Evanston City Council’s Rules Committee tonight could possibly end months of political debate by choosing a plan to redraw Evanston’s nine wards to be voted on at the next council meeting.

Tonight’s special meeting will be the second in two weeks to address redistricting, as aldermen at the Oct. 7 meeting voted to delay further discussion of the matter.

But some residents said they feel the aldermen are being too hasty and that a map selection tonight could benefit the aldermen’s interests and not those of their constituents.

“This is a political process and this is a question of who owns the process, the aldermen or the citizens?” said George Mitchell, president of the Evanston chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “I’m seeing the aldermen run the political process, and the aldermen are responsible to their constituents.”

Ald. Lionel Jean-Baptiste (2nd), however, said he would not rush to a decision tonight.

“It is possible that we would not make a consensus,” he said. “I want it done right; time is not the issue for me.”

Illinois law requires that the city redraw its ward boundaries before August 2004 because U.S. Census information from 2000 indicates that population among the nine wards is unbalanced. Many proposals would shift residents out of the overpopulated First Ward — which contains downtown Evanston and much of Northwestern — and increase population in the predominately black Second and Fifth wards.

But both Associated Student Government and minority interest groups complain that this juggling could diminish the voting power of students and blacks in those wards.

The most recent proposal, submitted by Jean-Baptiste and Ald. Elizabeth Tisdahl (7th), aims to keep the black population in the Second and Fifth wards 10 percent higher than the white population. Tisdahl said the map also was designed to convince Ald. Arthur Newman (1st) that students would not have a majority vote in his ward.

Newman said Tisdahl’s map was her own concern.

“That’s her view on her proposed map,” he said.

Newman narrowly won the 2001 aldermanic race against Allan Drebin, a professor in the Kellogg School of Management.

Tisdahl said this proposal was drawn to build more of a consensus among aldermen, but she said she doubted it will succeed.

“It was an attempt to get some consensus and address those issues,” Tisdahl said, “but I don’t think it’s done that.”

The map would noticeably shrink the Seventh Ward, but Tisdahl said she hoped this would make it more palatable to other aldermen.

“It gets down to what happens in each person’s ward,” she said. “Since it decimated my ward, I thought everybody else could be happy. But obviously I have a lot to learn about mapmaking.”

A committee composed of ASG representatives and Evanston residents proposed another map that would maintain student voting power and maintain black representation in the Second and Fifth wards.

This map would keep most of the student vote in the First and Seventh wards, while shifting much of downtown into the Fourth Ward.

Students first became concerned about the redistricting process when Newman proposed a map that would divide the campus among three wards: the First, Second and Seventh. Northwestern currently is divided between the First and Seventh Wards.

ASG has also worked to mobilize students on campus to be more involved with the redistricting process. ASG started circulating a petition Sunday, calling for aldermen to vote on maps that would protect both student and black rights.

“Students are standing up for themselves in Evanston,” said John Hughes, ASG’s Rainbow Alliance senator and city council liaison. Hughes is also a former Daily Forum editor and a member of the Students Publishing Co. board, which owns the newspaper.

“We’re saying, ‘Don’t trample on our rights, because we will defend them,'” he said. “That’s an important message to send to the city — one that students haven’t been very good at sending in the past.”

Evanston resident Bruce Baumberger, who worked with ASG in drafting the proposed map, said he hopes aldermen will spend more time discussing maps than lobbying for any particular map.

“The key point is to see the council engage in a consensus-building dialogue to come up with a good map, whether it’s our map or someone else’s map,” Baumberger said. “It’s very disheartening when you think of the effort many people put into coming up with the maps, and now they’re not spending any time to intelligently discuss them.”

Thus far 16 different maps have been submitted, including proposals by Jean-Baptiste and Newman, as well as Mitchell and the NAACP.

The Rules Committee will meet tonight at 7 p.m. at the Evanston Civic Center, 2100 Ridge Ave. The meeting is open to the public.

The Daily’s Jessica Gdowski contributed to this report.