Chicago aldermen Wednesday are expected to clean up mistakes from six months ago.
In January, the city council signed off on new boundaries for Chicago’s wards. But the mapmakers had been up the whole night before tinkering and making adjustments to appease aldermen. That meant some of the legal descriptions for the wards were off, inaccurate, wrong.
The council will likely fix those mistakes, with a 58-page correction that Ald. Dick Mell, chair of the committee overseeing the mapping process, said includes only technical changes.
“There’s a difference [between] drawing [the map], and then legally saying, ‘The west side of 63rd Street from 49th to 83rd,’' Mell explained before his committee signed off on the revisions Tuesday. “And that’s what we have to change.”
The actual map, Mell and city council aides insisted, is the exact same one the council passed in January.
Ald. Bob Fioretti says he isn’t so sure. After the committee okayed the corrections, Fioretti questioned why aldermen weren’t given a copy of the changes with more time to scrutinize them.
Fioretti has long criticized the mapmaking process, which lifted his 2nd Ward from the South and West sides, and plopped it on the North side.
