New district map puts whole Beltrami County Board up for 2024 election

BEMIDJI — All five Beltrami County commissioner seats will be up for election this year after a judge signed off on a new redistricting plan.

The April 25 decision is the result of a lawsuit by former Commissioner Jim Lucachick and 30 other plaintiffs. Lucachick challenged whether the County Board followed the law when it redrew district lines in 2022. He also claimed he was deliberately drawn out of his district by fellow board members.

In October 2023, Cass County Judge Christopher Strandlie ordered Beltrami County to start the process over, ruling it applied the wrong legal assumption when accounting for population changes. The ruling required the creation of a five-member commission to oversee redistricting.

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After four meetings and three public hearings, the redistricting commission voted 4-1 on a new map, known as 5C. Court-appointed members included retired Sheriff Phil Hodapp, retired County Attorney Tim Faver, former DFL state Sen. Rod Skoe, realtor Mark Dickinson and Professor Laura Buchholz.

The new map moved enough of the population around to automatically require all five elections in the county, with the threshold set at a 5% population shift. The rejected map separated the city of Bemidji’s five wards into two county districts, while the new map divides the city between three.

All five commissioner districts were also up for election in 2022 when the since-challenged map was approved that spring. To get commissioners on an alternating rotation, candidates for Districts 1 and 3 will run for two-year terms, and candidates for Districts 2, 4 and 5 will run for four-year terms.

According to the last U.S. Census, Beltrami's population is 46,228. Split five ways, that would equal 9,246 per commissioner district. With the new map, the least populated district has 9,189 residents and the most populated has 9,294.

The rejected map’s district populations ranged from 8,382 to 9,708. State statute requires that populations from district to district stay within a 10% threshold, which was met in 2022.

In the October judgment, however, Strandlie opined that nothing in the record showed the County’s Board map choice was unavoidable when other proposals resulted in lower population shifts.

Lucachick was present at most of the redistricting commission meetings this winter, according to official minutes. He represented the former District 5 for 14 years, but his home township of Turtle Lake was moved into fellow Commissioner Craig Gaasvig’s District 1 in the 2022 process.

“I didn't take it lightly to sue the actual county that I was elected in, but I felt — and 30 other people went with me — they felt it was worth the fight to bring that to the forefront,” Lucachick said.

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“It's a pretty strong message ... across the nation to the counties everywhere, [that] redistricting is important. It needs to be followed and it doesn't have to be politicized."

In a phone interview, former Commissioner Reed Olson expressed his thoughts on the lawsuit.

"We followed state statute, all the way through,” Olson said. “If you look at what the judge said, he never said that we violated state statute. He said that we could have complied better.”

Olson likened the judge’s ruling to a traffic stop.

“You’re getting pulled over on Highway 2 by a county sheriff's deputy. ... [The] deputy pulls you over. You say, ‘What? I was going 65. That's the speed limit.’ And then this deputy says, ‘Yeah, I mean, you were technically following the law, but we think you could have been going 61 instead of 65, so I'm going to give you a ticket,’” he said.

“You know, that's just not the way that the world works.”

The redistricting commission met its May 7 deadline to complete the work, ahead of the candidate filing period that opens May 21.