For some residents of Penn Township, the new year might bring changes to their local voting ward, polling place and township commissioner.

Township officials approved an updated ward map, adjusting boundaries of the municipality’s five wards to correspond with data from the 2020 U.S. Census. The map goes to county officials for approval.

Township manager Mary Perez said a little more than 500 of the township’s approximately 20,000 residents will be impacted by a change in ward. The county will contact residents in the coming year if they are affected, she added.

“This is done in conjunction with the Census every 10 years,” she said. “We need to try to get the number of residents in each ward as close as possible. In some places, it’s really not a big deal because they don’t have a lot of growth. But we have a lot of growth, so it’s more so important for us to do this.”

Perez and the township’s solicitor, Michael Korns, arranged the new wards with a goal of disrupting the smallest number of residents.

Perez described the process as a “time-consuming puzzle.”

“We try to keep everybody in their same ward as much as possible, but we have to go by the Census blocks,” she said. “It’s not like we can go street by street and move people as we see fit.”

Redrawn wards must account for where the commissioners live because each commissioner must live within the district they represent.

“We also tried to keep the polling places within their district,” Perez said, saying she does not expect any polling places to move.

Residents affected by a ward change will vote in a different location and be represented by a different township commissioner.

“If somebody up here was used to dealing with Chuck Konkus, or calling him if they have an issue, they’ll now call Larry Harrison,” she said. “We tried to keep that to a minimum as much as we could.”

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