Measure 2 asks voters if Spokane City Council should have less power drawing their own districts

Hidden among the many multimillion-dollar asks on this month’s special election ballot, the city of Spokane is asking voters with Measure 2 whether the City Council should have less power in drawing council districts in the future, after the most recent process was embroiled in accusations of gerrymandering.

If approved, the ballot measure would amend the city charter, which acts like a sort of local constitution.

The measure has support across the ideological divide, having been co-sponsored by conservative Councilman Michael Cathcart, who pointed to concerns that last year’s redistricting process was improperly influenced by politics, and liberal Councilman Zack Zappone, the politician who was at the center of those concerns.

Every decade, Spokane redraws the boundaries of its three City Council districts to ensure each has roughly the same number of residents. The residents within those districts can then elect two council members to represent their district on the City Council, in addition to a City Council President who is elected citywide.

In 2022, the city tasked three volunteers, appointed by the mayor and approved by the City Council, with drawing possible new maps. Zappone served as a nonvoting member of that committee; the City Council has final say in what map to approve.

The commission drafted more than a dozen maps, whittling them down until each of the three volunteers had one they wanted to present to the public for additional feedback. Zappone also presented his own map, which brought the reliably left-leaning voters of Browne’s Addition into his district in exchange for a more politically mixed portion of the West Hills Neighborhood, effectively improving the chance that a liberal like Zappone could get elected in his district.

Zappone has consistently stated in public that his only motivation in drafting the map the way he did was to reunify neighborhoods previously split between council districts.

Although the redistricting committee recommended a different map, which made the fewest changes to prior district boundaries, the City Council voted 4-2 in favor of Zappone’s .

Accusations of partisan gerrymandering were quick to follow, with a lawsuit filed with the Spokane County Superior Court and ethics complaints filed with the city, the latter of which was only resolved in December. A judge in April found that Zappone and the City Council had not engaged in gerrymandering, but added that the councilman had appeared to violate the spirit of the law.

Zappone has said the revisions made by Measure 2 would clarify portions of city law, preventing local lawmakers in the future from stepping into a similar political minefield.

“The legislation that we passed today would deal with a lot of these gray areas,” he said in December.

Measure 2 has three key provisions meant to prevent future perceptions of partisan interference.

First, it expands the redistricting commission from three members to seven. The mayor would appoint three members, one from each existing district, and the City Council would appoint three. Those six members would vote to appoint a nonvoting seventh member who would act as chairperson.

The second key provision would bar the City Council from replacing the redistricting commission’s recommended map with one drafted by the council, as occurred in 2022. If a council majority votes against the recommendation, the commission would have to draft a new map. If no map could be agreed upon, the decision would be made by a municipal court judge.

Finally, Cathcart’s charter amendment would create a process for local residents to request a redistricting process in the middle of the decennial. Redistricting typically occurs every 10 years after the census is published. While the city council can redistrict in the middle of this 10-year cycle, it has never exercised that power. The threshold for a citizen petition to call for a mid-decennial redistricting would be 10% of recent voters.

Preventing the breakup of neighborhoods during future redistricting efforts would also be codified as a priority for the commission under the modified ballot measure.