Lake Las Vegas, Calico Ridge areas now in Henderson Ward 1

Henderson City Council members on Tuesday passed a redistricting plan to ensure the city’s population is evenly split among its four council wards.

Staff members presented two options for redistricting the wards. The council voted 4-1 in favor of the first option, which extends Ward 1 to include the Lake Las Vegas and Calico Ridge neighborhoods in its borders.

Only Ward 3 Councilwoman Carrie Cox voted against the plan. She said many residents reached out to her with concerns about their neighborhoods being split up in the redistricting.

She praised the second plan for more effectively evening out ward populations and said more of her constituents prefer the plan. Cox also said that Andrew Powell, city planning manager and city demographer, gave her a rough draft for a third option on Monday, which she said would be more effective overall than the two presented at Tuesday’s meeting.

“There would have been a more balanced approach, creating the best possible even movement between wards while complying with requirements and keep it fair for residents across the board across all wards,” Cox said during the meeting.

Cox made a motion to table a vote on the new ward maps at Tuesday’s meeting and revisit the subject at a later date, to give residents more time to share their thoughts and to provide staff more time to draft another plan.

“What I ask is that we as a City Council work together, and we table it for a couple of weeks,” Cox said.

Council members voted 4-1 against that motion.

Before Cox spoke at the meeting, Mayor Michelle Romero criticized Cox’s plans to introduce a third option for redistricting.

Romero said that a council member adding a third option would not offer the expertise of city staff, would push redistricting past the city’s deadline of Sept. 15 and could be “perceived as” gerrymandering.

Ward 4 Councilman Dan Stewart and Ward 2 Councilman Dan Shaw said the best way to handle redistricting is to leave creation of the plans to “the professionals” on city staff and to follow their recommendations.

Stewart said that while he too wants to hear from residents, council members getting involved in the drawing of ward maps is how the process gets politicized.

“To be fair and equitable to all of the residents, I believe we leave it in the hands of the professionals and we don’t meddle with something that we should not be meddling with. Then it becomes politicized,” he said.

Stewart said he was “very disappointed” in how the redistricting process became politicized over the last several weeks.

He criticized the city’s recent move to ward-only voting for council members and said the redistricting becoming politicized was a result of ward-only voting.

“I plead with my colleagues that not only on this issue, but pretty much every issue from here on out,” Steward said, “we be very careful about devolving into a mentality of ward-only thinking.”

Contact Mark Credico at mcredico@reviewjournal.com. Follow him on Instagram @writermark2.