An Ulster County voters’ group is suing the County Reapportionment Commission over the county's new legislative redistricting map.

No sooner were the elections over than the lawsuit was presented in state Supreme Court to force the commission to change the new map, redistricting map, which was adopted on July 13. The commission is charged by the Ulster County Charter with redrawing county legislative district lines in the two years following the 2020 U.S. Census, with the final version due in July. However, the redrawn map did not comply with the state’s legal standard of requiring no more than a 5 percent difference between the populations of the largest and smallest county legislative districts. The law used to require no more than a 10 percent variation; this change appears to have been missed or ignored by the Ulster County Reapportionment Commission, which went with the larger figure.

Ulster County’s attorney notified the commission that the map was not compliant and must be changed. Reapportionment Commission Chair Regis Obijiski has been quoted as saying that the Commission “has no intention of going back and fixing their mistake ... without a court order.”

Indeed, Republican Ken Ronk, a county legislator for the Town of Shawangunk and minority party leader in the Ulster County Legislature told the Shawangunk Journal in October, “My understanding is that the commission operated in a bipartisan fashion and in good faith to deliver the maps. Until there is a legal challenge to those maps, and a judge rules otherwise, we will work with them as they are.”

That chimes with Ulster County Republican Election Commissioner John Quigley, who said, “As election commissioners [not reapportionment commissioners] we simply have to wait until there’s legal action on this.”

Democrats may have been naive during the process and appear to have been surprised by the commission's 4-3 vote to approve the map.

“Since it was discovered that the map is legally defective about two months ago, I have argued that [the Reapportionment Commission] should reconvene and draw a new map that complies with the law,” said County Legislature Chair Tracey Bartels. “It is ridiculous that it should take a lawsuit by private individuals to get a public commission to fix the illegal issues.”

The chair of the Gardiner Democratic Committee, Tom Kruglinski, who is also a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said, “From its inception, the commission, "COR" for short, was dominated by Republicans whose party stands to benefit from the division of Gardiner for the next decade.” Kruglinski added, “The COR used the ‘cracking and packing’ gerrymandering technique to make it almost impossible for a Democrat to win a legislative seat even though Democrats outnumber Republicans by a ratio of two-to-one.”

In the Town of Ulster, three districts were created by the COR. Previously there were two. “The Town of Ulster is the business seat of the county,” says plaintiff Laura Hartmann. “Three legislators dilute the priorities of the town’s residents. We have big issues to deal with, issues that impact the entire county. It is important to keep the town as whole as possible."

Since the commission cannot legally reconvene after July 31, the issue goes to the courts and a judgement will be required to either have the panel meet once more and continue the work, or have the map overruled and redrawn in compliance with state law. According to the county charter, the new map, in whatever form it ends up being, must be in place for next year's county legislature elections.