EVERETT — The process for an upcoming citizens’ commission to map out the new districts for council elections is currently being worked on.
In a proposed outline released this month, the city would call for applicants for the commission this spring. The commissioners would be selected in June, but their groundwork in arranging the district map wouldn’t begin until 2020, according to the proposal. The outline presumes commissioners would work together with a hired consultant called a district master.
The proposed deadline to set the map would be Nov. 1, 2020 for final approval by the City Council in December 2020. City officials plan to see the first district elections occur in 2021.
City Council members last week expressed concerns this timeframe is lengthier than what they hoped. Two council members characterized it as “protracted.”
The districts will have localized elections that place people onto the citywide council. Voters in Everett approved this system last year. Five of the seven council seats will over time convert to geographic-based elections where only the people who can run for office also live in that designated part of the city.
The nine-member commission would be responsible for creating the council district areas and hiring a district master, who’s a specialist well-versed in district elections. The commission would independently work out the mapping and the City Council would be largely hands-off by design.
Finding a district master may be the most unique challenge: it is understood that nationally there are not many people who work in this field.
More immediately, the city also still has to allocate money to cover the associated costs for starting the districting process. An outline suggests the cost estimate is all over the map. However, the highest estimate is $82,000 over two years, which includes $35,000 for the district master and $30,000 for consulting attorney costs according to a draft budget snapshot released last week.
The council’s role would be to select seven of the nine commission members under the plan. The mayor would select the eighth member, and the commission itself would select its ninth peer.
Voters last year approved changing the election system for the council to break up five of the seven council seats by geographic district.
The map’s standards are stringent: Boundaries must be set to have a proportionately equal number of residents within each district, and the map lines need to be reasonably drawn to section up the city. The 2020 Census data will be used to adjust the map in future years.
Promoters for introducing council districts call this system more egalitarian and representative because a broad range of candidates from across the city can be assured a shot at
getting onto the City Council by fencing off some seats by geographic district.
In years past, city watchdogs have criticized the council as having a predominant number of candidates from North Everett. The criticism got louder when at one point this decade, four councilmembers all lived in the same neighborhood.
