City of Avon to have new ward lines effective Nov. 15

AVON – There's a song that goes "The times, they are a changing," but in Avon, it's the wards that are changing and expected to take effect in approximately a month. And, this means that some residents may be voting for a different council person in the next election, or be represented by a different council member starting very soon.

Per the City of Avon Charter, in order to maintain a substantially equal population in each of the wards on a continuous basis, council shall consider reapportioning the city's wards after a decennial United States Census. This Charter Amendment was approved by the voters at the General Election held on November 8, 2022, and is using the U.S. Census data from 2020.

As such, on October 15, Avon City Council passed the ordinance to amend the code as it pertains to delineating new ward boundaries. The new boundaries will take effect on November 15. With the updated ward boundaries, precincts will also be revised by the Lorain County Board of Elections. This may affect where Avon residents vote in upcoming elections.

The next time that ward council members will be elected is during the general election to be held in November 2025, with terms beginning in January 2026. There are four wards in Avon.

Ward 1 changed from 9,868 to 7,202 residents. Ward 2 changed from 5,322 to 6,339. Ward 3 went from 4,372 to 6,021 and Ward 4 was unchanged and remains at 5,285. The largest change was in Ward 1, where residents were divided into Wards 2 and 3 to better balance the number of residents in each ward.

City Engineer Ryan Cummins and his team were largely responsible for executing the change order, and configuring the new wards. And, while this was a long and tedious process in the past, Cummins explained that new technology has greatly aided in this important balancing act.

"The idea was for the wards to be a more fair representation, as well as the amount of effort and work a councilman would have to put in to service the population. It's a lot more work to serve 9,000 than it is 4,000," Cummins said. "What I do for the city of Avon is I maintain the geographic information system (GIS) for the city and in that system we keep all manner of graphical representation of roadways, property lines, storm sewers, sanitary sewers, water mains – you know all of that kind of infrastructure information.

"So we keep those boundaries, we keep all the previous ward boundaries, we keep fire service boundaries and all manners of zoning districts. It's just different layers of data all in one big database," he explained. "It's a very powerful tool and I maintain that for the city. We were able to take in the census data electronically from the Census Bureau and we're able to take a certain number of residents out of a total and could I draw line.

"So using the GIS program and the census data, we could redraw that line and then tally up what that option looks like," Cummins added. "It's used extensively in the service departments, utility departments, zoning. It's an indispensable tool for managing development and keeping track of things, because the option would have been manually doing that which would be terribly time consuming."

City officials said that if residents have any questions or need further clarification regarding the changes, please contact the City Council office. The stated that city officials are happy to help residents navigate these updates and ensure that they are informed about their representation and voting options.