The battle over redistricting following the 1990 Census turned on a small but significant new demographic in a city that had otherwise been losing population for years - the 100,000 Latino residents that appeared in the Census. The redistricting battle was aggravated by a quirk of the calendar, by which the redistricting fell in the same year as a local election that brought in a new mayor and a substantially altered City Council, meaning there was tension at the end of the process between the outgoing, or lame duck, officials and the new ones.
The 1990 Census revealed that the city's once small Latino population had grown from only about 60,000 to 100,000 in 10 years, even while the city lost around 120,000 white voters. Most of those Latinos were (and are even today) concentrated in a relatively small area in North Philadelphia, although the old Council districts had them divided into four districts, which blunted their potential as a force in Council elections.
Latino leaders in the city realized they had their first opportunity ever to carve out a Council district with a significant Latino voting bloc. Council's sole Latino member, Angel L. Ortiz, introduced a plan to radically reshape the Council map, creating a single district housing most of the city's Latino population and giving them a comfortable majority there.
Council leaders, however, floated a plan that would have continued to carve up the population among four districts. Only three of the 16 other Council members rallied to the Ortiz plan.
"It's kind of hard to ask folks to change the lines of districts in which they were elected," Ortiz lamented to the Philadelphia Inquirer that fall. "It should never be left to those people to make that decision."
Latino leaders even threatened to file suit, saying the plan was a deliberate effort to suppress their votes, a possible violation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Outgoing Mayor Wilson Goode agreed, saying Council's plan was probably unconstitutional. He vetoed the first effort in October. That forced Council past its statutory deadline, imposed by the City Charter (learn more about the redistricting timeline for Philadelphia), and as required by the Charter, Council members stopped receiving their paychecks until the plan was approved.
Despite efforts by incoming Council President John Street to override the veto, Goode managed to hold the allegiance of enough council members to sustain his veto. Street and his supporters, however, refused to compromise and passed a substantially similar plan again in December, which Goode again vetoed. This left the city in an awkward political position - it was unclear whether the outgoing Mayor and Council could act quickly enough to break the deadlock, or if the entire issue would have to be pushed back into the new year for the new officials to deal with. The outgoing council, seeing that Goode was in no mood to compromise, decided to simply push the matter into the laps of their successors.
At first, Latino leaders had a surge of hope, since incoming Mayor Ed Rendell appeared to strongly support them.
But that elation turned to bafflement in early January, when Rendell and Street appeared to strike a deal to support a redistricting plan that maintained more or less the traditional boundaries of the districts, leaving the Latino voting bloc divided among several districts.
"By gerrymandering the Latino community, Council's plan would have ensured that Philadelphia's Latino community would have continued to have less than full participation in the political process," Rendell wrote in a commentary in a local Latino newspaper.
The plan passed at the end of January, three months after the deadline imposed by the City Charter. Rendell said at the time that he still supported the idea of a Latino district, but he did not want to see the incoming new Council members punished by going without pay because of the inability of the previous Council to solve the issue.
Council President Street and others said they would revisit the district borders later to see if they could improve representation for Latinos. Latino leaders did not believe Street and booed in the Council Chamber when the bill passed.
"Yesterday they put the final nail in the coffin," Will Gonzalez, legal coordinator for the Philadelphia Latino Voting Rights Committee, said in the Inquirer.
In the end, Council never did create the long-sought Latino district, leaving the issue to come up again in the 2001 redistricting.
Compiled by Committee of 70
Committee of Seventy + 
