County Board Expansion Faces a Long, Tough Sell : Supervisors: Idea has been rejected twice by voters. Even those who favor it cannot agree on whether to try to add two or four members.

In making expansion of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors her first priority, Supervisor-elect Gloria Molina has taken up a troublesome political issue that has been defeated twice by voters and provokes disagreement, even among some supporters.

Fulfilling a campaign pledge, Molina said last week that adding two--and eventually four--supervisors to the five-member board will be her first goal on taking office March 8.

The Los Angeles city councilwoman has argued that more supervisors are needed to better represent the county’s 8.8 million residents, particularly minorities. Because Supervisors Ed Edelman and Kenneth Hahn have long supported board expansion, a three-vote majority will exist to put the question to the county’s voters.

Winning voters’ support for more government will not be easy, supporters concede.

“It’s going to require a lot of struggle and education,” Edelman said. “You’ve got to be careful exactly what you put on the ballot, because it’s going to be attacked.”

The issue of adding more supervisors to govern the county, and what areas those officials would serve, has prompted debate in several political camps. For instance:

* Conservatives have pledged to oppose such a ballot measure, saying more supervisors would add an unneeded layer of bureaucracy.

* The Mexican-American group that helped clear the way for Molina’s election has reservations about adding just two supervisors. Such an expansion might have the ironic and unintended effect of diluting the voting power of Latinos, according to a lawyer with the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Instead, the group leans toward an immediate four-seat expansion.

* A group of San Gabriel Valley cities plans to support the addition of two supervisors, but only if their region is placed under a single supervisor.

These competing voices could be heard well into next year, the next logical time to place board expansion on the ballot, said Richard Dixon, county chief administrative officer.

To hold an election earlier than in June or November of 1992 would cost at least $3 million, money that would be taken away from vital county services, Dixon said.

If voters were to approve board expansion next year, supervisorial elections would likely be held in the new districts in 1994, Dixon said.

History seems to be stacked against a larger Board of Supervisors.

The county has been represented by five supervisors for more than a century and, for almost that long, there has been talk of expansion. A citizens’ panel studied the proposal in 1935, but nothing came of it.

Voters rejected a 1962 proposal to add two board members and a 1976 ballot measure to add four. That one failed 65% to 35%.

Proponents say the county’s rapid growth has made the need for more supervisors more pressing. Population has more than tripled in the last half century, leaving each supervisor with more than 1.7 million constituents to represent.

Molina and others contend that this ratio is one reason the supervisors have fallen out of touch with large groups of voters, particularly the poor. She has said that the board should first expand to seven members and, with future population growth, to nine members.

Conservatives, such as Supervisor Mike Antonovich, said the voters’ mood is still against more government.

“The problem that we have is that any expansion of the board would make government bigger and more expensive, taking money out of mental health and fire and police services,” Antonovich said. “It means higher costs to the taxpayers.”

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

Even the supporters of board expansion have concerns about how it would be implemented.

Edelman wants expansion linked to a proposal to make the county’s chief administrative officer an elected official. Edelman has said the chief administrator has so much power to direct policy that the post should be accountable to voters, not appointed by the supervisors.

Also, MALDEF will have its own agenda in a discussion of board expansion.

The organization represented plaintiffs in the federal voting rights lawsuit last year that created the 1st District Molina was elected to represent. The Latino-majority district was drawn after a federal judge found that the old boundaries unfairly diluted the voting power of Latinos.

MALDEF attorney Richard P. Fajardo said maps drawn during the federal court case showed that seven supervisorial districts would include just one majority Latino district, meaning Latinos would be able to control one-seventh of the board’s seats, instead of one-fifth.

The creation of nine districts would give Latinos two solid districts in which to elect candidates of their choice, he said.

Fajardo added that making the expansion in two steps might not be realistic. It will be troublesome enough to get voters to approve one board expansion, he said.

“We don’t want expansion to dilute the accomplishments we have already made through the court system,” Fajardo said. “Having gained a voice for the Hispanic community, you don’t want to dilute that voice. . . . Our first choice would be a nine-member board.”

Molina said last week that she had not heard the objections to seven districts.

She also said: “I didn’t talk about augmenting the board just to create another Hispanic seat. It was the idea of providing better representation for all the people in the county.”

Molina added that she will talk to MALDEF and other groups before making a proposal for board expansion.

Another group that will weigh into the debate is the San Gabriel Valley Assn. of Cities. As of last week, 24 of the 31 cities in the organization had each contributed $500 to hire a demographics expert to create new political maps of the county.

San Dimas Mayor Terry Dipple, chairman of the association’s committee on redistricting, complained that the current map “carved the valley into three districts. We feel we are losing our clout.”

The area had been represented almost entirely by retiring Supervisor Pete Schabarum, but will be divided among Molina, Antonovich and Supervisor Deane Dana. Dipple predicted that as a result, the San Gabriel Valley will be less effective on such issues as fighting landfill expansions because those supervisors will give most of their attention to other parts of their districts.

Expansion to nine board members would be more difficult to push past voters, Dipple said, so the San Gabriel Valley cities told their demographer to draw maps with seven districts.

Staff writer Richard Simon contributed to this report.