Walkout Mars Council Session on Redistricting : Politics: Four members of the divided council walk out of a closed meeting, citing a warning by the city attorney that the session should be held in public.

Widening a growing breach over redistricting, four San Diego City Council members walked out of a closed session in which the subject was discussed Tuesday, while their five colleagues waded into murky legal waters by calling for two special meetings next month.

Tuesday’s developments deepened the two council factions’ divisions over the volatile redistricting question, prompting accusations of grandstanding and law violations as procedural maneuvering continued to dominate the increasingly bitter debate.

In addition, the council majority’s request for special Aug. 13 and 27 meetings to decide between two competing plans for new district boundaries dramatically raised the legal stakes in the controversy, which has careened between City Hall and federal courtrooms for the past week.

Calling the action a “clear, conscious violation” of a U.S. magistrate’s order directing the council not to proceed with the redistricting plan until next week, attorneys for the Chicano Federation of San Diego County said they intend to seek a contempt citation against the city today in U.S. District Court.

“The council has ratcheted this thing up and created a confrontation with the court,” said Michael Aguirre, who filed the group’s 1988 lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the city’s electoral system. “They’ve ventured out on a very precarious limb.”

But the city attorneys who will have to defend the council majority’s decision argued late Tuesday that the prospect of yet another court hearing simply underlines the fact that Magistrate Harry McCue’s order is subject to differing interpretations.

“There are two ways of looking at this, and the question of which is correct is something only a judge can answer,” said Jack Katz, a senior chief deputy city attorney.

As with most of the critical chapters in the redistricting battle, both of Tuesday’s developments blended political realities with legal constraints, causing the principals to weigh their desires against the sometimes blurry guidelines governing what is permissible.

Sharply focusing that conflict, the request for the two special August meetings could help to clarify how severely McCue’s order last week has curtailed the council’s prerogative in redrawing its eight districts’ lines. In that order, McCue barred the council from proceeding this week, as planned, toward formal adoption of a redistricting plan that has drawn strong criticism from Latino activists, some community leaders and several council members since its tentative approval by the council last week.

Beyond postponing council action, McCue’s order also warns that, unless the council reverses itself and approves an alternative redistricting map developed by a citizens’ advisory board, further court review of the plan is a certainty.

Preferring a strict interpretation of McCue’s order, the Chicano Federation attorneys emphasize that the magistrate’s ruling directed the council to “not proceed in any way regarding the redistricting” until July 23.

“The council has done something the judge expressly told it not to do, and once again it’s done it through secret decision-making late in the day,” Aguirre said. “To me, it’s a clear, deliberate violation. The judge said do nothing until the 23rd. By their action, they’ve disobeyed that order.”

However, city attorney Katz, outlining the city’s possible defense, argued that any judicial decision on the propriety of the council’s actions Tuesday will turn on a semantical interpretation of McCue’s order.

“The council still hasn’t done anything in terms of approving a redistricting plan,” Katz said. “The question is whether even calling for hearings is doing something in respect to redistricting.”

Tuesday’s scheduling of the two special August hearings stemmed from a discussion that began Monday when several council members publicly broached the idea of holding several meetings on the redistricting plans, arguing that doing so would provide an opportunity for greater public input that seemed to be in keeping with the spirit of McCue’s order. But, with Mayor O’Connor and others questioning whether action on any such hearings would violate the letter of McCue’s order, the proposal was rejected.

Nevertheless, the idea was revived in Tuesday’s closed session, in which an earlier teleconference among attorneys in the case also was discussed. Although City Atty. John Witt said that the idea’s legality was never specifically addressed, he and other city attorneys advised the council that, because the issue dealt with the council’s schedule, it should be discussed publicly, not privately.

It was that advice that prompted O’Connor and the three other council members--Ron Roberts, Bruce Henderson and Judy McCarty--who voted against the redistricting map conceptually approved last week--to walk out of the closed-door hearing.

Although the four pointed to the attorneys’ admonition in defending their walkout, the five who remained behind--and who supported last week’s map--denounced their colleagues’ action as a public-relations stunt having less to do with legalities than with trying to embarrass the council’s majority.

“It was just more cheap political theatrics,” said Councilman Wes Pratt. “The whole thing was contrived to make one side look good and the other side look bad.”

O’Connor, however, argued that the city attorneys’ cautions seemed to militate against continuation of the private hearing, both because of concerns that it should be held in public and questions over whether it might violate McCue’s order.

“When the attorneys say, ‘We’re getting into areas we shouldn’t,’ I’m going to listen,” O’Connor said.

“This wasn’t a set-up deal at all,” Roberts added. “It was like a fire alarm that four people heard and reacted to.”

Regardless of its motive, the walkout reinforced the mutual suspicions and antagonism that have developed between the council’s two factions since they began grappling with the thorny decennial task of redrawing district boundaries--a matter that directly affects each member’s political future.

Among other things, the plan passed last week dilutes the Latino population of a Latino-majority 8th District from the advisory board’s proposed 52.2% to at most 51%, and perhaps lower. The plan, offered by Councilman John Hartley, also would dramatically alter the configuration of a number of other districts and, by some estimates, would change council representation for up to 300,000 San Diegans.

But the advisory board’s proposed map also has been criticized as tilting toward pro-growth Republicans and establishing boundaries that exclude the new or planned homes of two council members from their respective districts. Moreover, while the panel’s membership was ethnically diverse, its critics have charged that conservative activists dominated its proceedings.

“I can’t understand how an advisory board run by some political consultants and land-use lawyers has come to be seen as having almost God-like qualities,” lamented Councilman Bob Filner, whose 8th District is a pivotal factor in the overall debate.

“The other side’s really been winning the public-relations battle,” added Councilwoman Linda Bernhardt, who also supported Hartley’s proposal. Councilwoman Abbey Wolfsheimer provided the fifth vote for that plan last week.

The redistricting debate has been complicated further by the city’s settlement of the Chicano Federation’s lawsuit, under which the city agreed to establish the redistricting advisory board and to provide minority groups a meaningful voice in the process of drawing the new boundaries. By rejecting the advisory board’s plan last week in favor of Hartley’s proposal, only hours after the latter was publicized, the council violated that agreement, the Latino group’s attorneys contend--an argument that resulted in McCue’s intervention.

Undeterred by the prospect of Aguirre’s threatened contempt request, Filner said he does not believe that McCue or any judge will fault the council for scheduling additional public hearings on such a critical issue.

“This schedule just allows for public input as requested in the court order,” Filner said.

Disagreeing, Aguirre half-facetiously referred to Filner’s history as a Freedom Rider who was jailed for his participation in 1960s civil rights protests in the South in describing the possible consequences of Tuesday’s council action.

“It looks like Bob will get a chance to be jailed twice for the Civil Rights Act--once for what he did for it, and once for what he did against it,” Aguirre said.