Speaking of DC representation: Do we need more, smaller wards?

A couple decades ago, I ran for City Council in Ann Arbor, back when local elections were in April, not co-incident with national elections, when local politics were dominated by Republicans, and when no other Democrat wanted to run for that Ward seat that particular year. (I lost, but made an acceptable showing.)

Ann Arbor has 6 wards, with two representatives from each, and with 4 year terms, one of the Ward Councilmembers is up for election every two years. They don't have at-large councilmembers, although the Mayor is elected at large, and is the tie-breaker vote.

I think about the organization of councilmember districts in DC a lot. We have 8 wards, each with one representative, 4 at-large councilmembers, and a Chairman of the City Council, elected at large. Generally, the chair only votes to ensure there are no ties.

Not that I think we need more councilpeople necessarily (we have a hard enough time getting good ones now), but I have often thought that the 2 councilmembers/ward method, a la Ann Arbor, would be worth considering.

On the other hand, I was talking to a friend, and he thinks the Wards are too big, that in a place like Ward 5 for example, the amount of ground covered is so great, that there often aren't common interests across the geography of the Ward, e.g., Fort Totten vis-a-vis Fort Lincoln, Brookland vis-a-vis North Capitol or Ivy City, etc.

Do we need a few more Wards, thereby adding a few councilmembers (argh!), to make the Wards smaller and provide a greater level of representation per capita?

This scares me too, because I worry about the decline of city-wide and/or other broader interests, at the hand of neighborhood parochialism. Having more wards could mean more parochialism. And if you believe that part of the problem of government is more elected representatives looking for things to do and fund, in order to maintain support, there are some negatives in this suggestion. (On the other hand, having more Councilmembers could allow the City Council to step up and take a stronger role and position in oversight.)

The Progressive Movement in the early part of the last century was partly about a kind of disenfranchisement of voters. They were against Ward-based politics because the ability to control smaller geographic areas politically (also through fraud) aided Machine politics which in turn abetted and supported corruption. So a big part of that reform movement was moving to at-large elections. At the same time, it made the achievement of minority representation much more difficult, and eventually was corrected somewhat by the Voting Rights Act in 1964.

To better meet the interests of some residents of Los Angeles seeking to separate the San Fernando Valley from LA as a separate city, they created a new system of Neighborhood Councils, like DC's Advisory Neighborhood Commissions, but with significantly more money and staff support. I don't know about power... But having a Neighborhood Council with 24 representatives seems scary to me. The old ANC6A was paralyzed having 14 members.

Still, something ought to be done. I don't understand why DC doesn't engage in a review of the Home Rule Charter, comparable to how cities like New York have Charter Review Commissions.