Gainesville City Council put off voting on a new ward map Tuesday night so a project team assigned to the task can assess two late proposals.

A meeting could be called next Thursday to hear from the committee, which would give a report and recommendation.

"Let's get this thing over with," Councilman Danny Dunagan said.

City Manager Kip Padgett agreed. "We're spending a significant amount of money on this, and we need to put some closure on this."

The city is redrawing its map based on the 2010 Census, which shows the population in Ward 3 has shifted so there are more Hispanics than blacks.

Also, the population now among the five wards ranges from 5,220 in Ward 3 to 10,215 in Ward 4, "so we clearly see the population is not evenly distributed," City Clerk Denise Jordan said.

"Ideally, if it was evenly distributed, we would be looking at a population of each ward to be somewhere around 6,761."

The project team, created to work with Jordan to establish a map, is made up of the Hall County elections office, Gainesville school system and legal representation.

A particular goal of the group was to establish the same boundaries for City Council and the Gainesville Board of Education, Jordan said.

The council has held seven public hearings on the matter, including one Tuesday night, since the first proposed map was presented to the group on July 20.

At Thursday's work session, the school board presented a draft of a ward map it designed with the help of Linda Meggers, formerly of the Georgia General Assembly's Reapportionment Office.

Another map was announced Tuesday night, as drawn by a local resident with an interest in the process, Emory Turner.

"Thank you for your time and effort," Dunagan told him as he spoke on his proposal.

"That's what citizens are for. We don't just elect you. We try to help you," Turner said.

Jordan said the project team would need time to consider the newest proposals, "so that all the maps you're going to consider will have had the same evaluation."

Turner's map might meet a dead end if it's not tweaked.

"I have respect for Mr. Turner's work, but three school board members lose their seat," Dunagan said, referring to how the map is drawn.

Attorney Drew Whalen, legal counsel for the redistricting process, said he believes the first proposal is better than the school board plan "simply because the overall deviation (from current population numbers) is lower."

Councilman George Wangemann agreed, saying he came to the meeting prepared to vote for the initial proposal.

"I want the main thing to be kept the main thing and that is, when you're redividing districts, you're looking for the population to be basically equal in each of those wards, and (the first) plan does just that," he said.

"But the (project team) needs to look at all of (the proposals)," Councilwoman Myrtle Figueras said.

If the council moves ahead with the map, it would be approved under a home rule ordinance. That way, the map wouldn't have to go through the state legislature.

The map would then be submitted for preclearance to the Department of Justice as part of the Voting Rights Act, which protects the voting strength of minorities.

The act was amended in 2006 to include language minorities such as Hispanics.

If the amendment is signed, the City Council can move forward with its new map.