County Bias Alleged in Remap Case : Justice: Supervisors accused of ‘racial gerrymandering’ in redistricting lawsuit.

In a “greedy act” of self-preservation, Los Angeles County supervisors secretly fashioned a redistricting plan that diluted Latino voting strength in order to protect their own political bases, the U.S. Justice Department and two civil rights groups charged Wednesday at the opening of a historic trial.

“This is an old-fashioned case about racial gerrymandering,” said Mark Rosenbaum, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Southern California, one of the plaintiffs in the case.

The Board of Supervisors has been accused in a suit filed by the Justice Department, the ACLU and the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund of dividing many of the county’s 2 million Latinos among three districts, thereby weakening their political clout in violation of the federal Voting Rights Act.

During opening arguments, Rosenbaum called the board “the most powerful and enduring all-white club” in the nation. “Since 1875--for 115 years--no person of Spanish surname has ever served on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors,” he said.

But John McDermott, a private attorney hired by the county, denied that the supervisors discriminated against Latinos.

For the plaintiffs to win, he said, “the court is going to have to make legal and political decisions that no court in a voting rights case has ever made.”

The plaintiffs are seeking to consolidate the heavily Latino neighborhoods encompassing East Los Angeles and growing immigrant neighborhoods in the San Gabriel Valley into one district in order to help a Latino win a seat on the five-member county board. The ACLU and MALDEF also have asked the court to consider expanding the board to seven members.

Rosenbaum said Wednesday that testimony will show the supervisors carried out the 1981 redistricting in “back rooms, by covert compacts among factions of the board, by private revolving-door meetings” of two supervisors at a time to sidestep a state law requiring that discussions involving three or more supervisors be conducted in public.

The remapping, Rosenbaum argued, was the subject of a “fierce partisan” political struggle between the board’s conservative majority of Mike Antonovich, Deane Dana and Pete Schabarum and liberal Supervisors Ed Edelman and Kenneth Hahn.

“For each bloc, the county’s Hispanic community was treated as the means to an end of either enlarging or maintaining the partisan balance of power,” the ACLU attorney said.

Rosenbaum said conservative board members only wanted to increase the Latino makeup in a district represented by the liberal Edelman--and liberal board members only wanted to shift Latinos to conservative Schabarum’s district.

“Where the Republican majority sought to send their Hispanics packing, so as to strengthen their long-term holds on their districts and their majority status, the Democrats wanted their Hispanics spread thin, so as to remain in a supporting roles and to pose an eventual challenge in Schabarum’s district,” the attorney said.

Neither faction had the four votes necessary to add Latinos to the other’s district. “It was in each incumbent’s political self-interest to leave the Hispanic community divided and weak,” Rosenbaum said.

County lawyer McDermott said that during the 1981 redistricting, Antonovich and Dana pressed for a district with more Latinos. “That hardly bespeaks of discriminatory purpose,” he said.

McDermott said Edelman opposed the plan, “not because he was anti-Hispanic, but (because he) felt Hispanics could be better served if not packed into one district.” He said Edelman believed Latinos would have more influence if represented by more than one supervisor.

McDermott pointed out that a Latino group, Californios for Fair Representation, also spoke out in 1981 against putting all the Latinos in a single district because “they said that would be tokenism.”

The supervisors, who have paid nearly $1 million to private lawyers on the case, contend it was not possible to create a district with a majority of Latino voters, using 1980 Census figures.

The plaintiffs argue that such a district can be created, using the county’s own 1987 population estimates. But county attorneys counter that they are only obliged to use the 1980 Census data.

U.S. District Judge David V. Kenyon said he wants the trial to take no more than 120 hours, which could span roughly six weeks.

The plaintiffs plan to call each of the five supervisors to testify on their discussions leading up to adoption of the redistricting plan.

The trial was delayed for several weeks when both sides sought unsuccessfully to reach an out-of-court settlement. Kenyon said Tuesday that once the trial began, no settlement would be allowed.

Both parties appeared close to a settlement last month when the supervisors agreed to put Schabarum in a new, predominantly Latino district. The compromise fell apart, however, when a counterproposal to increase Latino voters in Schabarum’s district was rejected by the board.

The last chance for an out-of-court settlement appeared lost Tuesday when the board voted down a proposal to expand from five to seven members.