Initiative Would Cut City Council Out of Realigning Its Districts

With the political smoke still rising over last year’s contentious redrawing of Los Angeles City Council district boundaries, an initiative campaign is under way to take the right of redistricting out of the council’s hands before the next round of remapping in 1992.

Although not a new idea nor an avenue to assured reform, the initiative proposes turning over the politically hot task to a citizens’ commission. Backers of the ballot measure, including the political reform group Common Cause, charge that council members played politics with redistricting last year, evincing more interest in preserving their own jobs than in fairly drawing up 15 districts.

Allied with Common Cause as a sponsor of the initiative is Councilman Ernani Bernardi, who at the same time has been pushing for another proposed initiative that would repeal the latest redistricting plan, adopted last September.

Both measures are aimed for the June, 1988, ballot. To qualify, supporters must gather 69,516 signatures for each measure.

The decision to take the reapportionment issue to a vote of the people is another chapter in the story of the city’s political structure adjusting to rising influence by minorities, especially Latinos and Asians.

At present, the council has one Latino member, Richard Alatorre, and will soon get another, Assemblywoman Gloria Molina, who was elected Tuesday to represent a new 1st District--the district created in the redistricting exercise last fall in response to a federal lawsuit saying that the city was denying Latinos fair representation on the council.

The council also has one Asian, Michael Woo, and two black members, Gilbert Lindsay and Robert Farrell. A third black council member, David Cunningham, resigned, but he is expected to be replaced by another black in the heavily black 10th District in the April 14 city election.

The Common Cause-Bernardi proposal would strip the council of its authority to redistrict and give it to a seven-member commission appointed by retired judges. The members would be selected by a two-thirds vote of the judges from among candidates nominated by any individual or organization. No public official could serve on the commission.

The commission would draw new lines for the 15 council districts in 1992 when the council is next required by the City Charter to adjust boundaries for population changes reflected in new census findings. The next census will be taken in 1990.

The campaign faces a number of political obstacles. California voters in 1982 and 1984 turned down proposals--including one sponsored by Common Cause--to create reapportionment commissions at the state level.

In addition, two groups that went to court to force the last redistricting, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, oppose the idea.

They said that a commission would limit the influence of minorities on redistricting. A MALDEF spokesman said he also doubts that commission members who are not accountable to the voters would be as responsive to public pressure as elected officials.

Walter Zelman, who heads Common Cause in California, said that having City Council members create their own district boundaries is “the most flagrant conflict of interest in politics.”

Last year’s redistricting fight provided critics with plenty of evidence of council members protecting their own political interests.

After first adopting a plan that would have proved risky to some members in future elections, the council quickly reversed itself and redrew safer boundaries after the death of Councilman Howard Finn in August. His district in the northeast San Fernando Valley was split up to protect the political bases of Councilmen John Ferraro and Woo.

More political heat was generated over these maneuvers than in the creation of the new 1st District in a heavily Latino area--which was the original purpose of the exercise.

The result is a council district map so full of zigzag lines that it looks like a Picasso painting. North Hollywood, for example, is divided among five council districts.

Councilman Joel Wachs’ new Y-shaped district is divided by a big chunk of Bernardi’s territory, with a long, thin finger--two blocks wide in one area--connecting Sunland-Tujunga on one side and Van Nuys on the other. Wachs, who unwillingly lost most of his affluent Sherman Oaks-Studio City political base, said he will gladly provide some of his $635,000 in campaign funds to support an initiative to create a reapportionment commission.

Bernardi was given a new San Fernando Valley district where Latinos make up nearly 50% of the population. Latino political organizers hope to field a candidate against Bernardi in 1989 or when the 75-year-old councilman retires.

“It’s going to be hard enough for any group of people to balance the needs of communities and the needs of minorities,” Zelman said. “But if you compound that with the needs of council members to protect their own political bases, it makes the process that much more difficult. And it makes it less likely that the compromises and adjustments that have to be made can be made without rancor.”

“I think there are an awful lot of grass-roots voters out there, especially in the Valley, who really feel abused by the process,” Zelman said in an interview.

However, others involved in the council’s redistricting process disagree with Zelman.

“Redistricting is a political process,” said Councilman Richard Alatorre, who was in charge of the council’s remapping. “You look at commissions in other states and they have led to the worst form of political haggling.”

Kimball Brace, a Washington-based reapportionment consultant to a number of cities and states, including Los Angeles during its recent redistricting, said he has not found commissions to be any less political or fairer than elected officials. Although nine states have reapportionment commissions, Brace said he knows of no city with one.

“You can’t really take the politics out of redistricting,” he said in a telephone interview.

Richard Fajardo, an attorney with MALDEF, an intervenor in the lawsuit that led to the council’s redistricting, said he also fears that “jockeying for appointment to the commission will become as political as drawing the lines itself.”

Fajardo said he opposes reapportionment by commission members who are not accountable to the voters.

Expressing similar concerns, Councilman Woo said, “Lack of self-interest and lack of accountability go together.”

Zelman responded: “It is very difficult for incumbents to say they’re accountable for redistricting when the objective is to make their job safer, which, in fact, means less accountable.” Zelman said that important decisions are made by individuals who are not accountable to voters, including U.S. Supreme Court justices.

Raymond Johnson Jr., president of the Los Angeles chapter of the NAACP, which also was an intervenor in the Justice Department lawsuit, said he will oppose a redistricting commission without a guarantee of minority representation.

A draft of the proposed initiative says the commission membership would have to represent the city ethnically and geographically but does not guarantee a specific number of minority members.

“What minorities have tended to do is put their faith in legislative leaders,” Zelman said. “I think they’re making a mistake because incumbents are going to think of themselves first and their community second.”

In the meantime, while Bernardi and Common Cause complete work on the commission initiative, the councilman is preparing to begin circulating the second initiative, which would repeal the current plan. His co-sponsors on the repeal effort include Finn’s widow, Anne, and former Dodger shortstop Maury Wills, who lives in Sylmar.

MALDEF attorneys, who oppose repeal of the present plan, said that if it passes, they will promptly bring suit to have it overturned.

Repeal of the current plan would return the new 1st District and its representative, Molina, to the Valley, and revive the issue of fair Latino representation, critics said.