Our Fix Philly Districts contest for redistricting the Philadelphia City Council closed at the end of August and we announced the prize winners on September 8.   This project was a chance for us to use the DistrictBuilder software to apply pressure for change in our home town, Philadelphia.

Fix Philly Districts was a collaborative effort between several local organizations:  WHYY NewsWorks, the Philadelphia Daily News, Philly.com and Penn Project for Civic Engagement.  While the DistrictBuilder software has been used to support competitions in Virginia and Arizona, this Philadelphia implementation was the first time it was being used for a municipal public redistricting competition.

The competition ran for only a few weeks in August, but we were overwhelmed by the degree of engagement by the public.  We had participants from all over the United States, and almost 500 people registered to use the application.  More than 1,200 plans were started, and more than 70 complete plans were submitted to the leaderboards.  The final competition garnered submissions from 31 teams or individuals.  Representatives from each of the partners reviewed these plans and selected several winners.

But there are larger questions here.  In particular, was this worthwhile?  Did it have an impact?  To answer that question, let’s look at where we started.

The Contest

In the last three rounds of redistricting, Philadelphia has developed progressively more convoluted and gerrymandered districts with the process after the 2000 census resulting in two districts there were among the least compact local municipal districts in the United States (check out our Redistricting White Paper and Philadelphia Supplement if you want to read more about how that was determined) and redistricting had historically been carried out behind closed doors.  This past spring both the Mayor Michael Nutter and City Council committed to a more open process and promised at least four public hearings to be held in the neighborhoods that would be most impacted.  But by early August, there were no hearings scheduled and the new district plan was due on September 9.

We launched Fix Philly Districts on August 3 and within days, City Council announced a public hearing … to be held at City Hall… in the morning… on a weekday… in August.  There wasn’t much chance that was going to result in much airing of opinions from the public.  But that did not mean the public wasn’t interested.  On Monday, August 8, our partners held a civic workshop event at WHYY.  More than 120 people showed up – it was standing room only.  Two members of Council (Sanchez and Green) attended and, to their credit, stayed through the entire event, both participating and contributing ideas for how to improve the redistricting process.  Ms. Sanchez was particularly supportive and offered to make time for the winners of the contest to present their plans at a future hearing.

Many news media outlets took Council to task for not providing more opportunities for public participation in the process.  Two more hearings were scheduled, this time in the neighborhoods and in the evening so that it would be easier for people to attend.  Azavea presented a sampling of the Fix Philly Districts submissions at the first event and the winners presented their own plans at the second event.

Council Releases a Plan

Council announced two slight variations on a plan on September 9, only a day after the second of the neighborhood hearings.  Both of the proposed plans are improvements on what we have had in Philadelphia for the past 10 years.  Both of these plans got a few things right:

• The two most egregiously gerrymandered districts are much improved, resulting in a plan that is somewhat more compact
• There is a more compact and identifiable Latino district
• There is a more recognizable set of “river wards” along the Delaware River

On the other hand, these plans do not come close to the standard set by the Fix Philly Districts competitors.  Some of the craziness includes:

• The 5th District still leaps across Broad Street and deep into the east side of town – this is clearly designed to simply incorporate Darrell Clarke’s home into his district, but significantly fragments the neighborhoods east of Broad St.
• The 5th District dips deep into Center City to capture Rittenhouse Square, Spring Garden and Fairmount neighborhoods.  This is entirely unnecessary and significantly fragments the neighborhoods NW of center city
• The 1st District spans the natural barrier of the Schuylkill River and ends up grouping SW Philadelphia with South Philadelphia, sections of the City that have little in terms of common interests
• The 3rd District dips down into the SW
• The 8th District has an appendage on its east edge that seems odd

These are strange moves, except in light of where the incumbents live.  Council developed a somewhat better plan, but it essentially remains an incumbency protection plans.  I am also surprised (though perhaps not that much) that the two plans represent almost identical concepts with only a few divisions moved around in each.  These aren’t really choices that would enable the public to have a real debate.

Did we have an impact?

This isn’t a typical Azavea project: there is no funding to support it; all of the partners did the work pro bono; and while our Cicero API and the work we’ve done on DistrictBuilder is clearly engaged with the geographic elements of the democratic process, Azavea does not usually wade into the actual scrum of politics.  Was it worth it?  Did we really have an impact?

Our ultimate goal would be to change the rules so that redistricting is taken out of City Council’s hands – I strongly believe that an independent redistricting process  is the only way to ensure a fair and transparent process that reflects the public’s interests, rather than Council members’ interests. But we were not so naive as to believe that was going to happen.  Did we change the way that Council acted or change the outcome of the redistricting process?  I think we did.  With some help from active coverage by the news media, we at least accomplished the following:

• We shamed Council into scheduling first one public hearing and then two more, enabling many more voices to be heard.
• Council delivered a plan that was not completely embarrassing and did so on time.

So City Council didn’t produce an embarrassing plan, and that’s a victory?  I actually think we did much more.   We successfully demonstrated that, given some online tools, there are hundreds of people that are sufficiently interested in the redistricting process to commit hours of their time to drawing their own districts plans.  And they did that in the middle of August, during a hurricane, several storms, an earthquake and anxiety about the Phillies.  The best ten or so of the plans submitted to the contest were better than what Council developed from many perspectives.  And I do believe that the scrutiny probably prevented some of the excesses that we saw after the last census.

Not the end of the story

And I suspect this particular redistricting story will continue.  Council has adopted one of the two plans and the mayor has signed it, but there is nothing to prevent this one from being tweaked.  An amendment proposing additional changes has already been introduced, there will be five new district council members inaugurated in January all of whom will likely have their own ideas.  Indeed, this new plan will not actually be used until the election of 2015, providing lots of opportunities for fiddling.

But I think we can say doubt that the public process represented by the Fix Philly Districts contest demonstrates, without a doubt, that the many members of the public want to be engaged in a civic dialogue, both with their elected representatives and with each other.  They will work hard to do so.  And our democracy can be better for it.