The Boston City Council Wednesday approved a map outlining new boundaries for the city’s nine voting districts, winding down an emotional and politically fraught monthslong process that will determine how political power manifests itself throughout a changing city over the next decade.
The new district maps were adopted by a vote of 9-4 with Councilors Frank Baker, Michael Flaherty, Erin Murphy and Council President Ed Flynn — who represent some of the old-line predominantly white neighborhoods of Dorchester and South Boston — voting against it.
The vote came hours after a state court judge denied a same-day request for a temporary restraining order to bar the council from voting on a new district map. The suit was filed by Robert O’Shea, Chair of the Boston Ward 6 Democratic Committee in South Boston, with the help of Paul Gannon, an attorney and a former South Boston state representative.
The council’s vote came a day after Flynn called for a halt to the city’s redistricting process, a move some familiar with council’s workings labeled a stall tactic.
Flynn did not address the suggestion at Wednesday’s meeting, a tense session punctuated with recesses, procedural maneuvers and thinly veiled questioning of colleagues’ motives.
Dorchester Councilor Baker provoked outrage and admonishment when he recalled a recent conversation about redistricting.
“I got a call from a long-time friend this morning, happens to be a Catholic priest,” Baker said, pointing to the clergy’s close watch of the process. “They’re viewing this exercise as an all-out assault on Catholic life in Boston, and it’s not lost on them that the person that’s leading the charge is a Protestant from Fermanagh.”
Baker’s reference was to the county in Northern Ireland where redistricting chair Liz Breadon grew up.
Responding with measured indignation, Breadon conceded that her home county was indeed one of the places where Catholics were discriminated against in the Northern Ireland.
“And it is an insult to me to have a colleague in this City Council insinuate that I am discriminating against Catholics,” Breadon said, her voice shaking. “That is not what’s happening here. I’m standing up for the rights of our minority communities — Hispanic, Asian, Black — to have equal access to voting and to have an equal opportunity to elect the candidate of their choice.”
The map takes slices of Flynn’s South Boston district, which has grown disproportionately to the rest of the city, and transfers them to Baker’s more slow-growing Dorchester district. It also shifts Baker’s district northward, leaving several precincts that border Milton and Quincy to combine with a different district that includes a large portion of the predominately Black Mattapan neighborhood.
The map now goes to Mayor Michelle Wu for approval or rejection. A spokesperson for the mayor said she will review the map in the coming days.
Even if Wu approves the new voter districts, there’s a chance the pending court action could derail the redistricting process.
Despite dismissing the more immediate request for a restraining order, Judge Anthony M. Campo ordered a hearing next Wednesday to examine an additional request for a preliminary injunction.
If granted, that order would bar the council from taking action on redistricting until the state Attorney General weighs in on an open meeting violation complaint also brought by former State Rep. Gannon.
The council also voted 9-4 to override Wu’s veto of a 20% pay raise for herself and the council.
Wu had previously proposed a more modest raise of 11% and asked the council to support that. Instead, the council staggered its pay raises going from $103,500 to $115,000 beginning in 2024, then going up to $125,000 in 2026.
