Community Corner
County Redistricting Topic of Open House
An open house was held Tuesday evening at the county administration building at 667 Ware Road in Woodstock.
McHenry County residents had the chance Tuesday night to see the map outlining the new legislative boundaries for the county.
Sparsely attended, the open house was held to show the proposed legislative redistricting and make people aware that, depending on where they live, they may soon have different county board representatives.
With the 2010 Census showing a jump in the county’s population of 48,683 residents — up to a total of 308,760 residents — the county board was required to reconfigure its districts to have the same population in each. Board members decided to maintain six districts with four members each and change boundaries to make them the same.
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The former target population per district was 43,500. With the new map it is 51,460, said McHenry County Administrator Peter Austin.
"I don’t know that we had completely assessed how disproportionate we were,’’ Austin said of the number of residents in some districts. "District 5 was up to 68,000. This is all new housing that didn’t exist 10 years ago. It was all agriculture.
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The McHenry County Legislative & Intergovernmental Affairs Committee, along with the McHenry County Board, came up with criteria to develop the new map. The most reconfiguration was done to districts in the southeastern part of the county.
"It’s all population driven,’’ committee chairman James L. Heisler said of the changes. "All of our population is down to the southeast quadrant.’’
District 6, which is the rural area in the western half of the county, was mostly unaffected by the changes, said District 3 Board Member Kathleen Bergan Schmidt. Districts 1 and 2 moved over more into Grafton Township and portions of District 5 were put into districts 1 and 2 to even them out, she said.
The board was also required to keep the new district populations within less than a 3 percent deviation from the target population, which the proposed map does.
The map is slated to be approved by the Legislative & Intergovernmental Affairs Committee on May 26 and by the county board on June 21.
