At its November 8 work session, the Eugene City Council passed a motion to send updated ward boundaries to a public hearing on December 13, 2021. The updated boundaries combine changes from two scenarios reviewed earlier this year. See a map of the proposed updated ward boundaries online.
After reviewing data updates and feedback from the community on two potential scenarios, the Council supported a motion to move forward with proposed ward boundary changes to wards 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, and 8 from scenario 1 and changes to wards 4 and 5 from scenario 2. These changes will be incorporated into a Resolution scheduled for a public hearing at the 7:30 p.m. meeting on December 13.
The City Council will have the opportunity to take action on the new ward boundaries after the public hearing or at their meeting on December 15. If approved, new ward boundaries would become effective with council action and would affect wards or districts for the Eugene City Council and Eugene Water and Electric Board. The full text of the resolution will be available online on the Council agenda website on December 9.
Every 10 years, after the federal census, boundaries for federal, state, and local elected offices, including City of Eugene wards, are reviewed and adjusted to reflect new population data. Updating ward boundaries helps ensure equal representation by local elected officials by making sure each Councilor and EWEB Commissioner represents about the same number of constituents.
Earlier this year, the Council approved a set of criteria to guide the creation of the scenarios including limiting the population range difference among wards to plus or minus 3 percent and creating scenarios that consider geographic and neighborhood features and strive for relative compactness and contiguity. The City received the official US Census data in August and began using the Council’s criteria to develop ward boundary scenarios based on the new population information.
The current population of Eugene is 176,667, which indicates that each of the eight wards should have approximately 22,083 residents.
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