Columbus City Council is moving through a few final steps before formalizing a redistricting plan.
The city approved annexing territory last year that added 1,462 citizens to the Columbus population, including 949 who are voting age. The increase will bump the city’s population to an estimated 25,102.
In December, the council needed a tiebreaker vote from Mayor Robert Smith to preliminarily approve a redistricting plan for the annexed territory.
The council will hold a public hearing on March 3 to receive public input on the new ward lines and proposed changes to polling places. From there, Chief Operations Officer David Armstrong said the council would need to formally adopt a redistricting ordinance.
“We don’t legally have to have the public hearing, but we want to get public input,” Armstrong said.
The annexation brought four areas of the county into the city. The four areas include most of the east side of Lehmberg Road and a short distance north on Highway 12, the Riverwalk to the west of downtown, a piece of Woodland Heights Drive to the north and the area around Columbus Middle School.
According to the proposed redistricting, Wards 2 and 3 would take in the areas east of Lehmberg Road, while Ward 5 would absorb the annexation near downtown and Ward 6 would take in the middle school and Woodland Heights.
The plan proposes no changes to the polling places in Wards 1, 5 and 6. However, in Ward 2, the proposal would replace Columbus Fire Station 1 with the East Columbus Gym. The fire station would become a polling place for Ward 4, and First Assembly of God would become a Ward 3 polling place (switching from Ward 4).
“This redistricting is pretty much a done deal,” Ward 3 Councilman Charlie Box said. “With this hearing, we want to make sure we’ve got the polling places where they ought to be so that we’re not causing citizens any hardship.”
Ward 2 Councilman Joseph Mickens initially objected to the redistricting plan on two counts — he thought it added too many apartment complexes to his ward and he thought the annexation as a whole should have added more people. Though he still maintains those objections in principle, he said he plans to vote for the redistricting ordinance once it came to the table.
“We were hoping to get 30,000 residents from annexation, but this plan falls well short of that,” Mickens said. “We wanted to do that so we could recruit places like Red Lobster and Olive Garden that won’t look at communities under 30,000. But the citizens that were annexed into Ward 2 are very grateful. They had been neglected somewhat by the county, and we’ll hopefully be able to relieve them of some of the problems they have been having.
“Right now, it is what it is,” he added. “I’m excited about it, and we’re just going to move forward with what we’ve got.”
Vice Mayor and Ward 1 Councilman Gene Taylor said he didn’t see a hard deadline for adopting the redistricting ordinance, but he indicated “the sooner, the better.”
Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.
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