Committee redrawing Pittsburgh City Council district map wants to preserve majority minority districts

A volunteer committee tasked with redrawing Pittsburgh City Council’s nine districts is determined to maintain two districts where the majority of residents are people of color, its chairman said.

Committee members said they also aim to keep neighborhoods together to avoid splitting them up among separate council districts.

While not required by law to have two majority minority districts, the committee wants to “because it makes council more equitable,” said committee chair Daniel Woods, chief of staff for Councilman R. Daniel Lavelle.

The City Council Reapportionment Committee, which held its first meeting this week, will analyze population data from the 2020 census to equitably divvy up the city into nine districts. It’s a process conducted after each census, meant to ensure that districts “correctly reflect the size of the population,” said Jalila Jefferson-Bullock, an associate professor of law at Duquesne University.

“Everyone’s vote must have equal weight, so there must be, in a sense, equal population numbers in a district,” she said. This often means that districts with growing population numbers may become geographically smaller, while those with shrinking populations may expand to cover a larger area.

Overall, the city experienced a nearly 1% population drop, according to data from the most recent census — and six of nine council districts have seen that trend in their communities.

One of the main challenges the reapportionment committee faces is maintaining the city’s two majority minority districts, which currently are Districts 6 and 9. They are represented on council by Lavelle and the Rev. Ricky Burgess, respectively.

“I did do some initial attempts at playing around with the map and it’s going to be tough to reach that threshold because of the population loss and the African American population loss within the City of Pittsburgh,” said Woods, who also served on the city’s last reapportionment committee.

Keeping those districts intact is key for proper representation in minority communities, Jefferson-Bullock said. Splitting up minority votes can “dilute” them, she said.

“If the numbers are there in any way, if they’re able to preserve that district, they should go out of their way to do so as long as it’s in line with the criteria,” she said.

That’s one of the committee’s top goals, Woods said.

“All members are in agreement that we have to do our best efforts to maintain the majority minority districts,” he said. “We also want to ensure that we create a map that, in common terms, makes sense in the sense that we don’t want to split neighborhoods and we just want to craft a map that really works for the City of Pittsburgh and really is representative of the residents of the City of Pittsburgh.”

Once the committee has a preliminary map, it will present the proposal to City Council. The public will then be invited to offer input through public hearings, which could lead to further revisions, Woods said. The final map needs to be approved by August 2022.

The changes would take effect for next fall’s election.

The public hearing process, Jefferson-Bullock said, is imperative. She urged people to participate in the process to ensure they’ll be properly represented for the next 10 years.

“People should go and make sure their interests are preserved appropriately,” she said. “Democracy requires always that we participate in it.”

Each council member appointed one member of the reapportionment committee. Woods represents District 6. Other members include Schuyler Sheaffer for District 1, Johnathan Alexander for District 2, Bob Charland for District 3, Blake Plavchak for District 4, Matt Singer for District 5, James Murray for District 7, Emilie Yonan for District 8 and Shawn Carter for District 9.

A similar reapportionment process is also underway to redraw Pittsburgh Public School Board districts.