City Hires Attorney to Fight Voting Rights Suit : Oxnard: Officials say defense costs may exceed $100,000. The lawyer unsuccessfully represented Los Angeles County in a similar case.

The Oxnard City Council has hired a high-priced attorney to defend the city against a voting-rights lawsuit that seeks to place more minorities on the council.

Meeting in a closed-door session this week, the council decided to hire Los Angeles attorney John E. McDermott, who unsuccessfully defended the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in a similar lawsuit last year.

“It will be very expensive, maybe more than $100,000,” Oxnard City Atty. Gary Gillig said.

The decision comes at a difficult financial time for the City Council, which last month cut most of its social programs, laid off a few workers and closed restrooms in public parks to make up a projected $5-million deficit over the next two years.

The hiring of McDermott, a leading defender of at-large election systems such as Oxnard’s, indicates that the council is concerned about a lawsuit filed by an unsuccessful mayoral candidate to carve the city into four council districts.

Latino activists and voting-rights attorneys contend that at-large election systems tend to dilute minority voting strength. Only when Latino neighborhoods are able to vote for their own representatives will more Latinos get elected to public office, they say.

Incumbents and other opponents argue that cutting smaller cities into districts leads to pork-barrel politics and poor overall representation because, they say, elected officials favor the interests of their districts at the expense of the entire city.

The case against Oxnard was filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles last year by Juan Soria, who ran for mayor in November. Last week, Judge Manuel Real set a trial date for June 18.

The lawsuit against Oxnard is the first districting case in Ventura County. Similar cases filed elsewhere in the state have brought expensive defense attorney bills.

In a 1989 landmark case, the city of Watsonville in Northern California spent $2 million to defend itself and lost, Gillig said.

Los Angeles County spent more than $6 million in its redistricting case, including $4.6 million in legal fees and expenses on the team headed by McDermott, who was paid $290 an hour.

Soria said his lawsuit has cost him about $45,000 so far.

McDermott, a senior litigator for the 300-lawyer firm of Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, failed in his attempt to fend off the redistricting drive in Los Angeles County, which led to the election of the first Latino supervisor in Los Angeles County this century.

But McDermott was victorious in defeating voting-rights suits brought against Pomona, Stockton and Chula Vista.

McDermott declined to speculate Thursday on the outcome of the case against Oxnard until he has had a chance to review it.

Oxnard has one elected Latino councilman, Manuel Lopez; an Asian mayor, Nao Takasugi, and Latina City Clerk Mabi Plisky, the wife of Councilman Michael Plisky. According to the 1990 census figures, Oxnard is 44.4% Latino, 42.9% white, 6.1% Asian, 6.1% black and 0.9% American Indian.

Council members live in mostly white, affluent areas of the city--Dorothy Maron, Plisky and Manuel Lopez in northwest Oxnard, and Takasugi and Gerry Furr in southern neighborhoods near the beach.

Council members said they are willing to settle the case with a compromise to avoid the costs of a protracted legal battle. They said they would accept a system by which council members are picked from districts, but elected by the entire population.

But Soria said such a compromise is unacceptable because minority candidates typically lack the money to campaign citywide. “Their offer will never be accepted,” he said.

If the compromise were accepted, council members could easily take up residence in minority districts and continue running the city, Soria said. “They are just looking for ways to stay in power.”

But council members say they object to district-by-district elections because they have the city’s best interests at heart.

“When things are important for the governing of the city, you have to fight for them,” Councilwoman Maron said. “On any scale, how we vote for our officials is very important for the city.”

District elections would hurt a city the size of Oxnard, Maron said. Of California’s 444 cities, all but about two dozen have at-large elections. Los Angeles and San Francisco are among the exceptions.

Takasugi said he doubts that district elections would increase minority representation. “If the objective is to increase Latino representation, districting is not the way to go about it,” he said. “If the community gets behind a viable candidate, it can raise sufficient funds and put somebody on the council every two years.”