Picketing of Homes Prohibited : Protests: The ban by supervisors applies only to unincorporated areas. Board members fear pickets at their residences and hope cities will follow their lead.

Facing the possibility of protests in front of their homes by Los Angeles County employees who do not want to lose their free parking privileges, the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday passed a law that prohibits picketing of “private residences.”

The urgency ordinance, which took effect immediately, applies only to unincorporated areas of the county--where none of the five supervisors or Chief Administrative Officer Richard Dixon live. But county officials said they hope that local cities will follow their lead and outlaw the picketing of homes.

The board approved the measure 4-0 without discussion. Supervisor Pete Schabarum was absent.

County officials said they proposed the ordinance after members of Local 660 of the Service Employees International Union threatened to march in front of the supervisors’ homes to protest a proposal that county employees who work in the Civic Center pay for parking.

The parking fees are part of a traffic-reduction plan the county submitted this year to the South Coast Air Quality Management District.

Union officials have argued for several weeks against the proposal--which they said could cost clerical workers as much as $1,400 a year--but they denied threatening to picket homes of county officials.

“But if we want to do that, we believe that it is our right to do so. This ordinance certainly won’t stop us,” said Local 660 general manager Sharon Grimpe Correll.

She noted that Local 660 picketed Dixon’s Burbank home in January in a dispute over fringe benefits.

Union lawyers will consider challenging the new ordinance as a violation of constitutional rights to free speech and public assembly, Correll said.

But the county counsel’s office said a U.S. Supreme Court decision allows prohibitions against the picketing of homes. In 1988, the high court upheld a Wisconsin town’s ordinance that made it “unlawful for any person to engage in picketing before or about the residence or dwelling of any individual.”

In a case stemming from protests outside an abortion doctor’s home, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote that “there is simply no right to force speech into the home of an unwilling listener.”

A picketing ordinance previously was discussed by the supervisors because of protests but never voted on, said Frederick R. Bennett, assistant county counsel.

In 1987, about 200 people marched in front of Supervisor Mike Antonovich’s home in Glendale to demand hospice care for dying AIDS patients. A year earlier, 150 animal-rights activists marched in front of Supervisor Ed Edelman’s Westwood home in an attempt to prevent the county Department of Animal Care and Control from selling some shelter animals to researchers.