Reading between the lines

Charter reform gives Worcester the ideal opportunity to redraw district lines that prevent minority candidates from running for city office.

by Joe O'Brien

It was just after 8 o'clock on election night 1998, and the headquarters of city-council candidate Maritza Cruz was packed with supporters -- Hispanic, African-American, and white faces, from teenagers to senior citizens. Together they helped (as did I) Cruz wage an impressive door-to-door campaign to wrestle control of Worcester's inner-city Fourth District from longtime incumbent Janice Nadeau.

Perhaps just as important, they wanted to make history by electing Worcester's first Hispanic city councilor. In fact, Cruz would have been the first minority candidate to win one of the five district council seats.

And it all came down to these final moments as the nervous crowd waited for the results to be brought in from the field.

As the first results trickled in, the crowd roared with enthusiasm. Cruz had handily beat Nadeau in the racially mixed precincts, which make up the downtown area, of Ward 10 and Ward Eight. But enthusiasm was crushed when this early lead was lost to Nadeau, who captured the mostly working-class white neighborhoods that make up three outlying precincts of the Fourth District. Despite winning six of the 10 precincts, Cruz lost the election by 129 votes.

While the loss left Cruz and her supporters discouraged, some progressive political observers say that her defeat was predetermined long before she started running. In fact, they maintain, Cruz's biggest opponent was a city charter change enacted more than a decade ago.

For though a 1985 charter revision created five district seats, which theoretically could help lesser-known candidates gain positions on the council, what was left off the charter were plans for an additional seat, a Sixth District (that would have represented voters from Worcester's downtown neighborhoods where most minority residents live).

"[It's] a loss to the minority community because it would have given us a voice on the city council," says Worcester Juvenile Court judge Luis Perez, one of the original charter-change activists. "A full democracy is one in which everyone has a voice."

The current push to establish a strong-mayor form of government has focused on how the 1985 charter-reform movement created an unstable executive structure. Yet few are talking about another important shortcoming of the 1985 effort -- namely, Worcester's failure to elect leaders who reflect the communities they serve. In fact, ensuring a diverse council was one of the main reasons why many community activists fought to change the charter in the first place.

Today, a growing number of activists say it's time to re-address the issue of minority representation as we begin to talk about revising the charter yet again.

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Ensuring a diverse council was one of the main reasons why many community activists fought to change the charter in the first place.

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IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND the lack of local minority politicians, we must first look at the charter-reform movement, which was started in 1983 by frustrated Worcester residents who believed that the city council often represented the interests of only a small section of the city.

At the time, all city councilors came from the north and west sides -- a situation created by the Plan E form of government adopted in 1950.

Plan E called for a nine-member board to be elected citywide, so candidates who came from the west and north side of the city were favored because those neighborhoods had the highest voter turnouts. These areas were also affluent, which meant that candidates were able raise and spend more money on campaigns. As of 1985, a city councilor had not been elected from the east side in more than 12 years.

Besides the geographic imbalance, activists argued that the council was dominated by the business community. This was in part true because the Citizens for Plan E Government was controlled by the city's elite who raised money and elected candidates who supported their agenda. Councilors such as Joseph Casdin, Sara Robertson, and John Anderson were endorsed by pro-Plan E activists and often controlled a majority of the council.

By the early '80s, a growing number of community activists and minority leaders decided it was time for change. A grassroots charter-reform effort was organized by Worcester Fair Share, a local civic organization. Led by then president Janice Nadeau, Fair Share organized a successful petition drive to have a referendum placed on the 1983 ballot that called for the creation of a nine-member charter commission. Although Fair Share was successful in convincing voters to support charter change, they were able only to elect four members to oversee it.

Instead, A pro-Plan E majority led by industrialist Paul Morgan captured the other five seats on the charter commission.

And it was this one-seat advantage that made all the difference.

After 18 months of public hearings, the charter commission released its recommendations. Fair Share supported a Paul Pezzella-led group, which called for a strong mayor to be written into the charter and an 11-member council with six district members and five at-large members.

