The People's Map

Russell served on Buffalo's 2011 Citizens' Commission. That commission met 15 times in ten weeks, kept a public website, and published a final report that thanked him for his “generous and exceptional contributions.” He was still the only commissioner to vote against its map.

The lines that took effect were, in Investigative Post's words, “a textbook example of gerrymandering.” The Fillmore District wrapped from the East Side around downtown to the lakefront and Allentown, a shape the paper nicknamed “Fillmore's Screaming Eagle.” Ellicott and Fillmore, it reported, were both drawn to give their council members favorable demographics.

A year later Russell made the case for treating redistricting as a planning problem rather than a political one, in an article for the Berkeley Planning Journal.

The 2020 census counted Buffalo's first population gain in seventy years: 280,052 residents in New York's adjusted count, or 31,117 per district.

The data arrived in August 2021, months late because of the pandemic. By Russell's reading of the City Charter, the mayor and the Council president had until the end of September to name the new commission. The Council president named his last appointee in January 2022, and the mayor named his four in late February. The commission was seated on March 2.

It met five times, from April 20 to May 19. No meeting had all nine members present, and no reporter or council member attended any of them. The commission announced its only public hearing on social media with a week's notice. Four days before that hearing, a racist mass shooting at the Tops supermarket on Jefferson Avenue killed ten people.

The hearing went ahead on May 18 and lasted eight minutes. One member of the public came in person. Russell watched the livestream, expecting the start of a public process. Instead the commission put a finished map on a screen, and it approved that map the next day. The city's redistricting web page went up after the hearing, minutes appeared in late June, and there was no written report.

Our City Action Buffalo, a coalition of residents and good-government groups, asked Russell to show what a fair map could look like. He published his criteria first: districts of equal population, compact shapes, Buffalo's 35 planning neighborhoods kept together, and fair representation for the city's Black and Hispanic residents.

On June 16 he released a memo comparing the commission's map with a first alternative. The coalition took both to residents through teach-ins and illustrated explainers in English and Spanish, then revised the alternative using what people said, including at the Council's June 28 hearing.

Our City Action called the revision the People's Map and filed it with the City Clerk on July 5. More than 800 people signed a petition for it, block clubs and neighborhood business groups backed it, and The Buffalo News editorial board endorsed it.

Drag across the map to compare it with the Council's version. Where the Council's lines split neighborhoods such as Broadway Fillmore, Genesee-Moselle, and Kensington-Bailey, the People's Map keeps each one in a single district.

“That's a way that we can advance racial equity through the plan by increasing the electoral power, potential electoral power of some of our residents.”

Russell Weaver, explaining the residents' map to WBFO, July 1, 2022

The Council scheduled its hearing for June 28, the day of the state primary for governor. More than 100 residents came anyway, in person and on Zoom. For two and a half hours, speaker after speaker opposed the Council's map, and not one spoke for it. Seventy pages of written comments said the same. The hearing opened with a council member stating, for the record, that the new lines had to keep every incumbent in their own district.

Two days later the Council called a special session to adopt its map, then canceled it within hours as residents flooded council offices with calls. On July 8 it late-filed an amended map for a vote on July 12. That vote was put off too, and the city's lawyers advised that the Council could consider only maps from the commission, which by then had disbanded.

On July 19 the Council adopted the amended map, Council Map 2, without a roll call. Investigative Post timed the meeting at just under two minutes. In Russell's scoring it was the weakest of the five maps the Council had before it.

The mayor held his own hearing on August 3, at 10:30 on a weekday morning on a college campus. About 70 people came, and all but one speaker urged a veto. Some 200 written comments, 207 pages in all, opposed the map, and none supported it. The mayor signed it on August 15, saying its opponents did not represent a “significant” share of the city.

“The critics are right. The Buffalo redistricting plan that was the focus of a public hearing on Tuesday should be thrown out and the work restarted.”

The Buffalo News editorial board, June 29, 2022

“A coherent blueprint for productive change.”

The Buffalo News editorial board on the People's Map, urging a veto, August 2022

Two districts stood out. In Ellicott and Fillmore, the odds that people in a district's long-standing core were moved out were more than double the odds in the rest of the city.

The people moved were not a cross-section. In Ellicott, more than half of the 3,862 residents drawn out were Hispanic, while three-quarters of the 5,916 drawn in were white. In Fillmore, nearly half of those drawn out were Black and more than half of those drawn in were white. Fillmore's voting-age population went from plurality Black in its historic core to 45 percent white under the new lines.

Russell then matched the moved areas to past primary results. Ellicott shed precincts where its council member had won 43 percent of the vote in 2010, the only primary in which he faced a serious challenge, and kept precincts where he won 67 percent. Fillmore shed precincts that gave Black candidates 63 percent of the vote in the 2019 primary its council member won, and kept precincts where they won 25 percent.

The report concluded that both districts were redrawn to protect their incumbents, at the expense of Hispanic residents in Ellicott and Black residents in Fillmore. The judge's ruling did not address those findings, as Our City Action pointed out at the time.

On October 18, 2022, Our City Action Buffalo, the University District Block Club Coalition, and nine Buffalo voters sued the Council, the mayor, the city, and the Erie County Board of Elections. Their petition argued that the city ran a late, closed process in violation of the City Charter and the state Open Meetings Law, and it incorporated Russell's 91-page, 260-paragraph expert report, which he wrote without pay.

In December the city answered with two outside experts. One compared the Council's map with 100,000 computer-simulated plans; the other critiqued Russell's measures. Russell's reply argued that neither engaged the question before the court, which was whether the Council's choices, given what was in front of it, followed the law. The simulated plans were never part of the public process. The city's experts also relied on a set of 55 neighborhoods that had never been made public before the city's December filings.

On December 19, 2022, State Supreme Court Justice Timothy J. Walker dismissed the case with prejudice. He ruled that the city's timing was reasonable, that the open-meetings claims came too late and did not apply to the commission, and that the question was not whether the residents' maps were better but whether the Council's map substantially complied with the law. The map, he wrote, “falls well within the range of options the Common Council was entitled to select.”

Our City Action said the ruling left the record's other concerns unaddressed, including incumbent protection, and that it would weigh its options.

“Redistricting authorities ignore the public at their peril, for comparison maps drawn by the public allow courts to evaluate when politicians have subverted the law for private or partisan gain.”

Michael P. McDonald and Micah Altman, The Public Mapping Project (2018), quoted in Russell's reply to the city's experts

“A redistricting map devised by the people's elected representatives takes precedence over a map proposed by a vocal minority of residents.”

Justice Timothy J. Walker, December 19, 2022