Council OKs less-gerrymandered district map

FOLLOWING WEEKS of intense negotiations, City Council yesterday approved a final redistricting plan that fixes some of the gerrymandering issues with the city's 10 councilmanic districts but sets up very high population differences.

A map produced by Councilmen Frank DiCicco and Jim Kenney passed, 15-2, with nay votes from Republican Councilmen Brian O'Neill and Jack Kelly. Mayor Nutter is expected to approve the map today, allowing Council to get paid. Under city law, Council would forgo their pay if they did not pass a plan by yesterday.

Meanwhile, a map created by a working group of Council members that included O'Neill, Anna Verna, Maria Quinones-Sanchez, Marian Tasco and Darrell Clarke was tabled after it barely received committee-level approval last week.

"There's no bloodletting; we all came to an agreement," DiCicco said. "Leadership shows that you're willing to say sometimes that your plan may not have been the best plan."

The DiCicco-Kenney plan makes one of the nation's most gerrymandered districts - Quinones-Sanchez's 7th District - more compact. The district now covers a large chunk of North Philadelphia and corkscrews around Temple University, through parts of Kensington and into Northeast Philly.

A notable difference was how the competing maps dealt with the Northeast's 56th Ward - represented by powerful Democratic ward leader John Sabatina, whom no one wanted to deal with.

In the working-group map, O'Neill, who represents the 10th District, was given 75 percent of the 56th Ward, and the remainder went to the 6th District, represented by outgoing Councilwoman Joan Krajewski. The DiCicco-Kenney map sticks O'Neill with the entire ward. Efforts from both Council president hopefuls, Clarke and Tasco, to help O'Neill failed.

DiCicco said Council will introduce a bill on Oct. 6 to make a few more tweaks to the map.

The new plan has a 9.75 percent population difference between the largest and smallest districts, more than double the current population deviation. DiCicco said it was difficult to draw a compact map without widely varying deviations. He acknowledged that there's always a possibility for legal challenges.