Ending the Political Shame of L.A. : * The Vital, Historic Ruling on Board of Supervisors

For the suspiciously long time of 115 years, no Spanish-surnamed person, African-American or Asian-American has ever been elected to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

Now a federal judge has said that this exclusionary pattern is no accident, that the board did indeed illegally discriminate against Latinos by gerrymandering political districts and that this wholly unacceptable situation has to change.

And so, in the ruling Monday (Garza vs. County of Los Angeles) that strikes a powerful blow for fairness--a blow that could reverberate in every city, county and state with a significant Latino population--U.S. District Judge David V. Kenyon has ordered up a new chapter in this region’s political history.

The language in the ruling handed down by Judge Kenyon was unambiguous. It utterly validated the arguments made by attorneys for the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union and the U.S. Justice Department. They presented overwhelming evidence that the district lines the supervisors themselves drew in 1981 were designed to obstruct, not promote, representative government.

Kenyon ruled that to protect their own incumbency, the five men on the board carved up a geographically compact Latino community, thereby denying Los Angeles County’s largest ethnic minority “an equal opportunity to participate in the political process and to elect candidates of their choice . . . .”

That kind of racial or ethnic gerrymandering is illegal under federal law and is as offensive as poll taxes, literacy tests and the other racist tactics that all-white governments used to discourage African- Americans from voting during the worst days of segregation in the Deep South.

And so now the county board and its attorneys have got to go back to the drawing board and comply with Kenyon’s ruling. The judge wisely and explicitly gave them that option--stating in his ruling that it is “appropriate” to give the board “a reasonable opportunity to meet constitutional requirements” by finding non-discriminatory ways of reapportioning their districts.

For its part, the Board of Supervisors, which already has spent an unconscionable $3 million in taxpayer dollars defending the self-serving status quo, must give up any thought of appealing the decision.

Instead, the supervisors should dust off plans to increase the size of the county board so it will be less difficult not just for Latinos, but for African-Americans and Asian-Americans to elect members of their communities to what is among the most powerful local government bodies in the nation (the board serves 8.5 million, a population greater than those of 42 states).

A larger board would benefit not just minorities in Los Angeles County, but everyone who finds the current outdated structure unresponsive. To their credit, a minority on the board, Supervisors Kenneth Hahn and Edmund D. Edelman, have long argued for expanding the board as a means of settling the lawsuit out of court. Their pleas went unheeded.

It’s true that voters in the past have rejected an expanded board, no doubt in part because of the added cost of creating additional seats.

But voters now might look more kindly on that reasonable option. A political structure that keeps Latinos and others from the table of county government is costly in ways that dollars and cents can’t even begin to measure. The situation has been the shame of Los Angeles, and it’s long past time for a change.