$6 Million Spent by County in Voting Case : Lawsuit: The legal bill in the losing battle will rise because plaintiffs’ costs must be paid. Supervisors defend the expense.

Los Angeles County supervisors hired seven private law firms and spent at least $6 million in fighting the voting-rights lawsuit that paved the way for today’s historic election that is expected to place a Latino on the board.

The bill is likely to grow by several million dollars because the county is required to pay the legal costs of the victorious plaintiffs.

A review of the county’s costs to date shows that $4.8 million went to private lawyers who received up to $375 an hour during the 2 1/2-year legal battle.

County attorneys and supervisors said the costs were necessary and reasonable in light of the great importance of the case and the complexity of the litigation.

“It was a necessary fight,” said board Chairman Mike Antonovich, noting that the board was accused of intentionally discriminating against Latinos in drawing district boundaries in 1981. “All five supervisors agreed that we did not do anything wrong.”

In addition to hiring private attorneys to help the county legal staff, the board’s conservative majority and the liberal minority each had their own legal counsel paid by the county.

The legal expenses ranged from photocopying to rental of a truck to haul legal documents to court during the trial. The county costs also included lodging for trial witnesses in Los Angeles and travel expenses for attorneys and supervisors who attended federal appellate court hearings in San Francisco.

One of the county’s redistricting experts, UCLA professor William Clark, was paid $192,430 for “demographic analysis,” according to county records. A number of other consultants were paid to study whether Latinos voted as a bloc and other issues.

The figures--which are not final--were contained in a summary of billings provided by the county in response to a state Public Records Act request filed by The Times.

The U.S. Supreme Court earlier this month let stand a lower court ruling that the all-Anglo board had discriminated against Latinos in drawing district boundaries.

The decision allowed today’s election in a redrawn 1st District to go forward. With four prominent Latinos in the race--Los Angeles City Councilwoman Gloria Molina, state Sens. Charles Calderon and Art Torres, and Sarah Flores, a former aide to Supervisor Pete Schabarum--the election is expected to place the first Latino on the board in 115 years.

If no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote--a likely outcome with nine candidates in the race--the top two vote-getters will face off Feb. 19.

Two plaintiffs--the American Civil Liberties Union and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund--still are calculating their expenses, but a spokesman for both groups earlier projected the bill would exceed $2 million. The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, as an intervenor, also is entitled to attorneys’ fees but could not provide an estimate.

The U.S. Justice Department, a plaintiff, spent about $2 million on the case, making it the longest and most expensive voting-rights case brought by the civil rights division, said John R. Dunne, assistant attorney general for civil rights in Washington.

The federal government--which assigned 12 attorneys to the case and rented an office in downtown Los Angeles during the three-month trial--cannot seek to recover attorneys’ fees. But the Justice Department is permitted to recover the $300,000 cost of copying hundreds of thousands of pages of depositions, exhibits and transcripts of the trial proceedings.

A hearing will be scheduled before federal Judge David V. Kenyon to decide how much the county should be required to pay the plaintiffs. The county can dispute some of the costs.

While the county hired seven law firms, the bulk of the billings came from a legal team headed by John McDermott that received $4.6 million in fees and expenses.

McDermott declined comment other than to say, “This was a big case with lots of witnesses, lots of analysis, lots of documents. We did what was necessary to do a first-class job on it.” McDermott, who received $290 an hour, first represented the county as a member of McDermott, Will & Emery. Then he moved to Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft and continued to work with attorneys from both firms.

A review of the county costs shows that the board’s conservative majority of Antonovich, Deane Dana and Pete Schabarum and the liberal minority of Ed Edelman and Kenneth Hahn each had private attorneys paid from public funds.

Taxpayers also paid $7,428 to hire an attorney to press Schabarum’s unsuccessful legal claim that he should be allowed to intervene as a Latino elected official. Schabarum’s grandmother was Mexican.

The preliminary figures do not include $500,000 that the board’s conservative majority voted to pay to a law firm during a closed-door session. The funds were designed to allow Schabarum, even after retiring, to fight the redistricting case to the Supreme Court if the board dropped its legal appeal.

The money was returned with interest to the county the same day that the Supreme Court denied the county’s appeal, officials said.

The county’s current $6-million figure does not include the salaries paid to the county’s own attorneys who worked on the case. No estimate was available.

The legal battle came at a time when county services have been cut for fiscal reasons.

For example, the supervisors a few months ago refused to allocate $500,000 to reduce the 21-week wait for first-time AIDS patients at county hospitals. The supervisors also balked at spending $2 million to keep homeless shelters open every night during winter.

The county’s redistricting costs have been paid through a $36-million fund set aside each year by the supervisors for legal expenses, including settlement of lawsuits. There is $12 million left in the fund.

When all the county’s bills are finally submitted and plaintiffs’ fees are awarded, the redistricting case may rival or surpass the county’s costliest litigation--$13.8 million spent to fight lawsuits brought by owners of property damaged in Malibu’s Big Rock Mesa landslide in 1983.

One of the biggest expenses in the redistricting case, after attorneys’ fees, was photocopying of the hundreds of thousands of pages of depositions and exhibits. About 160 people were deposed.

Antonovich said that the case raised important legal issues. Supervisors maintained that district boundaries should be based on total number of voters, rather than population.

“Counting illegals gives certain areas more political power and disenfranchises the citizens of this county,” Antonovich said.

He pointed out that the new 1st District has more than 300,000 voters, “whereas my district has nearly 900,000 voters, and that is not fair.”

ELECTION DAY

Voters in the 1st Supervisorial District will go to the polls today in a historic election that is expected to give Los Angeles County its first Latino supervisor in this century. Polls are open from 7 a.m. until 8 p.m. Voters who want polling place information or have other questions may call the county registrar of voters at (213) 727-1900 or (800) 325-0918.