Latino Vote Activists Zero In on County : Representation: Attorneys say an Oxnard school district might be the first agency to be sued over at-large elections.

In an effort to enhance Latino political power, voting-rights attorneys are considering federal lawsuits to force as many as 10 city councils and school boards in Ventura County to change the way their members are elected.

Latino lawyers are tracing voting patterns in cities across California to demonstrate that the widely practiced system of electing candidates citywide dilutes minority voting strength.

They want city councils and school boards to abandon this at-large system of voting by dividing jurisdictions into separate, single-member districts so that neighborhoods with a concentration of minorities could elect their own representative.

After a string of legal victories in central California and in Los Angeles County, the attorneys have targeted 68 municipalities and school boards in the state that might qualify for the next round of court challenges under the U.S. Voting Rights Act.

Although the attorneys generally decline to name their targets, they acknowledge that the Oxnard Elementary School District might be the first to be sued. The Oxnard Elementary District has no Latinos on its five-member school board despite a 70.9% Latino student enrollment. Only one Latino has ever been elected to the board.

“Initially, we are going after the ones that have the most severe degree of under-representation,” said Joaquin Avila, a Milpitas attorney who specializes in voting-rights lawsuits.

“For Ventura County, we are looking at at least two school districts and the rest of them are cities,” Avila said. “We are just about ready to go forward with one in Ventura County, possibly within three to four weeks.”

For Latino leaders, forcing the switch to single-member districts is the first step to correct what they view as a growing imbalance: Latinos compose 27% of California’s population, yet hold only 5% of the state’s elective offices.

In Ventura County, all 10 cities and 20 school boards elect members at large. Only three Latinos hold council seats, and 12 Latinos sit on school boards in the county.

“We have a problem with democracy here,” said Carmen Ramirez, director of the Channel Counties Legal Services Assn. in Oxnard. “If all of the people serving on the City Council live in the same neighborhood, they don’t have to worry about crime in La Colonia, police problems, poor schools or potholes.”

Latino leaders also believe that single-member districts will begin to reverse a historic trend of low Latino voter registration and participation. Only when Latinos can win local office, they say, will their communities get more involved in politics at all levels.

“Before you can talk about a statewide Latino movement, you have to start at the local level,” Avila said. “The 1990s will be the decade of Latino empowerment in California.”

A number of Anglo politicians believe that single-member districts are useful in large jurisdictions with diverse populations. The Ventura County Board of Supervisors, for instance, makes good use of single-member districts, they say.

But some politicians in Ventura County say small cities and school districts do not need single-member districts because each officeholder is easily accountable to all the voters.

Furthermore, they maintain that single-member districts could lead to Chicago-style ward politics, with council or school board members looking out only for the parochial interests of their districts at the expense of the entire city or school system.

“The idea of providing the best education for students would be replaced by special interests and political infighting and political deals,” said Jack Fowler, president of the Oxnard Elementary School Board.

Fowler, often criticized by Latinos as insensitive to non-English speakers, said he has expected a voting-rights lawsuit since Latinos won a precedent-setting case in Watsonville last year. He said he would oppose such an effort because “the quality of candidates would diminish markedly” and “in the long run it will lead to bad government.”

For the time being, about 95% of California’s 444 cities with city councils choose their members in at-large elections. About 96% of the state’s 1,028 school boards select their members at large.

Until now, California has not pursued federal voting-rights cases, such as those that have changed the complexion of city councils, school boards and judiciaries across the southern United States.

Attorneys in California have filed only a handful of cases, including the one that forced the Watsonville City Council to create single-member districts. More recently, civil rights lawyers persuaded a judge to approve a Latino-majority supervisorial district in Los Angeles County. The Board of Supervisors hadn’t had a Latino member since 1875. The case is on appeal.

For decades, civil rights lawyers, often aided by the Justice Department, used the U.S. Voting Rights Act in the Deep South to change election systems deemed discriminatory against blacks.

In 1982, Congress renewed the Voting Rights Act and lowered the legal burden of proof. Before 1982, voting-rights attorneys had to prove that an at-large system was created with the intent to discriminate against minorities. Now, they have to prove only that the system has a discriminatory effect, regardless of intent.

