A year after civil rights groups filed a federal lawsuit against the city of Jacksonville over newly drawn City Council and School Board districts, the city is trying to settle the case.
Last May, residents and groups including the Jacksonville branch of the NAACP, the Northside Coalition of Jacksonville, and the ACLU accused the city of racial gerrymandering, purposefully drawing the boundaries of the districts to concentrate the city’s Black residents into just four of the 14 Council districts to weaken their voting power in local elections.
The court sided with the groups, finding that the Council had used race as a factor in drawing the maps, and ordered the city to redraw them. The city’s attempts to redraw the districts still did not fix the problem, and in December the city was ordered to a map drawn by the plaintiffs instead.
The city spent the following three months attempting to appeal the ruling until pausing the appeal last month. A bill will be introduced at tomorrow’s Council meeting to approve the settlement, which would mean the city must accept the court-ordered map and pay $100,000 in attorneys’ fees to the plaintiffs. The city had spent more than $160,000 already in fighting the case. (The Tributary)