

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Voting Districts
« on: June 27, 2006, 06:53:30 AM »
In the last 2-3 years, Hackensack's voting districts have changed.  Who makes those districts and wards and why the recent change?  It appears that some wards are bigger than others. 

Also, what are your thoughts on a city government in which each ward has a council member and at least one councilperson at large?



ericmartindale

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Re: Voting Districts
« Reply #1 on: June 27, 2006, 09:31:13 AM »
Here's my understanding, and I might be slightly off on this:  The district and ward lines can be changed by a consensus agreement between the Republican and Democratic chairpersons of Hackensack.

The lines were changed in 2004 or early 2005 because over the course of many decades, condo construction, rental construction, and/or demolition of the housing stock changed the distribution of voters across the city. 

For instance, the old district representing Union Street and portions of the central business district around the library had a dramatic reduction in registered voteres as the housing stock was eliminated for the expansion of the business district, city hall, the Middle School, etc.  The area around Anderson Park also experienced a dramatic decline in registered voters due to demographic changes in the large apartment old buildings. The new residents are mostly illegal aliens or recent immigrants who are not registered voters.  Meanwhile, Prospect Ave soared in population.  A few of the voting districts became so large that they were unmanagable.

I think that Hackensack was ORDERED by the Attorney General's office (or some other state-level entity) to redo the district lines.  The wards are supposed to have approximately equal populations, and the districts within each ward are also supposed to be roughly equivalent.

During the process, a decades-old problem was rectified: The old district lines were nonsensical. The 2nd, 3rd, and 4th wards cut east-west across the width of Hackensack, incorporating disparate neighborhoods as "districts".  The new ward lines, although not perfect, more accurately represent the "sense of community" in different parts of the city. The Second Ward is generally centered around the Hillers distict and HUMC, the Third Ward is generally for Central Hackensack, the the Fourth Ward for the better parts of Prospect Ave (and west).  The southeastern part of the city remains the First Ward, and the Fairmount Section remains the Fifth Ward.

Some political tinkering is also evident.  For instance, I think the lines were drawn specifically so that Arlene Schatz, acting chair of the Hackensack Taxpayers Association, would be seperated from the bulk of the neighborhood in which she is active.  I'm not a huge Schatz fan, but I picked it up right away, and I just chuckled when I saw it. Something funny was also done for the block bounded by Central, High, First, and Second Streets, but I'm not sure who was the target of that one.

It'll probably be decades before the lines will need to be changed again, but since new construction has dramatically shifted to the Third Ward, one can guess that any future inbalance is likely to involve that area.

 

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