New Chair appointed and district lines redrawn at weekly Alachua BOCC meeting

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GAINESVILLE, Fla. (WCJB) - A new chair has taken her seat and district lines have been redrawn to reflect a growing Alachua County during Tuesday Board of County Commissioners meeting.

Marihelen Wheeler was unanimously chosen as the new chair after Ken Cornell stepped down from the seat after his year term was up. Mary Alford, the commissioner that nominated Chair Wheeler is now the Vice-Chair.

One of the first decisions on the docket of the new-look board was to decide on how to redistrict the county, which is typically done on odd years especially after the census.

According to BOCC officials, numbers from the 2020 Census show an increase of about five thousand people per district so the lines were redrawn to reflect that.

Chris Dawson, the Transportation Planning Manager for the BOCC presented the new districts to the board. During the meeting he pointed out changes to District Five

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“This is Austin Cary Forrest mostly, it has affectively zero population, and one of the reasons that we chose to move it was just to make it so we didn’t have this weird appendage going off one district sort of into another,” said Dawson.

He also pointed out the westward shift of population throughout the county in the last decade.

“Generally madam chair, we have some changes sort of in the northwest portion that reflect short of the shift of population to the west and that’s really what those changes there are designed to do is to kind of even out that population,” said Dawson.

The new district lines were also approved unanimously.

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