Maureen Feeney is not the most popular councillor in City Hall this week among her own colleagues. And, actually, that's as good sign as any that Feeney did excellent work in her job as chair of the committee in charge of redistricting the city's council seats.

Pretty much everyone on the council lost a precinct or two that they didn't want to lose. Feeney has been getting calls from all over the city from unhappy people.

Nonetheless, on Wednesday, the council was expected to approve a plan Feeney painstakingly crafted after months of research, public hearings and, sadly, contentiousness.

It was not a pleasant experience, but Feeney accomplished her mission: she balanced the council seats by population as she is required to do by law. And, she succeeded in re-drawing the lines to create a new majority-minority seat in district five. That means that more than half of the voting age people in the district are people of color.

This week, fellow Dorchester councillor Charles Yancey let Feeney 'have it' in a very public way because he was unhappy about the final plan Feeney devised. Yancey said the plan was "an insult" to him and his constituents in ward 18, because it moved three Mattapan precincts from his district four seat into district 5.

In a press release sent to the Reporter, Yancey blasted his neighbor, saying Feeney had "attacked" Yancey's political base. Yancey then quoted Carol Mallory-Causey, fresh off an unsuccessful bid for State Senate, using her to roast Feeney by calling her actions "underhanded, sneaky and deceitful."

Yancey went further, blasting Feeney for "rejecting" his request to schedule an eleventh-hour hearing on the matter in Mattapan. This, despite the fact that he himself passed on an opportunity to host such a meeting weeks earlier, an extraordinary courtesy that Feeney extended to each district councillor.

In our estimation, Councillor Feeney was not treated fairly by Councillor Yancey, who has not been forthright in presenting the facts about Feeney's leadership role in the process. No one will ever be fully satisfied with the results of redistricting. It inevitably results in people being shifted into new political spheres of influence.

In Dorchester, for instance, Feeney surrendered two long-held precincts in the Meetinghouse Hill area to make up for Yancey's loss in Mattapan. Such trade-offs were necessary across the city to prevent a large-scale re-shuffling of precincts and to eliminate the prospect of two sitting councillors- John Tobin and Rob Consalvo- being forced to run against each other.

Councillor Feeney deserves praise, not scorn, for completing this difficult task and for doing it in a dignified, fair-handed manner.

-Ed Forry