Santa Ana Group Buoyed by Ruling on at-Large Elections

A spokesman for Santa Ana Merged Society of Neighbors said Friday that a federal court ruling that at-large elections in Watsonville discriminate against Latinos provides the “chink in the armor” the group needs to change Santa Ana’s own election system.

SAMSON president Harry Greenberg said the group would ask the City Council on Monday “to save the community the trauma and expense” of a court battle and place the question of ward elections on the November ballot.

In 1986, SAMSON twice gathered enough signatures to qualify ballot measures that would have instituted elections by ward. Currently, council members in Santa Ana are elected citywide but must represent their home wards. Both measures lost in close, bitterly fought elections.

Zeke Hernandez, a SAMSON member and president of the local chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens, said SAMSON has a standing request with the groups that won the Watsonville case to file a lawsuit on their behalf against Santa Ana.

“In the final analysis, it is going to be filed,” Hernandez said at a news conference Friday. “It’s a matter of when.”

Lawsuit Delayed

The groups, San Antonio-based Southwest Voters Registration Project and the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund--or MALDEF--have been studying Santa Ana for about two years. They delayed filing a lawsuit in 1986 because other cases were pending and the groups had limited resources, said Richard Martinez, field director for Southwest Voters.

Richard P. Fajardo, a MALDEF staff attorney, said his group is continuing to investigate the situation in Santa Ana. “We have some very serious concerns about the way Santa Ana conducts its election,” Fajardo said. But he declined to say if a lawsuit will be filed.

Hernandez, conceding that it is unlikely the City Council on Monday will grant the group’s request, said either a lawsuit or action by the state Legislature would see to it that the November election “is the last election held under this system.”

While SAMSON includes Latino members such as Hernandez and local community leader Sam Romero, it is not primarily a Latino group, and its interest in overturning Santa Ana’s at-large system is not specifically to help Latinos gain more representation on the City Council, where two Latinos currently sit.

Instead, said SAMSON member Gordon Bricken, the group objects to a system it considers “fundamentally unfair to Santa Ana residents, regardless of ethnicity.”

Because council members must campaign citywide rather than just in their own wards, they must raise large sums of money to compete with candidates who receive hefty contributions from business interests, said Bricken, who is considering running for either mayor or a council seat in November.

“The process even discriminates against well-to-do people,” Bricken said. “I can’t enter the race and finance it myself.”

Vice Mayor Patricia A. McGuigan said a ward system “tends to alienate council members from each other and tends to set up cliques and blocs. I just don’t feel government can be conducted appropriately with this kind of system. It has been proven in many large cities to be somewhat of a negative.”

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday found that at-large elections diluted the voting power of the Watsonville’s 48.9% Latino population. Plaintiffs had argued that dividing the city into districts would give Latinos a majority in at least two of them.

Low minority turnout at the polls, the court ruled, is “indicative of lingering effects of past discrimination.”

Watsonville City Atty. Don Haile said he would recommend to the City Council that it appeal the decision.

The Santa Cruz County community of 23,543 has never had a Latino council member, even though Latinos account for about half the city’s population.