County Auditor's Office has come up with two options for new Cedar Rapdis City Council districts

CEDAR RAPIDS - City Council member Kris Gulick's District 1 council district has been an east-side one confined largely to northeast Cedar Rapids and mostly west of Council Street NE.

On Monday, the City Council will look at two map options that adjust the boundaries of the five council districts to keep their populations similar as required by state law and based on the results of the 2010 Census.

Both map options expand Gulick's District 1 across the Cedar River to include a small piece of northwest Cedar Rapids, including the flood-hit Time Check Neighborhood.

If one of the two options is approved by the City Council, District 1 will join District 3 as the second of the five council districts to include precincts on both the east and west sides of the Cedar River.

Gulick on Friday said he assumed that his district boundaries would change a bit to accommodate the city's growth in population and the places in the city where it has grown and not grown.

In his sixth year in office, he said he has tried to listen to residents citywide and to attract them to his quarterly constituent meetings regardless of having been elected from District 1.

“It always been an option that anybody could contact me, so it wasn't like I was really parochial about the districts anyway,” he said.

He added that the Time Check Neighborhood in northwest Cedar Rapids is a “stone throw” across the Cedar River from his northeast Cedar Rapids home.

Back in 2005, the City Council adopted a district map in preparation for the city's first election of a nine-member, part-time council with five district seats. At the time, the council talked about the long-held perception in the city of a divide between east and west, and the council said it liked the idea of having a council district on both sides of the river.

Now the council has asked Joel Miller, the Linn County auditor and commissioner of elections, to provide map options that take into account population changes, and Miller on Friday said council members in recent days talked again about the idea of districts “bridging the east and west.”

Nonetheless, Miller reported that he and his staff initially came up with three map options, none of which had any of the five districts but for District 3 on both sides of the river. However, Miller said the Iowa Secretary of State's office's administrative rules called for the use of a different formula than Miller's office had been using to calculate the allowable differences in population - 10 percent or less - between the largest and smallest of districts. And the formula, he said, resulted in the creation of three new map options, one of which did not meet the 10-percent standard.

At a special meeting at 9 a.m. Monday, the City Council will look at the two remaining map options, Option 4 and Option 6.

Miller said his staff has come up with options that keep most residents in the same council districts. There was no effort, he added, to keep incumbents in their existing districts or to push two incumbents into the same district or to prevent such a push. His county staff didn't really know where Cedar Rapids council members lived, he said.

The proposed maps keep district incumbents in the districts which they represent today.

Back in February, Miller estimated that the 2010 Census showed that council District 3 had lost 10 percent of its population in the decade while District 5 had grown by 25.3 percent. Meanwhile, District 1 and District 4 had grown less than 1 percent while District 2 had grown by 5.5 percent.

The new maps put the largest proposed district within 4 percent of the population of the smallest proposed district, well within the state rule, said Miller.

He noted the City Council also asked that the district maps be designed with a thought to where the city's population is slated to grow over the next decade.