Ward 8 Councilman Marion Barry has turned 2010 census data into a battle over the District’s racial divide. “The people in Ward 8 are wonderful,” Barry told The Washington Examiner. “The demographics are like an apartheid system, but they’re not responsible for the system.”
The population west of the Anacostia River has boomed as white residents have flooded into the city, census data show. But on the east side, the population has shrunk. The lines for the city’s two easternmost wards — 7 and 8 — will have to be redrawn to bring their populations back up to the legal limit. Ward 2, home to Georgetown and downtown, boomed and will have to give up some territory. Ward 6, once on the low end of the legal limit, is now nearly on the mark for the average population. Wards are required to be no more than 5 percent above or below about 75,000 residents. Reaching that level for every ward is likely to cause the council to redraw the borders of several wards, council members said.
To break apart what Barry called an “apartheid state” in Ward 8, the ward should expand into more mixed areas. He wouldn’t get specific about where he’d like the new boundary drawn, but came close.
“We can’t expand into Prince George’s County to the south, and we can’t go into Ward 7, which also lost population,” Barry said.
That mostly leaves the Ward 6 neighborhood stretching from the west bank of the Anacostia to Nationals Park.
“I’ll defend the riverfront,” Ward 6 Councilman Tommy Wells told The Examiner. “Ward 6 should stay the same.”
Wells is likely to win the fight.
“We’re starting to see demographic shifts occur in a natural way,” said at-large Councilman Michael A. Brown, who is co-chairing the redistricting committee with Ward 2 Councilman Jack Evans. “I don’t think we need to gerrymander it.”
Evans’ Ward 2 must shrink its geography. He said he wants to keep the changes simple by redrawing the lines to the legal limit rather than trying to give each ward an equal population. At-large Councilman Phil Mendelson agreed. Both councilmen said that would mean adding some of Ward 7 into Ward 8 and pushing more of Ward 7 west of the river. Wards 5 and 1 could then absorb parts of Ward 2.
Residents, Mendelson said, shouldn’t worry.
“We’re essentially a one-party city,” he said. “[Redistricting] doesn’t affect people as badly as they fear.”
