Cleveland Proposed Wards 2013.jpg

(Photo by Courtesy of Cleveland City Council)

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Cleveland City Council President

on Monday released the map of council’s new ward boundaries –- affirming rumors that both the downtown business district and the northeast neighborhood of Collinwood will be divided.

But most of the historic Glenville neighborhood will remain intact in the new Ward 9,

that the predominantly black enclave would be split into as many as four wards.

The new district consolidates areas previously represented by

and

. The two longtime council members will be forced to face off on the November ballot.

State Sen. Shirley Smith, who last week

for threatening to divide Glenville and

into the secretive nature of his decision-making process, said Monday that she is not entirely satisfied, because the northeast corner of Glenville is lost to two other wards. But she accepts the results.

"In all fairness, it seems this is the best we can do for Glenville at this point, given the population loss," she said.

She reiterated her request for an investigation, however, and said she hopes the city’s law department will review the city charter to determine whether Sweeney is allowed to unilaterally draw ward boundaries without input from council or the community.

Council will hold a public hearing on the map at 9 a.m. Tuesday in Room 217 of City Hall and will then vote on its adoption in council chambers. (See the proposed map in the document viewer below. More detailed maps with street names are posted on the

.)

Council, which redraws the lines every decade following the census, must do so by April 1 or cede the authority to Mayor Frank Jackson. The city charter requires the size of council to shrink from 19 wards to 17 on account of population loss since the last redistricting. West Side Councilman Jay Westbrook announced this year that he would retire at the end of his term, simplifying boundaries for his West Side colleagues by sacrificing his ward to the process.

But on the East Side, tension brewed, as many of Sweeney’s colleagues and community activists publicly accused the council president of designing the East Side ward maps to satisfy the wishes of

Miller’s Ward 10 now straddles the Forest Hills neighborhood and the western tip of Collinwood.

Sweeney’s new plan reassigns the southern portion of Collinwood to Miller’s ward to recover population lost in recent years. Miller’s appears to be the least compact of the new wards – zigzagging westward from Collinwood, through a sliver along the lakefront, then blooming just east of downtown.

That forces longtime Collinwood

s ward westward into a slice of Glenville.

The maneuvers would have a domino effect on wards throughout the city, too, drawing all of them farther west and causing three wards to converge downtown.

The downtown area, which is now represented by

, will be cut up into three wards. The majority of the business district will remain in Cimperman’s ward. But a division occurs at East 12th Street, where the southeast quadrant, including PlayhouseSquare, lands in Councilwoman Phyllis Cleveland’s ward and the northeast area is assigned to Councilman T.J. Dow.

Downtown property owners have assessed a special tax to provide extra cleaning and safety services, and the neighborhood has doubled its population in the past decade. They worry that splitting the area into thirds will destroy their momentum.

"As I have said before, downtown is very fragile," John Ferchill, chairman of the nonprofit Downtown Cleveland Alliance, said Monday. "The area has come a long way in the past 10 years, and this is not something we want to see."

Ferchill said that his group will consider pushing for a charter amendment downsizing council even further and creating at-large seats to minimize turf wars in the future.

Jose Feliciano, an attorney and the chairman of the Hispanic Roundtable, voiced concerns Monday about changes to Ward 14, home to the city’s only Hispanic voting bloc. The new map splinters that ward’s Hispanic population – dropping its concentration from 41 percent to 37 – and potentially dilutes the power of the Hispanic vote.

Feliciano said he is exploring options for a legal challenge under the federal Voting Rights Act.

"You have about 40,000 people who will go unrepresented on this council," Feliciano said. "Zero out of 17 council members will be Hispanic, yet one out of every ten residents is Hispanic. That’s not right."

Feliciano added that enough Hispanics live on the city’s West Side to draw a ward that is 44 percent Hispanic.

Sweeney needs 12 of his colleagues’ votes — a two-thirds majority — to suspend the rules of council and pass the new map on a first or second reading this week. He needs only 10 votes if the proposal undergoes the full three readings.

He said Monday that he is confident he has the 12 votes for the plan to pass on the first try.

He said that he is "leading by example," having made sacrifices in his own West Side ward by relinquishing Cleveland Hopkins International Airport and certain streets to Councilman Martin Keane.

Residents in several neighborhoods have launched letter-writing campaigns and have pledged to attend Tuesday’s meeting in protest of the new map. But Sweeney predicts that they will find that the new boundaries better serve their interests.

"When a pressure cooker is used right and managed appropriately something wonderful comes out of it," Sweeney said of his controversial process. "And this map reflects the results of a lot of hard work on behalf of the citizens of Cleveland."