No formal action from Council will occur at this meeting since it is a City Council Work Session. Staff is expecting to share information with City Council on the City Ward Boundary update process needed following the 2020 US Census and share a draft map of what changes would address the population changes from the Census that occurred across some Wards. Staff also is seeking direction at this meeting from Council on moving forward with the next steps to complete the Ward Boundary updates before the 2023 elections.

Article 3 of the City of Billings Charter requires election wards with 10 Council Members and two Council members representing each ward. Chapter 11 of the City Code requires that ward boundaries be described in an ordinance and shown on a map. State Code Section 7-5-4401 requires that cities of the first class (Billings) have between 4 and 10 wards and that the population in each be as equal as possible. This ensures that, per the US and Montana Constitutions as well as case law, that voters have equal voting strength and representation with their elected governing bodies. In jurisdictions like Billings that have more than one election district, equal voting power and representation are accomplished by equalizing the population among all of the election districts.

Redrawing election boundaries has a judicially approved set of mandatory and a set of discretionary criteria. From the outset, staff focused its efforts on changes that meet the mandatory criteria, such as equalized population and contiguous and compact shapes of wards. The most common discretionary criteria are to use geographic or topographical features as boundaries and borders that use existing political unit boundaries - like roads, ditches, rivers, etc. A more rarely implemented, but allowed discretionary criterion, is to establish boundaries that do not adversely impact incumbent elected officials. The Billings City Charter requires that Council members reside in the wards that they represent. If a new ward boundary plan was adopted that placed an incumbent in a different ward from the one that elected him/her, that Council member would immediately forfeit his/her seat because s/he would no longer reside in the ward that elected him/her. The current plan does not affect any current Council members in terms of their place of residence and the ward they represent.

The City's 2020 population per the 2020 Census data is 117,240. The 2010 Census data set the City population at 104,170. The current population of 117,240 means that the ideal population per ward is 23,448. The increase in population since the 2010 Census is most significant in Ward 4 (See the attached Draft Ward Boundary Redistricting Map) at 25,722. This creates a significant imbalance with Ward 1 that has a current population of 20,580, a 5,142 difference between Ward 4 and Ward 1. Staff has reviewed the populations in the wards and also looked at election district boundaries, and has developed a recommendation for Council to make two significant changes between Ward 1 and Ward 4 to adjust the population distribution (See attached Draft Ward Boundary Redistricting Map) that will bring all of the wards within less than 1% of each other in population (0.7%). This proposal appears to be the most straight forward way to make the necessary changes with the last effect on the five wards overall. Staff at the meeting will walk through the draft map, proposed changes, and some minor tweaks to the map beyond the main population adjustments.

The 2023 City Government Primary is Tuesday, September 12th and the General is Tuesday, November 7th. The time for candidates to file opens 140 days prior to the Primary, or the third week in April 2023. That means the City should determine its Ward boundaries prior to the opening day for candidates to file so they know which Ward they reside within. Given the schedule in early 2023, staff suggests it bring the ward boundary changes to Council for public hearing and first reading of an ordinance no later than the first meeting in March 2023 so it can be passed and approved the second meeting March.

 

The stakeholders in this process include the residents of Billings that are represented by the City Council and Mayor across the five City Council Election Wards. Ensuring that the population in each Council Word is approximately the same to maintain even representation for each Ward is an important process for the City after each decennial Census is tabulated and the data is released.

There is really only one alternative for the City Council at this point, and that is to move forward with updating the City Council Wards to adjust population distribution as evenly as possible across all five Wards. In this case, staff has made adjustments that bring all 5 Wards within 0.7% of each other in terms of population totals per Ward.

The main fiscal impact from this effort is the staff time involved in collecting the Census data, analyzing it, and then preparing draft Ward maps to show how the adjustments in population would be distributed across the Wards. City GIS, Planning, Legal, the Clerk's Office, and Administration have been involved in this effort in the City, and the County Elections Administrator and County GIS Department also have participated. If the Council fails to adopt a plan prior to the 2023 municipal election or adopts a plan that does not meet the primary criteria for redrawing election boundaries, the decision could be challenged and additional resources would be committed to defending its decisions.