That law change brought a new wave of voting-rights lawsuits in Southwestern and Midwestern states. In Texas, Latino activists have forced more than 100 cities and school boards to hold district elections.

“California has a reputation as a liberal state,” said Richard Martinez, executive director of the Southwest Voter Registration/Education Project. “That frame of mind was a very powerful factor in keeping people from taking a hard look at reality.”

Last year, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that Watsonville had to change to single-member districts, thus implanting Texas rules in California and other Western states under the court’s jurisdiction.

Under the law, federal courts must mandate single-member districts in places shown to have racially polarized voting: where minority candidates have fared worse in Anglo areas than in Latino areas and where Anglos have traditionally voted solidly against Latino candidates.

The courts also require that district lines be drawn around geographically compact areas with similar interests.

Avila and other voting-rights attorneys said they have focused on Ventura County because it has a substantial number of Latinos, about one in four residents, who lack representation in local government.

In some cities, such as Fillmore, Latinos make up the majority of residents and still fail to elect Latino representatives because large sections of the Latino community do not vote.

Latino leaders believe that creating single-member districts will prime the pump of Latino voter participation. They say that more Latinos will register to vote and make it to the polls when they believe they can elect their own neighborhood representatives.

“In Texas, there were jurisdictions that were 80% or 90% Hispanic and never voted an Hispanic into office,” said Richard P. Fajardo, staff attorney for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF). “They broke up into districts, and things changed pretty drastically.”

Fajardo said, “Places like Fillmore are going to be prime targets for these kinds of cases.” Latinos make up an estimated 59% of Fillmore’s 11,600 population yet have no Latino on the council or school board.

In 1986, the City Council inflamed the Latino community by formally endorsing a statewide proposition supporting English as the state’s official language. But Latinos in Fillmore were dealt two setbacks in a row.

They failed to mount successful recall campaigns against three council members who supported the English-only resolution. Then, in 1988, three Latinos who ran for council were defeated by Anglo candidates. In this year’s election, no Latinos are vying for office.

“It’s very frustrating,” said Ernest J. Morales, former mayor of Fillmore, who was one of the three Latinos defeated in 1988. He said the Latino community has all but given up. “The view is there were three good candidates last time, and they didn’t make it. Why should I knock my head against the wall and not get anything out of it?”

The political potential of dividing cities into districts has captured the imagination of many Latino leaders in Ventura County, who have formed a group, Latinos for Fair Representation. The group has held several public forums to generate wider interest in voting-rights issues.

Latino activists hope that many cities and school boards will opt for district elections rather than face a lengthy and costly court battle. For example, the cities of San Diego, Pomona, Redlands and Salinas initiated single-member districts on their own after threats of lawsuits, Martinez said.

Voting-rights lawyers believe that the Los Angeles County case will persuade other county boards of supervisors to make sure their supervisorial district boundaries are drawn fairly and do not dilute minority voting strength.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors spent $3 million to defend the configuration of its districts and failed to persuade the judge that they were drawn fairly, Fajardo said.

“A number of jurisdictions are going to look at the Los Angeles County case and realize how expensive lawsuits are,” Fajardo said. “They will realize that they can delay the inevitable but not beat it.”

The Ventura County Board of Supervisors already has single-member districts, which are reconfigured every decade to reflect shifts in population documented by the U.S. Census.

Next year, MALDEF and the Southwest Voter Registration/Education Project plan to watch how supervisors in Ventura County and other counties in the state redraw their district boundaries.

“During 1991, we will be monitoring what the county supervisors do and will draw our own district lines with the help of local Latino leadership,” Martinez said.

To reflect the rapid growth in eastern Ventura County, the supervisors redrew district lines twice during the 1980s, once in 1981 and again in 1986. Although figures are unavailable, the 5th Supervisorial District centered in Oxnard emerged in 1986 with a heavy concentration of Latinos.

