By Dustin Brown
The U.S. Department of Justice has approved the city Districting Commission's new lines for the City Council, sealing the plan that sparked protests in Ridgewood over the neighborhood's division between Queens and Brooklyn.
The Coalition for a United Ridgewood, a community group that formed to fight the boundaries, is meeting Thursday night as part of its evolving mission to spark political action in the neighborhood after its vocal fight failed to prevent the split between two council districts.
The Districting Commission announced last Thursday that Joseph Rich, the chief of the voting section of the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division, had faxed a letter that conferred federal approval on the new district boundaries.
“The attorney general does not interpose any objection to the specified change,” Rich wrote.
Charged with redrawing the city council district boundaries to account for 2000 census figures, the Districting Commission removed the southern part of Ridgewood from Councilman Dennis Gallagher's (R-Middle Village) 30th District and added it to the 34th District represented by Diana Reyna (D-Williamsburg), which now lies exclusively in Brooklyn.
The altered district boundaries will be used for the upcoming city council elections in November, and they will take effect when the new term begins next year.
A 1974 U.S. Supreme Court decision required the commission to submit changes to the Justice Department for preclearance, a process imposed because of voting rights violations in the city that occurred in the previous decade.
The Coalition for a United Ridgewood had already changed gears in May by organizing a voter registration drive to target the neighborhood's large and growing Hispanic community, which figured strongly in the Districting Commission's reasoning for redrawing the boundaries.
“We have to continue working with voter registration, and then the Hispanics really have to get out and vote so that politicians pay attention to us,” said Nubia Holzherr, one of the group's leaders.
The commission originally proposed the Brooklyn-Queens district to help distribute the past decade's population growth, which was much heavier in western Queens than in Brooklyn. The new district also follows the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by keeping together the minority community of Hispanics that crosses the Brooklyn border into Ridgewood, which is more than 60 percent Hispanic in the section slated to join Reyna's district.
But the coalition contended that neighborhood unity was more significant than ethnic unity, with some Hispanics coming forward to express outrage that they would be grouped according to ethnicity rather than geographical community. With the Queens section only accounting for a third of a predominantly Brooklyn district, many residents also fear they will lose out on political representation.
But Reyna, who is running for re-election, has pledged that she would devote as much attention to Ridgewood as other parts of her new district.
The coalition's goal is now to ensure a strong political voice by securing a strong presence at the polls.
“I think the Hispanics have been very quiet and very dormant,” Holzherr said. “They only came out to speak out when this was happening. We hope they continue to fight and keep together, united. We want the community to really get involved.”
Angelo Falcon, a senior policy executive at the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, is scheduled to speak at the coalition's meeting Thursday night, where he will explain why his organization supported the new district lines for Ridgewood.
“We wanted to be able to make sure the Latinos in Ridgewood were not isolated in that area and would have representation, as opposed to being in an area where they wouldn't as a group be able to elect representatives of their own,” Falcon said in a phone interview Monday.
But Falcon sees the community organizing efforts around the redistricting as a positive step.
“As a result of all this outcry, it's really developed a real sense of Latinos participating more in the politics and civic life of Ridgewood,” he said. “It kind of opened up a whole avenue of people working together.”
Falcon characterized Ridgewood as one of the first middle-class Latino communities to emerge in the city, which he said raises the challenge of “how do you get this rising Latino middle class to work with the Latino poor” in a neighborhood like Bushwick,” which will join Ridgewood in the redrawn district.
“That's the kind of coalition that I think would really be very potent down the road,” Falcon said.
The meeting will begin at 7:45 p.m. Thursday at IS 93 at 66-56 Forest Ave. in Ridgewood.
Reach reporter Dustin Brown by e-mail at Timesledger@aol.com or call 718-229-0300, Ext. 154.
