ZONE ELECTION PANEL SET TO FINALIZE LINES

The Cape Girardeau Zone Election Committee could meet as early as this week to draw final boundary lines for the new wards.

The citizens committee was formed late last year to sort out legal questions surrounding the implementation of ward council representation here a measure voters approved last November.

The measure divided the city into six "zones" or wards, but population in the zones varied by as much as 58 percent.

City Attorney Warren Wells said that the most recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings require that the zones be as nearly equal in population as possible so that each council member represents about the same number of people.

The city last month hired the Southeast Missouri Regional Planning and Economic Development Commission in Perryville to compile census data and redraw the zone boundaries.

"They have sent me a copy of two different maps they've prepared, and they're preparing additional copies," Wells said Thursday. "We're expecting those any day.

"As soon as we get those, we're going to send them out to committee members and set up a meeting."

One of the 22 members of the committee, Ken Richardson, also has drawn up his own proposal for the zone boundaries.

Richardson said Saturday he used the same census information and mapping techniques as the regional planning commission.

He said an official with the commission told him the maximum population variation on the plan is about 4 percent. "Mine is less than 1 percent," Richardson said.

According to the way he's drawn the maps, Zones 1, 2, and 6 each have 5,786 people; Zone 3 has 5,780; and Zones 4 and 5 each have 5,748.

Richardson said the upcoming meeting should be an important one because time's running short to prepare a new measure for voters.

"I expect this to be the nitty gritty meeting coming up, especially since it's going down to the wire on our time constraints," he said. "I think there probably will be a push to take one plan over the other as opposed to a hybridization of the two because of the time constraints."

Richardson said he's confident the committee will be able to come up with an adequate measure to resubmit to the voters.

"I think as long as there's nothing outrageous it will pass," he said. "The only stumbling block, if there is going to be one, is people might not understand why incumbents can't be drawn out of the ordinance."

State law prohibits council members' terms from being ended prematurely by the adoption of the ward system. That means at least three of the current council members must remain in office until 1996.

In both Richardson's plan and that of the regional planning commission, boundary lines were drawn so that those three council members Melvin Gateley, Melvin Kasten and Al Spradling III all live in separate wards.

After the 1994 election, when three council members will be elected from wards, Gateley, Kasten and Spradling will become representatives of the wards where they live.

Richardson's plan would, however, prevent Doug Richards, whose terms expires next year, from seeking re-election.

"He'll live in Melvin Gateley's ward, so he won't be able to run again until 1996," Richardson said.

Richardson's and the commission's plans both attempted to keep the present voting ward boundaries as much intact as possible, but there will be some variance.

"The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that you cannot simply draw ward boundaries for any political expediency," Richardson said. "The idea that you draw it very close has been thrown out by the courts.

"There's no such thing as being within a small enough variation if you had a better plan to go with."

That means that census data had to be used to draw the boundary lines by population, and the U.S. Bureau of the Census failed to compile their figures on strict voting wards guidelines.

Richardson said the census "jumped around quite a bit," particularly on the north end of town around Lexington Avenue, where the census was "really sloppy."

The most pressing need now, he said, is to get a legal ward election plan before the voters.

"There's definitely an interest to redo it, now it's up to us to determine what are really fair zones," Richardson said.