WHEN THE RESULTS of the 2000 Census are released at the end of the month, the Boston City Council will begin the process of drawing new district lines. Creating nine equally populated districts is more than just a numerical exercise. It’s also a hotly political one, potentially shifting neighborhood power balances and disrupting incumbents’ winning coalitions. The process will be especially contentious this year, since early estimates indicate that African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, and other racial minorities now make up nearly half the city’s population, up from 41 percent in 1990. Yet there’s never been a Latino or an Asian elected to the city council. And there have never been more than two African-Americans elected to the council at any one time.

Council president Charles Yancey of North Dorchester and Councilor Chuck Turner of Roxbury — the only two blacks on the council — have recently suggested creating one or two additional “minority-majority” districts that would be likely to elect people of color. Resistance from their fellow councilors is likely to be fierce, but with Yancey in the corner office, this is the best chance in 20 years to sculpt a more diverse council.

This January, Yancey was elected president thanks to a surprise move by conservative councilor Jimmy Kelly of South Boston, who couldn’t muster a majority to retain the presidency for an eighth consecutive year. Yancey, who had previously sought higher office (for example, he ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1998), has been making the most of his newfound power, gleefully telling the Globe in January about how he prepared the city for a snowstorm while Mayor Tom Menino was out of town. (The paper later reported that Menino was “miffed” at Yancey’s bragging.)

But Yancey is also seeking to make his mark on the more substantive issue of redrawing district lines. He’s appointed Turner to head the Redistricting Committee, and though the new districts won’t affect this year’s election (they’ll become operative for the 2003 race), Turner says he’s hoping to move quickly: “I would hope we could get a vote [on new districts] this year.” He speculates that “six, seven months should be enough time.”

His vice-chair, however, wasn’t even expecting the committee to exist at this point. “I was a little surprised we had a committee on redistricting this year,” says Councilor Maura Hennigan of Jamaica Plain, “because sometimes the data is challenged and it takes a while to shake out the numbers, so I don’t think we’re going to deal with it until next year. President Yancey has every right to create any committee he wants, but technically we probably won’t do anything until next year.”

If Turner and Yancey seem to be in a rush, they have ample reason. Yancey’s rise to power was an accident, owing more to Kelly’s unelectability than to his own leadership skills. With crucial missteps — like his recent call for a council pay raise in an election year, and an embarrassing comeuppance on the council floor last week in which Daniel Conley of Hyde Park successfully challenged Yancey’s judgment on the assignment of a bill to a certain committee — Yancey’s future as president may be shaky. Indeed, during discussion of the bill’s assignment, Conley accidentally called Kelly “Mr. President” out of habit and quickly corrected himself. Kelly joked, “You can call me Mr. President if you want.” Tellingly, Conley — who is not a Kelly supporter and voted for Brian Honan of Allston-Brighton to be council president this year — smiled wryly and said, “Next year, Mr. President.” If Yancey loses the presidency, he also loses the chance to appoint committee chairs — including the head of the Redistricting Committee. And no other councilor besides himself and Turner seems likely to advocate so prominently for the new minority districts.

The neighborhoods most often mentioned as candidates for these districts are the racially diverse Jamaica Plain, which could return a Latino elected official, and the South End, which a 1995 study by the Massachusetts Institute for Social and Economic Research (MISER) identified as more than 50 percent minority, with large pockets of blacks and Hispanics. Since 1983, when the council moved from citywide to district representation, the South End has been paired with South Boston, which has a majority of white voters. “Twenty years ago,” notes Yancey, “there was a lot of concern about linking the South End with South Boston, and I’d be quite surprised if that’s not looked at when we redraw the lines for 2003.”

Of these two areas, changes to the Jamaica Plain district may be less contentious because Hennigan, who’s held the seat since 1983, plans to run for an at-large seat this year and would not have a personal stake in maintaining the same lines. The South End, however, will be a minefield. The district has been represented for the past 17 years by Kelly, who is known for battling school busing, affirmative action, and gay rights — unpopular stances in the heavily gay, heavily minority South End.

Kelly says he would “vehemently” oppose removing the South End from his district. Cynics speculate that he wants to keep the neighborhood because of its low voter turnout, which allows the regular poll-goers of South Boston to re-elect him easily. If Southie were paired with a more electorally assertive neighborhood, his races would be much tougher. But, Kelly says, “I assure you there’s a lot of people in the South End and Chinatown who want the district to remain as it is, and if we can do that and remain in the bounds of the law, that’s what I intend to do.”

