Assault on the Fiefdoms

The U.S. Department of Justice has made it clear that it is serious about forcing the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to redraw district boundaries to correct discrimination against Latino voters. That may finally force the board’s five members to pay less attention to protecting their political fiefdoms and more attention to redesigning county government to make it not only more representative but also more modern and efficient.

The federal government’s determination to press on with a lawsuit against the county over alleged violations of the 1965 Voting Rights Act was expressed in a letter sent to County Counsel Dewitt Clinton by Assistant Atty. Gen. William Bradford Reynolds. In the letter Reynolds insisted that the county commit itself to reapportionment, and asked for a reply within 10 days. If the county’s answer is not satisfactory, Reynolds warned, the Justice Department will proceed with a lawsuit that would be the largest civil-rights action ever filed against a local government agency.

In a rather transparent effort to fend off a lawsuit, the county supervisors voted last week to hire a Southern California demographic research center to gather data that could be used to draw new supervisorial districts. That is not likely to satisfy the Justice Department, however. It does not take a demographic expert to see that Los Angeles County’s Latino population is big and still growing. It does not take a political scientist to conclude that something is amiss when the large Latino population has never elected one of its own to a board that was established 138 years ago. And it should be obvious to anyone that the five white men who currently sit on the county board are not truly representative of a sprawling urban region with a remarkably diverse population of 8.4 million people. The only thing that is not obvious is what took the federal government so long to notice the ethnic shortcomings of the county’s government.

Simply realigning the district boundaries in the current system will not be enough. Instead, county officials must revive proposals to increase membership of the board and to create an independent executive to administer the county, and then must work to put them into effect as soon as possible.

Rather than try to dodge the civil-rights bullet, the board should take decisive action to make county government effective--something that it cannot be with a structure meaning that every major decision is based on dividing county resources among the board’s five members. That might just persuade the federal government that the county Board of Supervisors really does want to provide more representative government, not just for 2 million Latinos but for all county residents.