An outcry over the splitting of Chinatown precincts between City Council districts. A councillor potentially put in the position of facing off against a colleague. Growing diversity in neighborhoods prompting calls for an additional majority-minority district.

At first glance, that all seems like the highlight reel from the ongoing debate over redistricting, a wonky topic that involves the redrawing of boundaries of the nine council districts to properly reflect population shifts across the city over the last decade.

District 2 City Councillor Bill Linehan of South Boston has been hammered inside and outside of City Hall for initially constructing a map tossing out of that district a precinct he lost heavily to an unsuccessful rival in the November election. Chinatown activists say the move splits up the neighborhood and dilutes its voting power. (Last week, he proposed another map that keeps Chinatown together, but slices up West Roxbury and Mission Hill.)

Linehan’s initial draft also put Michael Ross, who has represented District 8 since 1999, in the same district as District 6 Councillor Matt O’Malley. Under the new map, Ross would stay where he is. (Though it’s an open question where he will end up next year because he has formed an exploratory committee to look at a run for Barney Frank’s Congressional seat.)

And District 4 Councillor Charles Yancey has said he will be submitting a map that would increase the number of majority-minority council districts to five from four, since the city is majority-minority in population. To the chagrin of his colleagues, Yancey has also pushed for uniting Mattapan under one seat.

But for close watchers of City Hall, this all must seem familiar since councillors grappled with some of the same issues ten years ago, during the last redistricting effort.

Maureen Feeney, who had not yet retired and begun to angle for the job of city clerk, was in charge of the redistricting committee then. District 7 Councillor Chuck Turner, who had proposed a plan that would have pitted Councillor Rob Consalvo against then-Councillor John Tobin in an overhauled District 5, was not yet in jail for bribery. And Felix G. Arroyo, not yet an ambitious councillor at-large, was an ambitious council staffer.

“Residents from Chinatown to West Roxbury and Roxbury to Mission Hill were virtually unanimous in one respect – the overwhelming desire to keep neighborhoods together or reunite neighborhoods separated [by] redistricting,” Feeney wrote in a committee report to colleagues.

Arroyo recalled the efforts of the redistricting committee of 2001-2002 during this week’s meeting in noting that the process spanned a much longer amount of time ten years ago. “We didn’t pass that map until mid-October,” he told his colleagues as they attempted to inch toward a consensus.

It appears more and more unlikely they’ll be unable to finish by the end of this year, as Linehan and City Council President Stephen Murphy had hoped.

The only hard deadline they have is next November by which time they will need to have the reshaped districts drawn for the 2013 municipal elections.

Arroyo and fellow City Councillor At-Large Ayanna Pressley say the process should stretch into 2012 to give Frank Baker, the incoming District 3 councillor, a chance to weigh in and vote. Baker has expressed interest in picking up the Polish Triangle precincts currently in District 2 and in having a vote in the process.

Pressley said state Rep. Michael Moran and the Legislature’s redistricting committee, which took two years to redraw Congressional district and State House district boundaries, “set the standard” with frequent public hearings and initially wary voting right advocates were happy with the outcome.

Councillor At-Large John Connolly said that given the high turnover on the 13-member council in the last few years, other members could leave, easing some of the redistricting committee’s load. “That’s what broke the jam in Congressional districts,” he said, alluding to Congressman John Olver, the Amherst Democrat who stepped down as Moran and his colleagues were attempting to figure out how to shrink the Massachusetts delegation from ten congressmen to nine.

The comment underscores how much incumbency is among the top priorities in redistricting.
For Lydia Lowe, head of the Chinese Progressive Association, not so much. She said her group, which has scheduled its own hearings on redistricting, would be proposing several maps, one of which is likely to be unpopular; it would place Baker and Linehan in the same district.

Baker taps Beacon Hill vetfor City Hall chief of staff
Baker has tapped a Beacon Hill veteran as his chief of staff in City Hall. Amy Frigulietti, who volunteered for him during his District 3 campaign, worked in the state Senate as chief of staff to state Sen. Michael Moore (D-Millbury) and as a legislative aide to Guy Glodis (D-Worcester) when he served in the Senate.

A member of the Ward 13 Democratic Committee, Frigulietti was also assistant deputy superintendent and deputy sheriff at the Worcester County Jail when Glodis served as sheriff. Glodis became a lobbyist after losing a race for state auditor in 2010.

Frigulietti, a Savin Hill resident who grew up in Norwood, has also volunteered on various other campaigns, including then-Treasurer Shannon O’Brien’s run for governor in 2001, Stephen Lynch’s first run for Congress, state Rep. John Rogers’s (D-Norwood) reelection campaigns, and Michael Bellotti’s run for Norfolk County Sheriff.

Congressman Neal on the new Gingrich
“I always thought Mitt Romney would be the nominee,” Congressman Richard Neal (D-Springfield) told the State House News Service. “Out of nowhere, even for those of us who follow this every day, Newt Gingrich has emerged.” To be fair, people were warned. A spokesman, perhaps under the impression that he worked for Gilgamesh rather than Gingrich, offered up this bombastic response in May after news reports of a bad first week for the former House speaker’s presidential campaign: “A lesser person could not have survived the first few minutes of the onslaught. But out of the billowing smoke and dust of tweets and trivia emerged Gingrich, once again ready to lead those who won’t be intimated [sic] by the political elite and are ready to take on the challenges America faces.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: Material from State House News Service was used in this report. Check out updates to Boston’s political scene at The Lit Drop, located at dotnews.com/litdrop. Email us at newseditor@dotnews.com and follow us on Twitter: @LitDrop and @gintautasd.