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Here’s how Michael Browning, a resident of the Forest Park Southeast neighborhood, described the process, particularly the lack of transparency, during a legislative hearing last week:

“Your standards are so low, you would have to dig to find them,” Browning said. “Do better or don’t do it at all.”

Browning might get his wish. This fall, a group called , turned in enough signatures to force an April 2022 vote on Proposition R, which would take the redistricting process from the Board of Aldermen and place it with an independent commission. The measure is similar to the one Missouri voters passed in 2018 called Clean Missouri. That measure, which would have reduced the amount of political influence in the drawing of state legislative boundaries, was narrowly overturned last year when Republican lawmakers placed a deceptive ballot initiative on the ballot.

Make no mistake, when residents try to take the power of determining political boundaries away from incumbents, whether Republicans in out-state Missouri or Democrats in the city of ��ѿ��ý, the politicians will fight hard to hold on to their power.

And that, Browning told the aldermen, is why the first run at the map they produced looks like those who are controlling the process — close allies of President of the Board Lewis Reed — are trying to do.

“I believe the ward boundaries should not be drawn by politicians who stand to benefit from them,” Browning testified.

He continued: “Ward maps have a huge impact on the lives of people who live in this city, and the way you have treated this process makes it seem like you think it’s a joke.”

Browning is hardly the only critic of how little transparency Reed has demonstrated in the early map redrawing process. Alderman Heather Navarro, who has been a persistent critic of Reed’s failure to plan for the reduction in wards from 28 to 14, offered her own blistering critique of the process in a meeting the next day.

“We spent hours listening to people comment on a map that they couldn’t see and was not constitutionally possible,” Navarro said. “We have to have a map that meets legal muster. ... I can’t manipulate the map ... I can’t look around. ... There are experts out there who do this. ... This board has spent thousands of dollars on software ... and we are not maximizing its use. I very much feel the public’s frustration these past few days.”

The ��ѿ��ý Board of Aldermen is hardly alone in having trouble with the redistricting process. In ��ѿ��ý County, a judge last week removed a Republican from the commission who had refused to resign despite a charter provision that made him ineligible. In the Missouri Legislature, the bipartisan commissions are likely to end up dividing along partisan lines and producing maps that get challenged in court and redrawn by judges, as has happened in many past years. In Illinois, Republicans are rightly criticizing the Democrats who control the process for drawing maps based more on political protection than on changing population patterns.

Balancing the various constitutional elements of redistricting, from population to diversity, to the compactness of neighborhoods, is no easy task. But there is a better way. Many states and cities have adopted processes that allow experts and nonpartisan appointees to draw maps every 10 years with than the process that is taking place in the city of ��ѿ��ý. Voters next April will have a chance to reform the process that so many citizens are being shut out from this time around.

“Let an independent commission draw the lines,” Browning said the other night. “The people of this city deserve it.”