Southwest Florida’s fastest growing municipality will now place district residency requirements on city commissioners. A map dividing the city into five districts with roughly 11,500 residents apiece was approved by city commissioners unanimously Monday night, four months after city voters backed a referendum requiring the change.

City Attorney Mark Moriarty said the shift was carefully crafted by consultants based on census data. Six plans were proposed by consultants, and commissioners last night approved a district map and an ordinance enacting the change in election rules. “It was a long process,” said Mayor Rhonda DiFranco. The change requires commissioners now to live in the district they will represent on the commission, though elections will remain at-large. Commissioners until now could live anywhere in the city and run for the numbered commission seats.

The shift hasn’t been welcomed by everyone in North Port, though. While 66.4 percent of voters in August backed a change to the charter calling for district elections, former City Commissioner Richard Lockhart said the city is not ready for such a shift. “We are still growing for years in the future,” he said, noting North Port’s population of 59,212 this year is a fraction of the expected 250,000 residents expected to live in North Port once it is built out. “It’s way too premature to have districts right now.”

DiFranco said she actually would prefer a single-member district system, where only voters in each district elect their own commissioner and don't weigh in on the rest of the board. She wonders if many of the voters thought that was what they would get with the August referendum.

Politically, the change means some shuffling on the board in coming cycles. DiFranco, for example, holds Seat 3 today, but will have to run for re-election in District 1 in two years. The Seat 4 commissioner, Jacqueline Moore, is not up for-re-election until 2018, but lives in a district now that chooses a commissioner in 2016, so that will have to play out as well.

The change in North Port puts the city on a district system more like other mid-sized cities in Southwest Florida. Bradenton elects five council members who live in specified wards but are elected city-wide. Sarasota elected three single-member district commissioners and two commissioners at-large, the former required to live in their districts and the latter allowed to live anywhere in the city.