A Glimpse Into the Smoke-Filled Room : Supervisors: Redistricting trial, in which board is accused of excluding Latinos, looks at behind-the-scenes maneuvering.

As the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors was publicly setting up a commission to draw new district lines in 1981, Supervisor Deane Dana was privately suggesting another strategy to his conservative colleagues.

Dana, in a letter, suggested that the board’s three Republicans hire their own private redistricting consultant. He also urged against gathering political information through the commission, which was to hold hearings into the heated subject.

“All of that data is available to the public,” he wrote. “The power in reapportionment is information, and our own system would give us that additional leverage.”

The letter, among the documents in boxes stacked in a Los Angeles courtroom, is a key piece of evidence in a historic voting rights trial, and, according to plaintiffs in the case, shows that the supervisors secretly fashioned district boundaries to benefit their political self-interests.

But it and other testimony presented during the first 10 days of the trial also provide a rare glimpse into the behind-the-scenes politicking of the five supervisors.

The trial, though attended by only the lawyers in the case and a few reporters, carries high stakes, not just for the five supervisors but potentially for the county’s 8 1/2 million residents.

If the county loses or settles, supervisorial district boundaries are likely to be radically redrawn, assigning supervisors to new neighborhoods. A new redistricting plan also could end the conservative majority’s 10 years of control of the board, leading to changes in spending for such county programs as health and welfare.

The plaintiffs, including the U.S. Justice Department, are seeking to consolidate Latino neighborhoods into a single district--from which a Latino would have an improved chance of winning a seat on the board.

If such a district is created, Supervisor Ed Edelman or Pete Schabarum could face a strong challenge in this spring’s election from a Latino, such as Councilman Richard Alatorre, who has expressed interest in running for the board. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, also plaintiffs, have asked the court to consider expanding the board by an unspecified number.

The plaintiffs contend that the all-white board split up Latino neighborhoods among three districts, thereby diluting Latino political strength in violation of the Voting Rights Act, guided through Congress by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 after a systematic denial of voting rights to blacks in the South.

Latinos account for 33% of the county’s 8.4 million population, but no Spanish-surnamed person has served on the county board since 1875.

In testimony last week, a Caltech political scientist hired by the plaintiffs to study county redistricting from 1959 to 1989 told U.S. District Judge David V. Kenyon that “anti-Hispanic gerrymandering in Los Angeles bears a good deal of resemblance to anti-black gerrymandering in the Deep South from Reconstruction on.”

Prof. J. Morgan Kousser testified that, since 1959, when then-Supervisor Ernest Debs narrowly defeated a Latino opponent, the 3rd district has been repeatedly moved north and west to take in white neighborhoods in the San Fernando Valley and West Los Angeles--while moving away from fast-growing Latino neighborhoods in East Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Valley.

The plaintiffs need only show the redistricting has the effect of discriminating against Latinos, though they are attempting to prove discriminatory intent to bolster their case.

Although seemingly out of place in a political trial, there has been testimony from a historian about lynchings of Mexican-Americans during the late 19th Century. Among the factors that can be considered in determining whether there has been a violation of the federal law is a history of discrimination against minorities.

The trial has revealed the inner workings of the county board, such as a closed-door meeting that took place in 1981 as the board was discussing the redistricting plan in public session.

The plaintiffs learned about the private meeting while taking a deposition from a former clerk to the supervisors before the trial. The private meeting was attended by two supervisors at a time--an apparent effort to circumvent a state law requiring that discussions involving three or more supervisors be conducted in public.

None of the supervisors, however, could recall their conversations in the private session.

Caltech’s Kousser noted wryly that after the supervisors appointed a commission to draft a redistricting plan and invested county money in a sophisticated computer redistricting operation, they ended up in a private meeting, drawing their own plan with one clerk calculating population changes on an adding machine and another clerk tracing lines on a map by hand.

The trial has revealed that the board’s conservative majority spent $18,000 in campaign funds for a political consultant to draw a redistricting plan that protected their interests.

“So what?” John McDermott, an attorney hired by the county, said when asked about the supervisors’ political motives.

“I’d like somebody to name for me a redistricting in the history of government that doesn’t involve politics,” he said. “It is essentially a political process.”

McDermott, whose firm has already received $1 million to defend the county, has denied allegations of discrimination, noting that the board’s conservative majority of Dana, Schabarum and Mike Antonovich in 1981 drafted a plan designed to help a Latino win election from liberal Supervisor Edelman’s district. The plan failed to get the four votes required for approval.

Edelman testified that he opposed the plan because a Latino group in 1981 sought to increase the Latino population in not only his district but in Schabarum’s district, too.

Edelman, however, said he did not push the plan advocated by the Latino group, Californios for Fair Representation, because he didn’t believe it would win board approval.