Springfield City Council to decide on new wards

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (WAND) - You may be in a new ward soon.

The Springfield City Council will decide on a final ward map next week Tuesday. Springfield's 10 wards have been the same since 2010.

However, the maps have to be redrawn every ten years following new census data.

"The population of the new decennial census said that the city's population was 114,394..." said Molly Berns, Executive Director of the Springfield Sangamon County Regional Planning Board. "That means that each ward needed to be approximately 11,439 people. So the goal when we started this process was to make sure each of the new wards was as close to that target population as possible with the least amount of deviation."

The SSCRPC tried to keep the new maps as close to the old maps as possible. They wanted to make sure current alder people stayed within their current wards so they wouldn't have to run against each other in future elections.