Chicago ward map proposal blasted as ‘backroom deal’ and a loss for city’s Latinos; agreement means voters won’t decide on new boundaries

Enough Chicago aldermen are in agreement on a new map of the city’s 50 wards that they will avoid a ballot referendum next month that would have let voters choose from between competing maps, sources said Monday.

The proposed map will create 16 wards with Black majorities and 14 with Latino majorities, sources said. That’s one fewer Latino ward than the City Council Latino Caucus spent months fighting to secure.

Faced with a May 19 deadline to have at least 41 aldermen vote to approve a single map in order to avoid having their competing maps go to voters, council members have been negotiating to try to reach some kind of consensus.

Southwest Side Ald. George Cardenas, 12th, said it appears the various factions have crossed that threshold.

“A referendum wouldn’t have been good for anybody, so something had to happen and we’ve done that,” Cardenas said.

But the People’s Coalition, whose map was backed by the Latino Caucus, put out a statement late Monday calling the proposed deal “highly gerrymandered.”

“So-called ‘reformers’ made backroom deals and decided that voters shouldn’t be allowed to choose their map,” the group’s statement read. “… As a result, Latinos lost for the second decade in a row. The largest minority population in Chicago won’t be fairly and accurately represented as such. The voices of immigrant populations remain on the fringes.

“We’re disappointed some of our colleagues chose to save themselves over the Latino community. This ‘Welcoming City’s’ elected representatives have proven that they’ll let us in, but our voices do not count.”

The once-per-decade fight had grown increasingly bitter as the deadline approached, but in the end, Latino aldermen who had been holding out started making deals to join the 35 aldermen who backed a map constructed by the council Rules Committee and favored by most of the council’s Black Caucus.

Both the maps backed by the Latino Caucus and Rules Committee included the city’s first an Asian-American-majority ward.

The central point of tension has been Latinos wanting as many new wards as possible to give them added political power to reflect the fact Chicago’s Latino population continues growing, according to the latest U.S. Census. Black aldermen have wanted to hold on to as many wards as possible after decades of working to grow their strength on the council, in spite of the fact the city’s Black population is declining precipitously.

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In the latest twist, the Latino Caucus hoped to get the council last month to suspend its rules and for a majority of aldermen to pass either their map or the one backed by the Black Caucus and others. Doing so would have allowed the Latino Caucus to then amend its map for the June referendum in order to reflect changes it agreed to this year with the good government groups, including CHANGE Illinois.

But the Latino Caucus failed to gain enough support to do so, leaving them without the allegiance with CHANGE Illinois that they hoped would help them convince voters their map was more fair to people across the city.

Various Latino aldermen began negotiating deals to tweak their ward boundaries in the Rules Committee map and join in supporting that one, with Northwest Side Ald. Felix Cardona, 31st, recently announcing he had done so.

The coalition could still fall apart before aldermen vote on it, but it seems likely the political uncertainty of the referendum will convince enough of them to join together to avoid it.

The last time a map referendum happened, following the 1990 Census, it spurred a federal lawsuit that cost taxpayers $20 million. Backers of the Rules map have relentlessly positioned their proposal as the best way to avoid a repeat of that costly episode.

jebyrne@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @_johnbyrne