The Webster County Board of Supervisors will vote today to approve or deny the new precinct redistricting and supervisor districts.

County Auditor Doreen Pliner explained the process and why this redistricting is needed. Every 10 years, after the national census, cities and counties need to redistrict in order to make sure their districts are balanced based on the updated spread of citizens.

“Initially when we were given the final plans after the city redid their precincts, then we were asked to go in and do the precincts for the county,” Pliner said. “Once we developed our precincts, we sent it off to the state where they approved our precincts and then sent that over to the Legislative Service Agency.”

The Legislative Service Agency creates the supervisor district map based on the precincts, but Pliner said they ran into trouble at that step.

“There was no way to create supervisory districts and so they sent it back to us and rejected our precincts. Then they proceeded to take the plan and start tweaking it themselves,” she said. “They sent us a plan that basically was splitting two precincts in the city of Fort Dodge, and just the way they had the districts kind of made it hard for us to do some combinations if we needed to at times. So we asked them to redo it again. That’s what they have done and now they have come back with a new supervisor district plan.”

Pliner said they will be taking a portion of precinct 12 and moving it into precinct 11, but everything else will stay the same. Based on those precincts, the Legislative Service Agency designed the new supervisor map as well.

“Now we’ve got a pretty good plan. Everything’s in compliance and I think we’re going to move ahead with what we’ve got,” Pliner said.

The supervisors will most likely approve this plan at today’s meeting.

Pliner noted that Supervisor District 1 will be changing slightly, and with Supervisor Keith Dencklau planning to retire from the board, anyone wanting to run for that position will need to be aware.

“District 1 only changed a little bit, it lost precinct 2 and picked up precinct 10 and then a small portion of precinct 12 moved up into precinct 11,” Pliner said. “In that district, for people who are wanting to run, because that district changed, we can’t determine the number of voters the last time this election was held. So they will have to get 100 signatures on their petitions to qualify to run.”

The new maps of the supervisor districts and county precincts will be released after the supervisors have approved the plan.