State Panel Changes Its Mind on District Lines, Once More
The New York State Independent Redistricting Commission (IRC) has issued yet another version of proposed boundaries for the New York State Assembly, which keeps the lines for Lower Manhattan where they were for the 2022 elections, and thus largely preserves a plan that State courts ruled invalid on constitutional grounds last year. This move is a reversal of borders proposed in the IRC’s December draft, which sought to restore the lines of the districts representing Lower Manhattan to almost exactly where they were before the process began, last year. That December draft, in turn, attempted to override the lines used in the 2022 elections, which were set by the State legislature, after the IRC deadlocked in February 2022.
For more than a decade, Lower Manhattan straddled two Assembly districts. Southern Battery Park City, the Financial District, the South Street Seaport, and much of the Lower East Side fell within the 65th District. Northern Battery Park City, Tribeca, Soho, and part of the West Village comprised the 66th District.
This began to change as the results of the 2020 Census (which triggered a legally required redistricting process) started to trickle in. Early tabulations showed that for all of Manhattan, population growth had been sufficient to warrant greater representation in the Assembly, but not enough to justify one whole new seat. (Assembly districts in New York State have an average population of around 130,000 seats, and Manhattan’s population swelled by slightly less than 110,000 during the decade preceding 2020.) This fraction-of-a-seat gain meant that some community in Manhattan would need to reach across water and share an Assembly representative with neighborhoods in another borough.
But the IRC deadlocked last February on how to redraw lines for all three sets of districts it was supposed to oversee: the State Assembly, the State Senate, and the U.S. Congress. This led to leaders of the Assembly and Senate to take matters into their own hands and draw the new district lines themselves. Among the results State legislators settled on was that part of Lower Manhattan (essentially Battery Park City and the western half of the Financial District) would be grafted onto the north shore of Staten Island, as part of a newly expanded 61st Assembly District.
In a result that surprised almost nobody, the new boundaries formulated by the leaders of the State Senate and Assembly were widely perceived to favor Democrats. (Both houses of the State legislature are controlled by Democrats.) This led Republican activists to file suit, alleging that the new maps violated a State constitutional ban on partisan redistricting. A succession of courts found in favor of the Republican plaintiffs, which led to the maps devised by the legislature being thrown out and (in the case of the Senate and Congressional districts) being drawn yet again by a court-appointed “Special Master.” This resulted in Senate and Congressional primary elections (originally scheduled for June) being pushed back until late August.
But the court’s final ruling that the State Assembly districts were similarly invalid came only days before the June primary, which left no time to do anything but proceed with the election for members of the lower house of the State legislature.
After the primary, the previously deadlocked IRC resumed working on district maps for the Assembly, rather than handing this task to the judicially appointed “Special Master” who had redrawn lines for Congress and the State Senate. In December, the IRC released preliminary results from this effort. For Downtown residents, the upshot would have been a radical change from June, but almost no change from the prior ten years. Battery Park City and the western Financial District were to be once again severed from Staten Island, and instead reconnected to Lower Manhattan. Battery Park City was once more to be cleaved into northern and southern sections—with the former subsumed into Tribeca and SoHo, while the latter was joined to the Financial District, the South Street Seaport, and the Lower East Side.
Community Board 1 endorsed that plan, in a resolution enacted at its February 28 meeting, which noted that, “Lower Manhattan does not have symmetry with Staten Island in terms of housing density or typology or socio-economic interests,” and that, “Battery Park City is closely aligned with the surrounding neighborhoods of Tribeca and the Financial District both geographically and socio-economically [but] not with Staten Island.”
The same measure argued that, “resiliency plans for Battery Park City, the Battery, and Tribeca [are] being planned and implemented by Battery Park City… in conjunction with the Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice for the FDi Seaport Master plan,” adding that, “the societal concerns are linked together and fit with the new maps for one holistic approach.”
On Thursday, April 23, however, the IRC issued an updated “final” draft, which it sent to the State legislature for review. This version eliminated the district line changes incorporated into the December draft, and restored the boundaries originally created by the State legislature last year.
This raises the question of whether the courts that threw out essentially the same district lines when they were drawn by the State legislature will view the plan any less skeptically now that it has been endorsed by the IRC. At least one member of the IRC, Ross Brady, expressed concerns that the new draft hews too closely to the version created by the legislature. A spokesman for the Republic plaintiffs who originally succeeded in having that plan tossed out under judicial review was unavailable for comment.