I

IRONICALLY, KELLY strongly opposed the 1983 move to district representation on the council, while many progressives in the city strongly supported it. They believed — as it turns out, correctly — that the move would lead to more minority representation on a council that up to then had been virtually all white. But why aren’t there even more city councilors of color by now? Since the current model of nine district councilors and four at-large councilors was developed, only two racial minorities have been elected at any given time — and those victories came in the heavily black districts of Roxbury and North Dorchester/Mattapan. Efforts to branch out have met with failure. Only two African-American councilors have ever been elected by the city at large (Thomas Atkins in 1967 and 1969, and Bruce Bolling in 1981) — and none in the past 20 years. Attorney Frank Jones’s at-large campaigns in 1995 and 1997 drew multiracial support, but he lost both times. “It’s clear Boston has a history of finding great difficulty in voting for people of color over the years,” says Turner.

To some extent, this is the result of white voters’ attitudes. Turner describes the 1983 mayoral race as “Ray Flynn running on a platform that essentially said, ‘I believe in all the principles Mel King believes in, but I’m white.’ And that was — from my perspective — enough to get him elected.” It’s also due to the traditionally lackluster voter turnout by racial minorities — after all, low turnout in the South End is what allows South Boston to dominate the district.

Things may be changing. Both Jones and José Vincenty, a Latino who campaigned unsuccessfully for an at-large seat in 1993, are considering runs for Hennigan’s seat this year. And Felix Arroyo, a Latino who lost in the 1999 at-large race, plans to try again. “I think if you have good candidates, the race or ethnicity does not matter,” says Hennigan. “I think people really vote for the person.” Even Turner admits there’s been “a lot of growth in the consciousness of the white electorate in Boston.” As for voter turnout, Turner and other leaders note that blacks went to the polls in record numbers for the 2000 presidential election, thanks to extensive voter education and outreach. Leonard Alkins, the president of the Boston NAACP, believes the trend will continue. “There will no longer be apathy in voting,” he says. “People who take it for granted that communities of color do not vote historically will be in for a rude awakening.”

Even so, for both of these reasons — a sometimes racist white electorate, and a sometimes apathetic black and Hispanic one — additional “minority-majority” districts would help increase minority representation. Black, Latino, and Asian candidates would have a good shot at success in such areas, regardless of turnout. And the additional representation would be a boon to people of color, says Tobe Berkovitz, a professor of communication and politics at Boston University: “It benefits any community, whether we’re talking ethnic or geographic, to have a representative who’s really looking after their interests.” They may be more attuned than whites to their own community needs and constituent services, for instance.

“Sometimes people like to go to individuals who look like them, talk like them, and have a shared history,” Vincenty observes. “They say, ‘This person will open the door for me.’ It’s representation at its most basic level.”

But the methods of achieving such representation are controversial. “I wouldn’t support carving districts simply to compensate for low turnout in minority areas,” says former councilor John Nucci. “I think minority neighborhoods have to learn to get out and vote and use that vote to elect people of color for the council. I don’t think redistricting should compensate for that.”

New minority districts may face serious logistical hurdles as well. As Boston Herald columnist Tom Keane (who formerly represented the council’s Fenway/Back Bay district) points out, “The underlying premise of a minority district is you have segregated neighborhoods — you almost have to, to make it work.” But MISER’s 1995 study showed Boston to be much more integrated than it was even five years before, making a minority district very difficult to create today without drawing convoluted district lines. And that’s something that Turner adamantly rules out. Although he says that “the numbers, from what we’re hearing, could lend themselves to the creation of four districts where a person of color could be elected,” he is also quick to note that “I think it would be a mistake to go back to the old gerrymandering process. . . . That’s certainly not going to be our objective or our result.”

Indeed, Turner has to be careful in how he drafts the plan: a spate of recent Supreme Court decisions found that congressional districts gerrymandered to elect minority candidates were illegal. The decisions apply to municipal redistricting as well. As long as other criteria, such as keeping neighborhoods together, are taken into account, race can be one of a number of factors considered. But since protecting incumbents is another allowable criterion for reshaping districts, perhaps the biggest hurdle for Turner won’t be legal, but political.

The redistricting process means that incumbent councilors’ winning formulas — the combinations of wards and precincts that got them elected — will be altered. So it’s in their interest to make sure the changes are as minute as possible. Even beyond Kelly’s fierce opposition, “no councilor likes to give up anything,” says Hennigan. “They have relationships and people feel comfortable going to them.” Berkovitz of Boston University agrees: “The city councilors are going to be incredibly aggressive holding on to their turf.”

One way or another, we’re likely to see increased minority representation on the council — especially given the new Census figures. But the process of getting there — if it happens through redistricting — will be brutal. “When you go draw that line,” says Hennigan, a veteran of two previous redistrictings, “all hell breaks loose.”

Dorie Clark can be reached at dclark[a]phx.com.