Update: According to a new redistricting proposal D.C. Council chairman Phil Mendelson circulated Monday afternoon, the D.C. Jail will have its own dedicated ANC commissioner. The new map replaces a map Mendelson circulated late last week, which put the D.C. Jail and an adjacent residential building into one combined single member district.

Mendelson’s proposal prompted fierce opposition from residents, including members of the Ward 7 redistricting task force, who felt it was essential for D.C.’s incarcerated residents to have their own district.

A spokesperson for Mendelson said that his team decided to change the map back to the recommendation of the redistricting task force after receiving a letter from Ward 7 ANC Commissioner and co-chair of the redistricting task force Joel Castón.“We received the letter from Commissioner Caston after we had gotten the most recent version of the maps of what we circulated (on Friday),” the spokesperson explained in an email on Monday. “Once we heard from him and also heard from the community, we decided that this was the best way forward but we didn’t circulate again until today. The change was already made Friday night.”

Original:

A set of last-minute changes to D.C.’s proposed new boundaries for the city’s Advisory Neighborhood Commissions are prompting furious pushback by critics who say that they undo months of painstaking work, largely to mollify small yet vocal groups of residents in two parts of town.

Those same critics also worry the changes would leave residents in the D.C. Jail without a dedicated ANC commissioner, which they just got a year ago after years of trying.

The changes proposed by Council Chairman Phil Mendelson target two neighborhoods — Hill East and Cleveland Park — and come ahead of a final vote on new ANC boundaries set for Tuesday. It’s the final step in the city’s decennial redistricting process, when officials and residents team up to redraw the lines that divide up the city’s eight wards and almost 300 single-member ANCs districts. (The new ward boundaries were approved late last year.)

ANCs are neighborhood-level commissions that channel resident input on matters ranging from liquor licenses to zoning changes; there are 40 ANCs made up of 296 single-member districts of 2,000 residents apiece.

Mendelson’s proposed changes would reunite Cleveland Park under a single ANC — 3C — effectively undoing a proposal from the Ward 3 redistricting task force that split off a portion of the neighborhood closest to Wisconsin Avenue into a separate ANC, saying it had more in common with Wisconsin Avenue than Connecticut Avenue to the east. Groups led by the Cleveland Park Historical Society opposed the move, saying the neighborhood should be kept whole; in recent weeks yard signs saying “Stop the Split!” have appeared.

Mendelson is also pushing to undo proposed changes in Hill East, most significantly by keeping all of Ward 7’s neighborhoods west of the Anacostia River in a single ANC. The Ward 7 redistricting task force had proposed splitting them up between two ANCs, both of which cross the Anacostia River. In reversing that, Mendelson would also get rid of a dedicated single-member district for residents in the D.C. Jail, creating instead a district that incorporates a neighboring residential building.

Both changes have prompted some pushback, much of which comes from concerns that Mendelson is jumping into a months-long process at the last-minute and making changes demanded by groups of residents who complained directly to him.

“What he is doing is throwing out the entire exhaustive public process and saying, ‘No, I have a better idea,'” said Councilmember Elissa Silverman (I-At Large), one of the three lawmakers on the council’s redistricting subcommittee. “I am shocked by his disregard for the process, for ward councilmembers, for the task force members who volunteered their time, for his own subcommittee he appointed.”

Speaking on Monday, Mendelson rejected that accusation, saying he was simply doing what lawmakers do with all pieces of legislation they consider. “Amendments can be made, amendments are being made,” he said. “There are eight wards in this city, and a lot of [single-member districts]. There have been two areas that have generated hundreds of comments in opposition to what is proposed.”

On Monday, nine of the 10 members of the Ward 3 redistricting task force said in a letter that they oppose his proposed changes, saying that he is “facilitating [the] obstreperousness” of a small group of Cleveland Park residents. Additionally, opposition to Mendelson’s proposed changes in Ward 7 is coming from the ANC commissioner who currently represents residents at the jail.

Joel Castón, who was elected last year while he was incarcerated at the jail, sent a letter to the council on Friday to voice his concern that eliminating the stand-alone district for the jail would dilute the political power of D.C.’s incarcerated population.

“Having an incarcerated resident represent the residents of the jail as ANC Commissioner is important not only because of the hope and public safety benefits it brings, but also because the residents of the jail are a vulnerable population with their own unique challenges and they cannot be adequately represented by somebody on the outside,” Castón wrote.

Castón, the city’s first-ever incarcerated ANC, also said he saw a significant shift at the jail after he was elected. Before he became ANC, people detained at the jail had “little interest” in local government. But afterwards, Castón wrote, people wanted to get involved in local issues because they felt they had a voice.

“It invigorated a group of individuals we have desperately sought to participate in civic matters,” he wrote in the letter.

Castón, who served as a co-chair of the Ward 7 redistricting task force, worried that combining the jail’s single-member district with the new Park Kennedy apartments next door would unravel that progress in civic participation and give Park Kennedy residents an “unfair advantage” in ANC elections, because incarcerated residents have fewer resources to organize and run campaigns. And, he argued, giving the jail its own single-member district never emerged as a point of contention for the Ward 7 task force. In fact, it was a point of unity.

“After attending countless meetings and spending hours on the ANC redistricting, which was a contentious process, I have not heard any opposition to the D.C. Jail having its own SMD,” he wrote. “In fact, it was one of the only things throughout the process that had universal support.”

Castón, who was released on parole last year after 26 years of incarceration, currently lives in the Park Kennedy apartments himself. But he says that he believes the job of representing incarcerated constituents would be best served by a commissioner who resides inside the jail, “who is directly connected to the issues at hand.”

“I strongly believe that we need to keep the opportunity for justice-involved people to fully experience what it means to be franchised,” he wrote. “Washington, D.C. can be a model for other cities across the country. We can set the standard for how we should engage our incarcerated residents and increase public safety. But in order to do so, the residents of the D.C. Jail need their own voice and their own representation.”

Speaking Monday, Mendelson said he combined the D.C. Jail with Park Kennedy in his map because a jail-only single member district would be too far below the average population for single-member districts, which is 2,000 residents. About 1,300 residents are currently detained at the jail complex, which consists of the city’s Central Detention Facility and its adjacent, lower-security Correctional Treatment Facility. (Mendelson’s critics say there are actually more people in the census tract that includes the jail.)

“If we had a jail-only [single member district], it would be substantially below the average,” Mendelson told reporters. In response to the concern that the jail needs representation of its own, he said that that D.C.’s Corrections Information Council, a government agency that inspects and monitors the D.C. Jail, also exists to respond to those concerns.

Silverman said Mendelson’s changes to the Hill East portion of the map dismissed the intention behind carving out the jail as its own ANC.

“There was a very big advocacy effort that the jail would have its own SMD,” said Silverman. “Phil has just thrown that out.”