Evanston City Council’s Rules Committee delayed further action Tuesday on proposed redistricting of the city’s wards, after maps addressing the interests of minorities and student groups failed to generate any consensus among aldermen.

The City Council must redraw the nine wards’ boundaries before August in preparation for the municipal elections in spring 2005. Redistricting hearings began this summer, focusing on issues of black representation in the Second and Fifth wards and a diluted student vote in the First Ward.

Tuesday’s meeting was the first public hearing featuring all redistricting proposals. After some debate the Rules Committee decided to convene again Oct. 20 at Evanston Civic Center, 2100 Ridge Ave., for another public hearing on the issue. At the meeting the committee could propose that one map be adopted for discussion at the full council meeting on Oct. 27.

Previously the Oct. 20 meeting was scheduled to be a full council meeting where a vote on redistricting could have taken place.

Associated Student Government officers and senators appeared at the meeting Tuesday to lobby for student interests. ASG worked with the Citizen Ward Redistricting Committee, composed of residents and professors.

The ASG map proposes shifting the current boundaries of the First Ward, making it dominated by NU’s campus, which would still be split between the First and Seventh wards. Most of downtown would move to the Fourth Ward.

“I would say it was an eye-opening experience,” said Jane Lee, ASG’s external relations chairwoman and a Weinberg junior. “I saw the aldermen really consider the proposal.”

But Ald. Melissa Wynne (3rd), whose ward would be slightly affected by the ASG proposal, argued that the map disrupted the status quo too much.

“It disturbs more of the settled map that we have,” Wynne said.

Ald. Arthur Newman (1st) challenged the map’s fairness to residents, saying that ASG and its collaborators had created a plan to suit their own needs.

“What you define as fair and equitable is your opinion,” he said. “Fair and equitable has many authors. It was fair and equitable within the group that you were with.”

George Mitchell, the president of the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, presented two maps drawn by his group. Mitchell said the NAACP hopes to maintain the black majorities in the Second and Fifth wards, in compliance with the Voting Rights Act of 1964.

One of the NAACP maps proposes that the Second Ward’s southern border be dropped to Howard Street, shrinking the Eighth and Ninth wards. The Fifth Ward would also be stretched to include a northern portion of the First Ward.

But Newman said race should not be a primary concern in redrawing ward borders.

“An African-American candidate can win in any ward,” Newman said. “The citizens of Evanston do not vote on the basis of race. … There is no criteria that requires having two majority-minority wards.”

Ald. Lionel Jean-Baptiste (2nd) disagreed with Newman.

“While you’re optimistic about African-Americans,” Jean-Baptiste said, “the way we maintain various voices is that we follow the pattern from before of having majority-minority wards.”

Judy Fiske, a First Ward resident and realtor, presented three maps, including one readjusting the ward lines only slightly. In her map the First Ward would lose some territory along the western and southern boundaries.

That proposal focused on maintaining the single-family population in the ward, without shifting lines too drastically to threaten the “core community values” in the predominantly-black Second and Fifth wards, Fiske said.

“We want to create a healthy First Ward, not only for the next 10 years but after that 10 years,” she said. “We don’t want a downtown (and) student ward. That’s just not good for anybody.”

Aldermen did not discuss Fiske’s maps.

Kellogg Prof. Allan Drebin, who lost the First Ward aldermanic election to Newman in 2001, proposed a map that would move Ald. Ann Rainey (8th) out of her own ward. Drebin, who argued that ward numbers are arbitrary, proposed that a new ward be created that would contain most of the downtown district.

Rainey didn’t buy Drebin’s argument.

“I think it is extremely hurtful that somebody would take a ward that has come so far in the past few years and completely wipe it off the map of Evanston,” she said. “For you to take and eliminate that is kind of shocking.”