BEMIDJI — Nearly a year after the Bemidji City Council requested an external investigation into staff’s 2022 redistricting process, the report concluded city staff completed their responsibilities appropriately and in a timely manner.
In a 4-3 vote, Mayor Jorge Prince and council members Audrey Thayer, Josh Peterson and Ron Johnson approved spending up to $25,000 in liquor store funds for the redistricting investigation. The vote came in the wake of a Ninth Judicial District judge ordering Beltrami County to convene a second redistricting process, prompted by a lawsuit over the new district lines.
Thayer initially made the motion for the investigation and commented in a Wednesday, Oct. 30, interview that she felt staff could have timelier with presenting different options.
“There were three or four [maps] that would have been created, but only one had been presented to us, and that was disheartening for me,” Thayer said.
"I don't want to throw our staff under the bus because they do their jobs and they do them well for our city. They represent our city well. ... I just felt like we could have been a little quicker.”
The report, obtained in a data request, indicates that an 869-person discrepancy existed between the population of Bemidji used in the local 2022 and 2024 redistricting processes and the 2020 Census data within Bemidji city limits.
The 2022 ward totals City Clerk Michelle Miller presented that March showed a population of 15,443, while the 2020 census population indicates the city’s population at 14,574.
Miller told the investigator she never questioned the map’s population total, which were sourced from mapping and Census software she obtained at no additional cost to the city.
The investigator found the difference to be an error rate of nearly 6%, but redistricting laws emphasize that “mathematical precision is not required in redistricting only reasonable approximation.”
The report notes the commission charged with drawing Beltrami County’s 2024 maps refused to purchase more precise redistricting software that would have cost $2,500. While up to $25,000 in liquor store funds was approved for this separate investigation, the actual cost to the city was $9,862.
In a footnote of the report, Jessica Schwie with Kennedy & Graven stated the lawsuit against the county did not challenge the city’s 2022 redistricting and instead relied on it to support their arguments regarding different county redistricting options.
“In sum, while some very vocal persons were requesting more maps and delays to the process, they submitted precisely no evidence that maps put forth first by staff were inaccurate or incomplete or that any different outcome would have resulted because there was in fact some configuration that would have had a lesser population deviation," Schwie wrote.
“I'm not entirely pleased with the report,” Thayer said. “I think we could have been a little bit more thorough about it, but again, I'm not the person that's doing the interviewing.”
The lawsuit that resulted in the second redistricting process this year in Beltrami County was filed by former county Commissioner Jim Lucachick — who was redistricted into Commissioner Craig Gaasvig’s district in 2022. He and other petitioners claimed the County Board did not keep the districts as even in population as possible.
Bemidji’s redistricting also saw longtime council member Ron Johnson moved into Ward 1, but due to the city’s charter, he is serving out the rest of the term that ends this year. His bids to become the at-large council member in 2022 and the Ward 1 council member in a special election in 2023 were unsuccessful, and he returns to the ballot this November for Ward 1.
