CHAMPAIGN -- A number of area residents Saturday urged lawmakers to allow citizens to review and comment on new congressional and legislative district maps before they are approved by the General Assembly.

But it's not certain that will happen.

Rep. Karen Yarbrough, D-Maywood, who chaired a three-hour-long Illinois House redistricting committee hearing at Parkland College, said it's too soon in the process to know if there will be time for citizen reaction to the maps to be drawn by legislators this spring.

"We're at the beginning stages of doing this," Yarbrough said. "We only needed to do four hearings, we're doing 18. So we'll see where things go."

State Rep. Naomi Jakobsson, D-Urbana, was similarly noncommittal.

"I don't know how that's going to happen," Jakobsson said. "I know the county (board district) maps were up on the computer and people could see them that way. I suppose there could be something similar to that happening. This is so early that I don't know how the map would be shown."

But a strong sentiment for public hearings after the maps are developed was voiced from independents, Democrats and Republicans.

"The public should be allowed to see and comment on any new map that is drawn by the General Assembly at least two weeks before they are voted on by the House and the Senate in this session of the General Assembly," said Trisha Crowley, president of the League of Women Voters of Champaign County. "Additionally the General Assembly should give as much rationale as possible when describing the decisions that resulted in those maps that were drawn."

Bill Black, a Danville Republican who left the Legislature in December, exhorted his former colleagues "after you deliberate and come up with a map," to "come back and let people take a look at it. It's awfully hard sometimes to understand just where those lines are."

Trish Avery, a former Democratic chairwoman of the Champaign County Board, said in response to a question from state Rep. Chapin Rose, R-Mahomet, that she hoped lawmakers would permit public comment on a proposed map.

"I would like to see what it looks like," she said.

And Steve Beckett, a former Democratic county board member who helped lead the push for an independent county board redistricting commission in Champaign County, said the public "needs to see the map."

"They come in and talk about it. They can be critical of it," Beckett said. "Instead we're having a hearing today, having not seen a map, talking in generalities about Savoy and southwest Champaign, etcetera, without being able to give you any solid input. And then when the map finally hits the public, there is no time."

Saturday's redistricting hearing, at which 20 people testified, also turned into a debate about the wisdom of Champaign County's nascent redistricting process, which is believed to be the only one of its kind in the country. Eleven citizens, only four of whom are county board members, have recommended a new county board district map.

"I was extremely disappointed by the results," said Alan Kurtz, a Champaign Democrat who is both a county board and a commission member. "I had high hopes that this experiment, the first of its kind on the county level in Illinois and perhaps in the country, would result in a fair, non-biased and competitive map with full public input. That simply did not occur."

Kurtz claimed all of the computer-drawn maps offered to the redistricting commission were politically biased, and that the one forwarded to the county board, which he said "looked like a jigsaw puzzle," split 25 precincts, nine townships and five municipalities, and that it packed "almost the entire African-American community into one district, thus diluting their representation."

In reality, the recommended map splits 16 precincts, four townships and three municipalities. And while 6,102 African-Americans are in one district that is majority-minority, six other proposed districts have at least 1,100 African-American residents.

Alan Nudo, a Republican county board member, urged the state "to do what Champaign County" and Iowa have done and not draw a map to protect incumbents.

"The only way you do that is to take out the political part of it as Iowa did," Nudo said. "I would urge this group to look at what Iowa and the state of Washington and Arizona did for future censuses. Now this is a profile in courage because you have to buck the party, you have to buck the incumbents and you have to do what's right for the citizens, and that's what we're here for."

But Al Klein, chairman of the Champaign County Democratic Party, said that redistricting should be done by legislators.

"I think you cannot abdicate that responsibility by using a commission or another organization. Really, in the end, it's a legislative act," he said. "Our current example of the commission is more contentious than people thought it would be. There's a reason this hasn't succeeded elsewhere."