Some Cook County residents might be happy about the possibility of being in a new county commissioner district due to population changes over the last decade. Some might not. Working out the details of equalizing the number of constituents in each district as much as possible as required by law has been in the hands of Cook County Auditor-Treasurer Braidy Powers, and at a public hearing during the April 10 county board meeting he presented his suggestions. “This would be the very conservative option,” he said.
The proposed changes would include Jan Hall inheriting some of Jim Johnson’s constituents in the McFarland Lake area. Johnson would pick up some of the constituents in the southwest corner of Hall’s district and some of Fritz Sobanja’s constituents on the Lake Superior shoreline east of Grand Marais. Sobanja would pick up some of the southeast portion of Johnson’s district above Highway 61.
Jokingly, Powers stated, “Fritz has a huge amount of real estate. It’s kind of like Russia!” Because Sobanja’s district lies partly in Grand Marais where the population is much more concentrated than in other areas of the county, his district covers a much smaller area than the other four districts.
A list of the names and addresses of those affected by the redistricting will not be available until after the county board approves a plan. A second public hearing will be held on April 24 at which time a final plan could be approved.
According to Powers, “Voters will have until May 15 to apply for revisions to the plan. … The last day to notify voters of the new precinct boundary changes is July 20, which is 25 days before the primary. We will make those notifications as soon as we can after the plan is approved, any revisions are approved, and we complete the coding of the new districts/precincts in the election system. This should be well before the July 20 deadline.”
No elections will be necessary because the changes that would be large enough to trigger elections are in Sobanja’s and Johnson’s districts, and their terms will be up at the end of this year anyway.
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