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MORGANTOWN - Every two years, sometime between March and May, the Morgantown Ward & Boundary Commission commences its efforts to equalize the city's seven wards.
It must submit a report outlining its recommended changes, or a recommendation of no change, to Morgantown City Council by Oct. 31 each year preceding a city election. Council must then approve or disapprove the commission's report prior to its first regular meeting in December.
What was once a slow and painstaking effort including paper maps, pencils, calculators and post-it notes, has been aided significantly by technological advancements, particularly in the form of ArcGIS mapping data.
But it's still not easy, and by no means immune to controversy.
In May 2017, Morgantown City Council unanimously approved a change to the city's charter defining how the Morgantown Ward and Boundary Commission must go about its task of equalizing the city's wards.
The commission's charge, as originally defined in the city's charter, was to equalize as nearly as practicable the wards solely on the number of qualified voters.
The charter change, which came with a recommendation from the volunteer commission at the time, explained each ward shall contain as nearly as practicable both the same total population as determined by the most recent Census, and number of registered voters.
As it turns out, trying to square those two numbers made an already difficult task all but impossible - particularly due to student heavy areas where population count deviates significantly from the number of people who are registered voters in Monongalia County, and therefore eligible to vote in a city election.
The task presented by the charter change became such an issue that the commission was told in 2024 to essentially go back to focusing its equalization efforts on voter counts.
That will once again be the case this time around.
The Ward & Boundary Commission began meeting in late April, conducted a pair of public input sessions in July and seems to have boiled its proposed changes down to three map options.
One of which caught the attention of 3rd Ward residents, including Charlie Byrer, who formerly served on the Ward & Boundary Commission.
Byrer recognized the difficult task ahead of the commission before asking that the commission prioritize keeping the historic character of the neighborhoods intact.
"When you look at some of the numbers in our neighborhood, it's phenomenal what we could lose, and the heart of the neighborhood maybe, at times, could be in jeopardy. Some of these historic neighborhoods - South Park, First Ward, Suncrest, Evansdale - they've been there for years," he said. "Just like our neighborhood. We have Highland Park. We have Wiles Hill. We go all the way down 8th Street and down the boulevard over Hoffman, down to Falling Run. That's essentially been our neighborhood."
"I don't really like the sound of that, but I'm not sure I really care, because it's not going to stop my neighborhood from identifying as part of Wiles Hill, no matter how you draw the ward boundary line," he said.
As it turns out, the 3rd Ward was a central talking point the last time the commission submitted proposed map changes to Morgantown City Council, in September 2024.
Among those changes was a boundary line adjustment that would have resulted in 3rd Ward Councilor Louise Michael becoming a resident of the city's 4th Ward.
Commission Chair John Trumble explained at the time that each of the proposed maps generated by the ArcGIS software included that adjustment as a necessary change to align voter numbers across the city's seven wards. The map submitted would have equalized the wards to within 200 voters.
The map at the time had a discrepancy of more than 1,000 voters between some wards.
Even so, on a contentious 4-3 vote, city council voted to reject the commission's recommendation.
Some members called the vote "politically motivated" and "terribly self-interested," while others countered that the map recommended by the commission would be too impactful to the historic character of the wards and their neighborhoods - particularly 3rd Ward.
The last time proposed ward boundary changes were adopted by Morgantown City Council was 2020.