MADISON, Ala. (WHNT) — The work continues for Madison city leaders as they work to balance its district’s populations. 

The city held a work session Monday evening regarding its redistricting process.

Preliminary plan two, drawn up by Slaughter & Associates Urban Planning Consulting Firm, was presented to Madison city council members during the work session.

“We were able to go through an exercise where each council member (if they wanted to) could make a request for changes,” Slaughter & Associates Urban Planning Consulting Firm President/Owner Mike Slaughter said. “Some changes had to do with a split sub-division or moving areas from one district to another for population reasons. We were able to receive that input, implement it on the computer, and see how it impacted our one-vote/one-person principle.”

In doing so, the council could see (based on each request) how the districts would become unbalanced.

“We can do things graphically or we can do things numerically, but when it comes to the one-vote/one-person principle…the numerics are the important part of that,” Slaughter said.

According to Alabama law, the new plan won’t go into effect until the next election.

Currently, there are two working plans on the table, but Slaughter says they’re heading back to the office to make some tweaks to plan two.

“We’re going to tweak plan two with some input we received from the city council. We’ll do that in our office and then send it over to the city for distribution,” Slaughter added.

Slaughter says a public hearing has been set for Monday, October 9th to go over working plan two.