A final redistricting town hall meeting will be held on May 25 at 6 p.m. via Microsoft Teams for Houstonians from all Houston City Council districts. The meeting comes on the heels of a series of town halls held for each individual district over the course of May.
The city of Houston redistricts every 10 years, a process that involves new boundary lines for each council district based on data from the decennial U.S. Census and public input. As previously reported by Community Impact Newspaper, priorities for drawing new lines include maintaining equal population numbers across the city's 12 districts, easily identifiable geographic boundaries, not breaking up county voting precincts, avoiding the diminishing of voting power by demographic concentration or dilution, and preserving incumbent and constituent relations.
According to a March redistricting presentation, some districts that cover the Heights, including District C and District H, are among those that are furthest away from the necessary population level and face the biggest changes. District C also covers parts of Garden Oaks, Meyerland and Montrose, and District H covers parts of Woodland Heights, Northside Village and Northline.
District C is 15% overpopulated, while District H is 17% underpopulated. During an April 25 meeting hosted in District H, residents said they would like to see the city take diversity into consideration with the new boundary lines, but ultimately want to see their neighborhoods be kept together.
During District C’s May 3 meeting, residents said they would like all the historic districts to be kept under one district if possible, and to no longer have neighborhoods split into two.
As previously reported by Community Impact Newspaper, during District E’s May 18 meeting—a district that includes both Kingwood and Clear Lake—some residents expressed desires to have a contiguous district. Currently, District E Council Member Dave Martin, who resides in Kingwood, has to split time between the two areas. However, others in Clear Lake said they felt that District E should be kept the same because they feel Clear Lake has more in common with Kingwood than it does with the areas surrounding it.
Houstonians who are interested in drawing their own redistricting map as feedback for the city can do so with the help of a computer located in the Houston Planning and Development Department’s office at 611 Walker St., Houston, on the sixth floor. All proposed plans must be based on the 2020 census, cover the entirety of the city and be submitted by July 20.
According to the city’s redistricting website, a redistricting draft plan is expected to be ready sometime in either June or July. Public hearings will be held July 13 at 9 a.m. and 7 p.m., and on July 20 at 9 a.m. The revised plan will then be presented to council in August. An ordinance declaring the population of the city and a redistricting plan ordinance establishing boundaries of single-member districts will follow in a September meeting of Houston City Council.
New boundaries will go into effect Jan. 1, 2024. Information for the Microsoft Teams meeting can be found here.
