From the beginning, the Oneida County Redistricting Committee has said it’s wanted to keep the map redrawing process simple and quick.
It and all counties are working with a shortened timeline to draw new maps due to the delay in Census Data.
Oneida County’s population did grow in the last ten year.
The number of districts isn’t changing, so it’s now down to a matter of moving lines to make sure districts have equal populations within a margin.
Andrew Faust with the North Central Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission did the drawing for the county.
“Most of the population increase happened in Minocqua, City of Rhinelander, and Three Lakes. Otherwise, the population was fairly flat generally across the county. So I tried taking the old districts and making modifications to them,” said Faust in the most recent committee meeting.
The way the district lines shifted between Districts 11 and 12, current District 12 Supervisor Mitch Ives would no longer live within his district and would need to run again for District 11 if he wanted to stay on the board. That’s if this draft of the map is ultimately approved.
This was the only point of discussion among the committee members, and they were all in agreement with Committee Chairman Ted Cushing.
“We got to keep politics out of it completely. The only way to do that is to say, ‘Okay these are the population swings. If it affects somebody, it affects somebody,’” said Cushing.
The committee voted to approve the draft of the map so that it could go to a public hearing.
The public hearing is Tuesday, September 14th at 2:00 p.m. in the Oneida County Boardroom at the Courthouse.
