BIDDEFORD — On Monday, the Biddeford City Council voted to reapportion the city’s seven wards, which will result in several hundred voters finding themselves in a new ward and voting at a different polling place.
The purpose of reapportionment is to make the population in each ward more equal, said City Clerk Carmen Morris.
“The bulk of the change,” she said, is in Ward 5, because “in the last 10 years, Ward 5’s population has exploded.”
“I think mill development has a lot to do with it,” said Morris as the reason for the increase in population in Ward 5, which includes much of the downtown and mill district.
Councilor Bob Mills said he was concerned when he first learned he was losing voters in his ward, but understood when he learned the reason it was necessary.
Under the city charter, said Morris, reapportionment is required every 10 years. The last time it was done was in 2001.
She said she began the process last year and has been working on it for several months.
Morris said the reapportionment could have been completed sooner, but she was asked by the Office of the Secretary of State to wait until redistricting on the state level was completed.
Once she received recommended changes from the state, most of which she incorporated into the ward changes she proposed to the council, she moved forward.
According to Morris, figuring out how to reapportion the city was a labor-intensive project that required her to pour through census documents and track the city’s population street by street and block by block.
“The census doesn’t care about our wards,” she said.
Most of the work involved moving people out of Ward 5 into Wards 4 through 7. In addition, about 50 people living in Ward 6 will move into Ward 5.
No changes were necessary for Wards 1 through 3.
In all, approximately 600 of the city’s estimated population of 21,150 will be affected. Of those, slightly more than 300 of the city’s estimated 13,600 registered voters will be assigned a different polling place.
Notices to those registered voters who are affected went out in Wednesday’s mail, said Morris.
The changes will be in effect for the next election on June 10.
— Staff Writer Dina Mendros can be contacted at 282-1535, ext. 324 or dmendros@journaltribune.com.
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