AMHERST – The Town Council approved proposed redistricting plans at its meeting on Oct. 25.

The Town Council passed a motion 10-1-0 with two absent, to approve of the districting plan of five districts and two voting precincts in each district as proposed by the Directing Advisory Board (DAB). Voting precincts will be lettered (District 1A, 1B, etc.) and the new map seems to be the best possibe option after working around many state rules and regulations for redistricting.

According to the state, precincts within districts must have under 4,000 residents and all must be within a 5 percent variance of each other to be legal. Before the new proposed redistricting maps, Amherst saw eight of their 10 precincts failing to meet the requirement. Precincts also must be adjusted to pair in different ways so the number of active voters in each district are similar.

At their Oct. 18 meeting, much of the discussion on the proposed map was focused on the split of the UMass campus within districts. Of the minor changes made in between the two meetings, this issue did not see much of a change as ultimately most Town Council members and those on the DAB could not see real validity to the claim made in the previous meeting of deliberate separation of student voters due to their inconsistent track record and freshman housing situations.

According to the approved redistricting map, only 17 percent of on campus housed students will be moved into a new district which is much lower than the community at large. Ultimately the DAB chose to improve districts with giving power to people of color in mind. The redistricted map, through all it’s iterations, have been focused on balancing the number of voters and works to keep neighborhoods with high numbers of Black residents, and Latino residents together and not isolate them in mainly white districts. The move hopes to lead to an increase in electoral equity for Black and Latino residents, which was a goal of the project, and something addressed as important by the committee.

Now with an approved proposal, the map will be sent to the state’s Local Election District Review Committee. If approved by that committee, precinct and district changes would go into effect in 2022.