It was a plan that had the support of the minority leaders because it would create an inner-city "minority" district, District Six.

Morgan and the Plan E group, on the other hand, argued that the city manager's position should be maintained but an elected "weak" mayor should be created as well as an 11-member city council of which five councilors would be elected from districts. Morgan's plan was chosen by a five-to-four vote, and it was approved by Worcester voters in November 1985.

Although creating the district council seats was a great victory for the underrepresented south- and east- side neighborhoods, it was a great disappointment to the very activists who fought for an inner-city district, the Sixth District.

Instead, the city had to carve out five districts; and minority leaders knew at this point it would be harder to draw a district that would have a large enough number of minority voters to guarantee a minority candidate could be easily ushered into office.

THOUGH IT WAS SUPPOSED to be a non-partisan process, the commission, not surprisingly, was pressured by incumbent city councilors who stood to lose their jobs. And after months of work, the commission created the five new districts by pairing two wards (there are 10 wards in the city).

According to then commission member Lena Barry, population data was the only criterion used to create the districts (which by state law had to have equal numbers of residents). Barry says that the one exception to this non-political pairing of wards was the grouping of Wards Eight and 10 to make District Four. The two wards were grouped to allow for a "minority seat," Barry says, to be made out of the Main South and Elm Park areas -- neighborhoods that include both wealthy and poor residents.

Though not the inner-city district that minority activists had hoped for, the commission and city officials hailed this district's potential for electing a minority candidate.

Luis Perez now says that the formation of this district was actually a sham. "They [the commission] understood that the minority population was growing and registering to vote, so they made it appear that they had created a minority seat."

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If they wanted to create a minority seat, Perez maintains, they would have included nearby Plumley Village and Belmont Hill in District Four.

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If they wanted to create a minority seat, Perez maintains, they would have included nearby Plumley Village and Belmont Hill in District Four.

Perez goes as far as to say that the city's leadership intentionally diluted the minority community. But other city officials and a former city councilor say privately that the reasons are less sinister. If anything, they say, it was an issue of indifference.

It would also appear that there was little political will. At the onset of the commission's work, members polled Worcester residents and learned that 63 percent of those polled were opposed to creating a minority district.

So what they did was take the simplest route. They took existing wards, modified them slightly, and then grouped them. District Four had a 34-percent minority population, which was twice the overall percentage of the city's minority population.

NO MATTER WHAT THE reasons, the commission could have created a district with a larger minority community. Members could have carved out a District Four with more than a 40-percent minority population by moving just two precincts. While the commission did shift precincts around to balance out the population within the districts, it included in the "minority district" several mostly-white neighborhoods. While the minority community lost out in the drawing of the districts -- as evidenced in Cruz's campaign for a council seat -- and opted not to take legal action, other groups faired far better.

And despite the commission members' claim to the contrary, in practice other ethnic groups have benefited from the drawing of the districts. For example, District Two, which is on the city's east side, has been controlled by Italians since its inception. The district's first district councilor was Richard Bonofiglio who also happened to be a member of the charter commission. In fact, District Two has not had one non-Italian run for the seat. Another example is District Five, which has elected only councilors of Irish descent.

The US census coming out in 2000 will present an opportunity to redraw district lines and, perhaps, create a true minority seat, Perez maintains. Yet it could be harder to accomplish than in 1985 because of a 1993 Supreme Court ruling that prohibits political districts from being drawn strictly on the basis of minority population.

Yet the city could take advantage of a Massachusetts elections provision that allows communities to alter districts based on "community of interest" principals. In other words, districts with similar socio-economic profiles could be created. In District Four's case, Ward 10, Precinct 1, which is located on the outskirts of District Four and includes some of Worcester's most affluent streets, could be shifted out. In its place, Plumley Village could be moved in -- a move that would increase the minority population within the district and increase the odds for a minority candidate to win an election.

Yet it is clear that any changes to improve the odds for minority candidates will require political action. And it remains to be seen if these issues will even be part of the discussion at the upcoming hearings to discuss the charter change.