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GREENSBORO — A planned legal challenge to Guilford County’s new voting districts is slowly taking shape.

The effort, spearheaded by Democratic county leaders, civil- and voting-rights groups, aims to stop a redistricting plan passed by the Republican-led N.C. General Assembly in August.

The redistricting plan, which cuts the Guilford County Board of Commissioners from 11 members to nine and draws district lines that are more advantageous to Republicans, was cleared by the U.S. Department of Justice earlier this month.

“We’re going to be taking it to court, as far as we need to take it,” commissioners Chairman Melvin “Skip” Alston said.

Alston, a Democrat, is a former leader of the state NAACP. He said he’s been working with that organization, the Southern Coalition for Social Justice and friends who are civil rights attorneys to build a court case to prevent the redistricting.

“We let the Justice Department know our problems with the map and they saw fit to clear it,” Alston said. “But that doesn’t stop us from taking it to state and federal court. We’re going to be arguing it in several ways. Not just based on it being retrogressive in terms of minority participation under the Civil Rights Act, but also in terms of minority influence and the process that was used to get that map.”

Alston and other critics say the map stacks black voters in Districts 7 and 8, each of which has more than 60 percent black voters. That would mean fewer black voters in the remaining districts.

“That’s a problem in terms of the influence black voters can have in any other district,” Alston said.

Alston said there are also due process concerns. The General Assembly put together and passed the maps without any input from Guilford County voters or their elected representatives at the county level.

Republicans say Alston’s objections are ironic given the role he had in a very similar redistricting process in 1991.

That’s the year the board expanded from seven to 11, making it the largest county board in North Carolina.

At the time, it was Democratic lawmakers in Raleigh who redrew the election districts. Guilford Republicans fought the legislative change. County voters approved the districts in a referendum vote. Many voters said they were confused by the referendum. The change to the board came amid a bitter political fight between Republicans and Democrats.

That year Republican commissioners, led by then-Commissioner Steve Arnold, forced out some top county officials, took a number of political adversaries off local boards and slashed county positions and services such as public health and social services to cut taxes.

The ensuing controversy led to a protest march of more than 1,000 people and played a part in getting Alston into county politics 20 years ago.

Alston, then a leader with the NAACP , applauded the move to expand the board and redraw political lines to make them align with the newly constituted countywide school board districts.

He said the creation of nine single-member districts and two at-large seats gave minorities more of a chance to be represented.

Though Republicans did win back control of the board in 1996 they lost it again two years later.

Republican Commissioner Billy Yow has called the 1991 redistricting “setting up a dictatorship” run by Democrats and now says he’ll be glad to see it end.

The new map takes effect in February, but a court challenge could push its implementation past the next election cycle.

Contact Joe Killian at 373-7023 or joe.killian@news-record.com