Supervisor John Flynn, who represents the district, said he pushed for redistricting in 1986 because he wanted to replace Port Hueneme in his district with the Latino neighborhood of La Colonia. “I wanted my district to reflect a community of interest,” he said.

But others ascribe political motivations, such as cutting Port Hueneme Mayor Dorill B. Wright out of Flynn’s district. Wright challenged Flynn for the seat in 1980 and narrowly lost.

Wright said Port Hueneme is now stuck in the 2nd Supervisorial District dominated by east county cities that have little in common with his city. But he declined to comment on why Flynn severed Port Hueneme from his district. “A quote of that nature from me can only destroy relationships that are already stretched to the limits,” he said.

Other than the 10 targets in Ventura County, Avila’s list of potential voting-rights violators includes 20 jurisdictions in Los Angeles County, six in Tulare County, five in both Riverside and Fresno counties, four in both Kern and Imperial counties, three in San Bernardino County, two each in San Diego, Santa Clara and San Benito counties and one in each of the counties of Orange, Monterey, King, Stanislaus and Yolo.

“We don’t publicize these cities and school districts,” said Avila, former president of MALDEF. “I don’t want to needlessly alarm jurisdictions or unnecessarily raise the expectations of Latino communities.”

Avila has paralegals doing research in these cases, loading information such as precinct voting records into a computer. The computer software has the ability to sort out Spanish surnames and spit out areas that meet legal requirements for a court challenge.

After several months of research, he said, his team is close to launching two cases, one in Ventura County, the other in Tulare County.

Times staff writer Psyche Pascual contributed to this story.

LATINO CITY COUNCIL MEMBERS

Estimated Population for 1990

Latinos on City Total Pop. Latino Pop. (%) city council Santa Paula 24,490 15,306 (62.5%) 1 of 5 Alfonso Urias Fillmore 11,656 6,882 (59%) 0 of 5 Oxnard 130,210 66,439 (51%) 1 of 5 Manuel Lopez Moorpark* 26,059 10,267 (39.4%) 1 of 5 Bernardo Perez Port Hueneme 21,177 6,271 (29.6%) 0 of 5 Ventura 87,404 15,056 (17.2%) 0 of 7 Camarillo 49,400 6,329 (12.8%) 0 of 5 Simi Valley 105,021 11,412 (10.9%) 0 of 5 Ojai 7,770 808 (10.4%) 0 of 5 Thousand Oaks 95,659 6,716 (7%) 0 of 5 Ventura County 678,031 173,257 (25.6%) 0 of 5 Supervisors

* Includes State Dept. of Finance, Ventura County Planning Dept.

Source: National Planning Data Corp.

LATINO SCHOOL BOARD MEMBERS

Latino enrollment and Latino board members in Ventura County’s 20 school districts:

% Latino Latinos on School district enrollment school board Santa Paula Elementary 71.3% 2 of 5 members Joe Bravo, Robert Gonzales Santa Paula Union High 71.1% 2 of 5 Victor Salas, Al Sandoval Briggs Elementary 71% 1 of 5 Sixtos Galvan Oxnard Elementary 70.9% 0 of 5 Rio Elementary 69.7% 2 of 5 Ernest J. Almanza, Frances Chacon Fillmore Unified 69.2% 0 of 5 Ocean View Elementary 50.6% 0 of 5 Hueneme Elementary 49.4% 1 of 5 Jesus P. Cirino Oxnard Union High 48.4% 0 of 5 Somis Union Elementary 42.8% 1 of 5 Miguel Mejia Mupu Elementary 38.1% 0 of 3 Mesa Union Elementary 32.7% 0 of 3 Moorpark Unified 27% 1 of 3 Pamela Castro Santa Clara Elementary 25.8% 0 of 3 Ventura Unified 22.5% 1 of 5 Vincent Ruiz Pleasant Valley Elementary 15.7% 1 of 5 Maria C. Tejada Ojai Unified 15% 0 of 5 Simi Valley Unified 11.7% 0 of 5 Conejo Valley Unified 8.2% 0 of 5 Oak Park Unified 3.4% 0 of 5

Source: State Dept. of Education, Ventura County Superintendent of Schools