COLUMN RIGHT / XAVIER HERMOSILLO : Opportunity Missed on Eastside Turf : If the East L.A. liberals want a supervisor’s seat, they should go after Ed Edelman’s.

U.S. District Judge David V. Kenyon is correct in saying that the 115-year-old domination of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors by white males must be addressed and that Latinos and other ethnics be given the opportunity to have representation.

However, one major point in the discussion of the civil-rights lawsuit seems to have fallen into a black hole. While liberal elected officials concentrated primarily in the East Los Angeles area are asking that district lines be redrawn, and while their focus of attack has been the 1st District and its retiring king, Pete Schabarum, they have thus far cleverly deceived the media and the public.

Why are East Los Angeles politicians trying to break up the 1st District, which includes much of the San Gabriel Valley, when they could have challenged 3rd District Supervisor Ed Edelman in this week’s election?

Edelman’s district, which includes East Los Angeles, has the same percentage of Latinos as the 1st District (47%) but actually contains more Latino residents (888,611 to 874,804), according to figures published in The Times on Tuesday. Additionally, Edelman’s district even has fewer Anglos than the 1st District (605,879 to 732,809).

Could it be that what we have here is the same “good old boy” network with a new twist--entrenched East L.A. Latino politicians not wanting to rock the boat in their own back yard with Edelman? Does the old “Art Snyder syndrome” of an entrenched Anglo ruling the brown minority population still have to exist?

Shouldn’t Los Angeles City Council members Richard Alatorre and Gloria Molina and their supporters be rooting out the problem in their own turf before they come looking for political gold in the San Gabriel Valley?

An often-heard line at the news conferences following both the Kenyon court decision and the announcement of Schabarum’s retirement was “We (the Latino community) want to elect one of our own.” But when Sarah Flores, Schabarum’s former top deputy, was mentioned as being a possible winning candidate, they bristled.

Well, the people of the 1st District spoke loud and clear in Tuesday’s primary. They said they want to at least see a runoff in November between Flores and Schabarum’s choice, Superior Court Judge Gregory O’Brien.

I suggest that the people of the 1st District are also speaking to the traditional East L.A. political crowd and saying: “If you want a seat on the board, go after Ed Edelman because he represents the area with the most Latinos. Leave us alone. We don’t want you.”

This is not to say that many of us (I dare say probably most of us) in the Latino community don’t see the need for expanding the Board of Supervisors. Clearly, with the phenomenal growth that we’ve experienced, the addition of two or four new supervisors might be more efficient, though certainly costly to county government.

One thing, however, has become crystal clear. Those entrenched East L.A. politicians who clamor for rewriting the supervisorial lines, especially in the San Gabriel Valley communities of the 1st District, simply want ideological control of the board, nothing less. Otherwise, if all they wanted was any seat on the five-member panel, they would have gone after their crony Edelman.

Those of us (both Latino and non-Latino voters) who do not espouse the liberal beliefs of politicians such as Molina, Alatorre or Rep. Esteban E. Torres (D-La Puente) have for years elected more conservative people, including some Democrats, to office.

This year, many of us in the “other valley” at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains plan to do the same thing and make history at the same time by casting our votes in the November runoff for a fairly conservative woman and Latina--Sarah Flores.

This will prove, among other things, that a Latino can be elected from this district and that perhaps, a good part of the real problem before was not the color of one’s skin or the origin of one’s forefathers, but rather that an 18-year incumbent (Schabarum) with a couple of million dollars in his campaign chest was simply unbeatable.

Isn’t that another part of the reason some of these Eastside public servants didn’t take on Edelman? The answers for many of us are now rather obvious. Perhaps Judge Kenyon can see through the smoke screen and encourage the East L.A. crowd to run a candidate against Edelman . . . in four years.