Supervisors Face Increased Pressure to Expand Board : Redistricting: The number of seats has become a central issue in voting rights lawsuit. The suit alleges that boundaries drawn in 1981 prevented the election of a Latino.

Two high-backed leather chairs sit unoccupied whenever the five members of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors meet in chambers.

The chambers were equipped with extra chairs in 1961, Supervisor Kenneth Hahn recalled, because officials expected that the governing body in the rapidly growing county would be expanded someday.

But supervisors for years have resisted dilution of their power. And now that Los Angeles is the most populous county in the country, each supervisor represents about 1.7 million residents--more than twice the population of San Francisco.

Pressure, however, is mounting that could lead to board expansion--the most dramatic change in county government in more than a century.

A federal judge last month declared that the existing supervisorial districts are illegal because they “impair the ability of Hispanics to elect a candidate of their choice.”

Two plaintiffs in the lawsuit hope to persuade the judge to order expansion of the board to nine members.

And, although the board’s conservative majority has opposed expansion, conservative Supervisor Pete Schabarum recently indicated a willingness to reconsider his position and possibly provide the swing vote to enlarge the board by two seats.

The size of the Board of Supervisors has become a central issue in the voting rights lawsuit filed in 1988 by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the U.S. Justice Department. It alleges that the district boundaries drawn by the supervisors in 1981 prevented a Latino from being elected to the board.

U.S. District Judge David V. Kenyon ruled that the districts are “too large for any one person to adequately represent.” But he left it up to the supervisors to decide whether to remedy discrimination by expanding the board or redrawing the current five districts.

He is conducting hearings this week on a redistricting plan submitted by the county.

How well the supervisors represent their huge districts has been debated since expansion was first proposed in 1935.

The supervisors control a $10-billion budget and provide services to 8 1/2 million people--more than the population of 42 states.

“The board’s sweeping authority, the county’s enormous budget, the supervisors’ $94,344 yearly salary, with chauffeur-driven county automobile and the incumbent’s significant job security, have prompted the observation that the post of Los Angeles County supervisor is one of the most desirable political positions in the country,” a 1989 report by the California Commission on Campaign Financing says.

However, most residents simply do not understand the role of county government, the report says.

The job of a county supervisor in California has changed dramatically since 1912, when the primary task was “to assure the delivery of food to market by maintaining key roads with snow clearance during the winter and watering down the dirt roads in the dusty summer months,” said Hahn, a supervisor since 1952.

Today, county government affects anyone who ends up in court, calls the sheriff, uses a county hospital, spends the day at the beach, hears the symphony at the county-run Music Center, applies for welfare, complains about the accuracy of a supermarket scale, visits county-owned Marina del Rey or relies on a county flood control channel for protection from heavy winter rains.

The five-member board was created in 1852. During a three-year period in the early 1880s, it was expanded to seven members. Since 1885, the board has remained at five members, despite the county’s enormous population growth and the fact that it now covers 4,083 square miles.

In California, all 58 counties are governed by five-member boards except San Francisco, which has 11 supervisors who run the state’s only combined city-county government.

But the Los Angeles City Council has 15 members, each representing 200,000 people.

And Cook County, Ill., the nation’s second-largest county after Los Angeles County, has 15 commissioners. Each represented 353,193 people in 1986, about one-fifth as many as each Los Angeles County supervisor represented, according to J. Morgan Kousser, a Caltech history professor who prepared a report for plaintiffs in the current redistricting case.

Supervisor Mike Antonovich’s 2,615-square-mile district, stretching from Pasadena north to the Kern County line and west to Ventura County, is twice the size of Rhode Island. Antonovich said that representing such a large district is “no more difficult than the governor of California (being) able to govern the state.”

But the plaintiffs in the redistricting case have argued that the huge size of the districts makes it difficult for candidates--especially minorities and women--to challenge incumbent supervisors.

Judge Kenyon agreed, saying the five-district structure “clearly provides an advantage to incumbents and requires significant financial expenditures to run a successful campaign.”

In a supervisorial race where a candidate must reach 500,000 voters, substantial campaign funds must be raised, said Richard Fajardo, an attorney for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, a plaintiff in the redistricting case.

“If a candidate for supervisor wanted to walk door to door and spend 10 minutes with each constituent it would take him or her over 50 years,” the report by the California Commission on Campaign Financing says.

Expansion has been proposed since 1935, when a citizens commission said that a 15-member board would provide for better representation. But county voters rejected expansion proposals in 1962 and 1976. Since 1980, the present board has refused repeatedly to put the question back on the ballot. A proposal by Hahn to put the issue before voters again in November will come before the board July 31.

By expanding the board to nine members, Hahn said: “We can create a Hispanic district, an African-American district and an Asian district that will give a clear voice to these rapidly growing populations.”

Supervisors can approve expansion, without voter approval, to settle the voting rights case, according to county attorneys.

The board’s three-member conservative majority of Antonovich, Deane Dana and Pete Schabarum has publicly opposed expansion, contending that bigger is not better. They have argued that an enlarged board, with perks and staff for each of the additional supervisors, would increase taxpayer costs and would be less efficient.

Schabarum was prepared to join Supervisors Ed Edelman and Hahn in expanding the board to seven members to settle the redistricting case, the county said in legal papers. But the proposal was rejected by the plaintiffs because they claimed that the county plan fractured the Latino vote.

During a federal court hearing Monday, Schabarum testified that he was willing to consider expansion under certain conditions, including a guarantee that the county will not be required to pay for the plaintiffs’ legal bills of more than $2 million.

The two candidates seeking to succeed Schabarum, who is retiring, have vowed to put a board expansion proposal before the voters regardless of the outcome of the redistricting court case.

Richard B. Dixon, the county’s chief administrative officer, said that more supervisors would make the board more “ponderous and slow-moving.”

While the county’s population has grown, the power of supervisors has declined, Dixon said.

He cited the increasing number of cities in the county, from 45 in 1954 to 87 today.

When a neighborhood becomes a city, Dixon said, “the Board of Supervisors loses a great deal of its direct authority, loses land use planning, it loses the determination of who provides the services and at what level. And the people turn to their local city councilman.”

Supervisors also lost power, Dixon said, because of 1978 voter approval of Proposition 13, which took away their ability to raise property taxes.

The power of supervisors is also limited because the state mandates many services that the county must provide, Dixon noted.

The supervisors still wield considerable power. They have some latitude in deciding how much money goes to health and welfare programs or the sheriff. They award hundreds of millions of dollars in county contracts.