Statement from Committee Chair, Elizabeth Passer, on the Resignation of Fulton City Councilor Ryan Taylor and City Ward Lines
Fulton City Councilor Ryan Taylor is resigning from his position on the City Council due to the mistakes of others. It is unfortunate because Councilor Taylor has proven to be both effective as a leader and well liked by the people he was elected to represent.
Councilor Taylor was duly elected by the voters of Ward Six on information provided from the agency overseeing the election process, the Oswego County Board of Elections. This was overseen in a bipartisan way. It has come to light this month, January 2025 that some citizens of Fulton’s Fifth ward, including Councilor Taylor, have been assigned to vote in the Sixth Ward for many years. The discovery of this issue led to the illumination of a larger problem. The ward lines of the City of Fulton do not match the city’s population based on the Census of 2020 or 2010, but have not been changed since 1982. Every ten years, the US Census counts and tracks the number of people living in each geographic place in order to fairly distribute representation and resources. This process is laid out in the Constitution of the United States in Article One, Section 2, Clause 3, known as the Enumeration Clause. It is important to count all people because we all need and use resources to provide for the health and welfare of the entire community. We all use the roads and bridges, need security and available emergency management (police, paramedics, hospitals, fire departments), food sources, schools, sanitation, parks, courts, housing, etc.; common ground, everyday human needs.
To illustrate how this can impact a community if these needs are not evaluated, routinely every 10 years, we should examine how this was done in the City of Fulton. In 2015, Legislator Dan Farfaglia suggested that the City of Fulton needed to redraw the six municipal ward lines based on their populations so that the citizens would be fairly represented based on the 2010 census. The population in 2010 for the city was 11,940, if divided equally would have been 1,990 per ward. Then there are a few things that must be considered such as we obviously cannot break up households to determine this number, so we have an allowable variable of 5%. The districts in 2015 were as follows: first ward 1,993, second ward 1,760, third ward 1,832, fourth ward 2,421, fifth ward 1,814 and the 6th ward 2,120. Legislator Dan Farfaglia was pointing to the inequity of representation of each district, which would cause inequities in unfair representation of each ward’s needs being addressed based on population. If a council member was representing more people than another, but each having the same weight of a vote it created unequal representation.
The ward lines needed to be redrawn, but they were not. The City of Fulton never re-drew the lines after the 2010 census or the 2020 census to reflect fair representation for the people of all six wards, leaving in place ‘knowingly’ unfair and unequal representation for the residents of each ward. The effect of not tending to these ward lines gave greater representation to some wards and less to others. As an example of this in 2015 the councilor for Ward 2 represented 1,760 people, while the councilor for ward 4 represented 2,421, but all councilors each got one vote in matters before the City Common Council.
The ward lines are an imperative concern to be addressed. In the meantime Councilor Taylor will be resigning, but will still work to represent in other ways the needs of the City of Fulton and County of Oswego. Ryan Taylor is a valued member of the City of Fulton and our Country who has only ever served to represent everyone with the utmost integrity through his service in our military and in elected office. The votes cast by the registered voters of the sixth ward will for all intents and purposes be put aside for now, they will get another opportunity to decide on November 4, 2025. Let us look forward to how we can have Ryan Taylor continue to serve the Fulton community in the future, as he has in the past. Thank you Councilor Taylor for your service to our country and to the City of Fulton.
