photo by: Shawn Valverde/Special to the Journal-World

Downtown Lawrence is pictured in this aerial photo from September 2023. The intersection of West Sixth Street and Vermont Street is at lower left.

Here’s a fun Lawrence fact for you: Ninth Street doesn’t exist west of Kasold Drive.

Granted, it is not an overly fun fact, and if you miss a curve on the western portions of Ninth Street and you and your vehicle end up in someone’s front yard — where Ninth Street should be — it is even less fun.

But, it is an instructive fact about Lawrence city government.

Years ago, I was interviewing a longtime planning leader in Lawrence. I asked him how it came to be that Ninth Street ended where it did. After all, Lawrence could use all the east-west roads it can get, given that the KU campus interrupts a lot of traffic patterns.

He said there was a simple reason that Ninth Street ended where it does: When it was time to build Ninth Street farther west, the audience chairs in the meeting room of Lawrence City Hall filled up. Neighbors were opposed to the idea, and commissioners went with the voice of the neighbors, even if good planning principles almost certainly dictated otherwise.

Or, perhaps more accurately, commissioners went with the voice of voters. That’s the key point: Every city commissioner is elected at large, which means when the Lawrence City Commission meeting room is filled with neighbors, every single one of them is a potential vote won or lost for every single commissioner.

That will change if voters approve a new form of government for the Lawrence City Commission during the general election. Four commissioners would be elected from geographical districts spread across the city, while two commissioners would be elected at-large. That could be a game-changer in some ways. Three commissioners on any given project, theoretically, would be free to vote on the project without worrying about losing votes from the neighborhood where the project is located.

I’ve heard people argue that is a reason they are going to vote for the proposed government change. They are mainly people who believe the mindset of “Not in My Backyard” kills too many good projects at Lawrence City Hall. Of course, there are people who will vote against the change for the same reason, thinking it is right and proper for neighborhood residents to have plenty of leverage in such development matters.

How you feel about that equation may go a long way towards determining your vote. But it may not be the only factor on your mind. I’m hearing from a lot of people wanting to know what the districts will look like. Will the four districts be drawn in a way that tilts the town to the west, or will it ensure that the commission always has representation from the older parts of town in the east?

The answer: City government isn’t saying anything about that prior to the elections. The city is not proposing a particular map for voters to consider. Instead, city commissioners will draw the map after the election, if the measure is approved. That’s the way county commissioners handled the issue last year when they added two districts to that governing body.

I understand why city commissioners are taking that approach — but that doesn’t mean it is an approach I need to take. I have been in the map drawing business the last few days. Using a popular redistricting software — Dave’s Redistricting — I’ve drawn six maps to give you an idea of what could happen. There’s no guarantee that any of these maps will resemble the final product that commissioners would create. But, I think four of the six are reasonable possibilities. The other two represent what could happen if a party wanted to try to gerrymander an outcome towards one side of town or the other.

Before I get into the maps, a couple of reminders: 1. The population of each district needs to be roughly equal. 2. We use 2020 Census population figures, which means each district would need just less than 24,000 residents.

One of my big takeaways from the project is that Lawrence’s population is more balanced from an east-west perspective than I expected. West Lawrence is growing faster than east Lawrence, but the density in east Lawrence is still much greater than west Lawrence.

But, with that said, I still found it easier to draw maps that would make it likely — or in some cases guarantee — that two of the four “district commissioners” came from areas west of Iowa Street. It was more difficult to produce maps that would guarantee or make it likely that two of the four district commissioners would come from east of Iowa Street.

Let’s take a look at the six maps:

• I’ve labeled this the North-South Map, but it also could be called the We’re All In This Together Map. In some ways, I think it is the most interesting map because it creates four districts where the winner could come from the east side of town or the west side of town.

I did that by dividing the town on a north-south basis instead of an east-west basis. The result is you have districts that include some of the newest and oldest parts of town in a single district. The red district, for example, would include some of the largest, most expensive homes in town at Fall Creek Farms at Sixth and Peterson with the very blue collar community of North Lawrence. Or, look at the green district. It would include houses along the Jayhawk Club golf course, and it also would include homes around the aged 19th and Haskell shopping center.

If you want to divide the town in a true north-south fashion, you are going to have wide differences within single districts. A representative better be comfortable dealing both with issues of growth in new areas and issues of decaying infrastructure in old areas.

• The East-West map. This map does the opposite of the one above. It creates strip-like districts running from the north edge of the city to the south end. You get a definite east-west divide with this map.

This map would produce at least two district commissioners that live west of Iowa Street. But it could technically produce three. The red district has a small portion, near the turnpike that is west of Iowa. But, the vast majority of its voters live east of Iowa Street.

Other notable items about this map: It splits the University of Kansas campus into three districts. That could be avoided, but it likely would mean more of the red district would be located west of Iowa, raising the likelihood that three of the four districts could be represented by people from the west side of town.

• The Center Out Map. This map — which gets its name because I drew the center district first — puts the KU campus in a single district. The map is interesting because you could have three of the four districts represented by a west-sider, but you also could have three of the four districts represented by an east-sider.

It also is worth noting that downtown Lawrence is split into two districts in this map. Massachusetts Street is the dividing line between the red and the purple districts. Whether that is a negative, however, is a matter of opinion. Some may argue that if downtown is the heart of the city, it is proper that two of the four district commissioners have a piece of it.

• The Outside In Map. This approach resulted in two outer ring-like districts on the edge of town. That is kind of interesting because the issues neighborhoods on the edge of the city limits face often are different than the issues faced by central neighborhoods. It pretty much ensures a 2-2 split on east versus west district commissioner, though the purple district does have some territory west of Iowa — in the Deerfield neighborhood area.

The map does split the KU campus along Iowa Street, and it splits downtown along Massachusetts Street.

• The Four Corners Map. This is a pretty straightforward way to divide a city. Again, it makes a 2-2 east versus west split likely, with the same caveat about the purple district mentioned above. This map does keep downtown in one district. However, it put the KU campus into three districts, red, blue purple. However, that might not be a negative. One of the biggest issues KU creates at City Hall isn’t with the campus itself, but rather with the housing around it. This would ensure that three of the four district commissioners have neighborhoods that abut the campus. As such, town-gown issues are not likely to be forgotten.

• The Westward Tilt Map. This is the first of my gerrymander maps. I asked myself what would I do if I was trying to give west Lawrence more political power. My strategy was to give eastern Lawrence one district, the red one. Then, the other three districts would have the bulk of their territories west of Iowa Street.

However, it is worth noting that, technically, all four commissioners could be from east of Iowa with this map. It probably is not likely, but not impossible.

• The Eastward Tilt Map. On this, I simply asked how I could give more political power to the east side. I used the same strategy, but it doesn’t work as well for the east side. My three horizontal districts stretch farther into west Lawrence to get the necessary population. Just like above, it is possible that all four district commissioners could come from west of Iowa Street in this map. If you are an east side advocate, the risk versus reward equation could get dicey with this map.

Those are the maps. I could have created many more, but the purpose is to give you an idea rather than the actual answer. No one knows what the map would ultimately look like if voters approve the change.