N.J. Supreme Court rules Jersey City ward map does not violate ‘compactness’ law

The New Jersey Supreme Court on Wednesday quashed a legal challenge that argued Jersey City’s ward map is illegally gerrymandered.

Jersey City Councilman Frank Gilmore and a coalition of more than a dozen neighborhood groups sued the city’s ward commission in 2022, alleging the new ward map failed to be sufficiently compact, which they argue is evidence of attempted gerrymandering. In a 4-3 ruling, the state’s high court rejected those claims, saying the city’s ward boundaries are not “bizarrely shaped” and do not violate a law requiring wards to be compact.

“Today’s ruling comes as no surprise,” the city of Jersey City said in a statement. “It is yet another example in a long string of politically motivated lawsuits and baseless accusations that were aimed at damaging the mayor and this administration.”

A trial court dismissed the coalition’s lawsuit against the new map, but an appeals court later revived the suit and instructed the lower court to further investigate the compactness of the map. Wednesday’s Supreme Court ruling overturns the appeals court decision and reinstates the trial court’s full dismissal of the case.

Compactness, at least in terms of New Jersey’s municipal wards, is subjective. The New Jersey Legislature did not define “compactness” when writing the Municipal Ward Law, nor did it provide tools to mapmakers to assist in maintaining compactness.

In a Wednesday release, attorneys for the neighborhood groups said the state Supreme Court diluted the strength of the Municipal Ward Law and “allowed a gerrymandered map to stand.”

“Our clients are over a dozen community-based organizations who challenged the new ward map because it designed bizarre-shaped ward districts, cracking communities of interest who have been advocating for affordable housing and investing in environmental remediation in their neighborhoods,” the coalition’s attorneys said in a release. “We agree with the three dissenting justices, who comprise the newer members of the Court, that the majority effectively ‘devalued’ the importance of compactness in the drawing of municipal wards, and that this statutory requirement is all the more critical on the local level where neighbors rely on their representatives to advocate for issues of concern in their section of a municipality.”

The coalition used two mathematical analyses, the Polsby-Popper Measure and the Reock Score, to argue that compactness decreased from the previous decade’s ward map to the current map.

“Plaintiffs correctly submit — and the relevant mathematical analysis supports — that the wards’ compactness substantially declined since the prior map,” Justice Rachel Wainer Apter wrote in the dissent. “And the Commission did not explain why that is so.”

Justice Anne M. Patterson, who authored the majority’s ruling, wrote that because the law does not require the use of mathematical tools to draw the boundaries, the commission acted within its discretion to disregard the Polsby-Popper Measure and the Reock Score.

Patterson wrote that the state Supreme Court’s job was to determine whether or not the map was drawn illegally, not whether or not the map was drawn perfectly. Patterson wrote that the map did not feature wards resembling a “horseshoe” or “shoelace,” designs that a court would be more likely to consider illegally gerrymandered.

“It is, no doubt, possible to envision a ward map in which any of Jersey City’s wards would be more compact than they appear in the Commission’s redistricting plan,” Patterson wrote. “Our inquiry, however, is not whether a court could design a better map than the map that the Commission devised.”

The 2022 map has long been the subject of controversy: Critics have said the design was meant to strip power over several major developments from Gilmore, who defeated an ally of Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop, according to the Jersey City Times.

Also at question was whether “communities of interest” — historic neighborhoods or communities bonded by race, history, or politics, for example — should be protected from being split into separate wards. Both the majority and dissenting justices ruled that no law or precedent in New Jersey requires redistricting commissions to keep communities of interest consolidated into a single ward.

Several groups, including the ACLU of New Jersey and the League of Women Voters of New Jersey, filed briefs asking the Supreme Court to rule in favor of the neighborhood groups.

Had the close ruling flipped to the other direction, the ward map still might not have been struck down; rather, such a ruling would have returned the case to a lower court, where more “factfinding” would have been done regarding the compactness of the map.

Instead, with Wednesday’s ruling, no further proceedings will be held in the case.

“Time and again, these efforts have been exposed for what they are — both meritless and misleading,” Jersey City’s statement said. “For the past 12 years, we have led this city with integrity, transparency, and a commitment to putting residents first. This decision reaffirms that record.”