There’s More to Power Than Votes--Latinos Should Ask Pete Schabarum : Politics: By carefully cultivating developers in her new district, Gloria Molina can use surplus campaign money to fund populist causes.

More and more Latinos are being elected to political office. But their steadily increasing electoral successes are not paralleled by social and economic improvements in the Latino communities they represent. The reason is that the political process has not provided Latino legislators with the necessary resources to make a significant difference. As a result, too many Latinos continue to subsist on the economic margins.

That’s one reason why organizations such as the National Assn. of Latino Elected Officials, meeting later this week in Anaheim, should not be lulled by the demographic game--that numbers alone ensure a better future for Latinos. Many of the proposals for empowerment advanced by Latino elites overlook an essential point--local power grows out of political control over redistricting and over developing economic assets. The issue is how economic inequality is perpetuated through political boundaries.

Few Latino elected officials have assessed their hard-won victories in economic terms. “I think that the majority of Latino constituencies are working class and low income,” says Harry Pachon, NALEO’s national director.

Throughout the Southwest, a majority of Latino office holders serve on school boards and city councils in small, rural towns or inner-city barrios. But Pachon predicts Latinos will continue to migrate from inner-city areas into the industrial periphery and older suburbs vacated by white flight. As for now, most elected Latino officials speak for constituencies that suffer from the long-term effects of economic gerrymandering.

Gloria Molina’s election in April to the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors marked a major departure from this unfortunate legacy. Although the courts redrew the 1st Supervisorial District to yield a Latino majority, it retains most of the San Gabriel Valley’s industrial infrastructure and many Latino- and Asian-owned businesses. A sizeable number of lower-middle-class homeowners live in the district.

In economic terms, the combined industrial muscle of 1st District cities--Irwindale, Rosemead, the City of Industry and the City of Commerce, for example--is comparable to Deane Dana’s 4th, with its aerospace, arms and petrochemical corridor stretching from Long Beach to Marina Del Rey. Although Molina’s district is home to some outdated smoke-stack industries, it includes many newer high-tech, light-manufacturing, warehousing and distribution industries. These maquiladoras in the suburbs, many capitalized with redevelopment dollars, employ the Latino working class in her district.

According to one prominent redistricting analyst, it was the fear of losing strategic political and economic resources, rather than ideological differences, that inspired the board’s former conservative majority to oppose the court-mandated redistricting plan. Leobardo Estrada, the UCLA professor of urban planning who drew the new district boundaries, says that his plan did not merely redress decades of political gerrymandering. It also inadvertently threatened to significantly reallocate the county’s economic space. After the dust settled, the 1st District retained many of the political and economic assets that former Supervisor Peter F. Schabarum used to crown himself “king” of supervisors.

The supervisors’ vast control over development matters throughout the county, ability to make political appointments and power to spend money in their districts make the office a magnet for campaign contributions. “Incumbent supervisors collected 91% of the campaign contributions given to supervisorial candidates from 1981 to 1986,” wrote J. Morgan Kousser, a Caltech professor of history, in a report filed in the redistricting case. Only 2% of the contributions were less than $100. Because supervisors rarely face viable challengers, they can amass huge war chests to advance their political interests.

Schabarum’s efforts during his 18 years in office to bankroll his conservative agenda were unrivaled. His political-action committee distributed at least $850,000 to other candidates and campaigns from 1981 to 1987, including $213,000 to Dana in 1984, according to Kousser’s report. The former supervisor also pumped more than $100,000 into the come-from-behind 1986 campaigns of Dana and Mike Antonovich to ensure a conservative majority.

Last year, Schabarum directed that more than $440,000 of his own campaign funds be spent on passing Proposition 140, the initiative limiting incumbent terms in Sacramento. Campaign records show that the funds, transferred through loans he later forgave, served as seed money to qualify the initiative, which he helped to draft, and raise another $1 million in contributions. Remarkably, Schabarum did this even as he diverted more than $52,000 to his favorite conservative causes and candidates.

Schabarum established his fund-raising prowess by perpetuating the policies that had helped transform the San Gabriel Valley’s rural expanses into a zone of uncontrolled suburban and industrial growth.

By the end of Schabarum’s tenure, however, his personal power had become so great that it threatened to undermine the county’s political power structure. The system designed to distribute the county’s budget and bureaucratic resources equally among its “five kingdoms,” Estrada said, had, because of unequal economic development, become a feudal pecking order; “he (Schabarum) began to act like the guy in charge,” since he had all the industry and vacant land in his district.

Molina has expressed her desire to distance herself from these good-old-boy practices. But it may be too much to ask her to fight an arrogant bureaucracy, rich contributors and lobbyists while initiating the reallocation of her district’s public and political resources according to her populist instincts. She needs a strategy for building a rainbow constituency that can help her make good on her campaign pledges to empower the disenfranchised.

One option is for Molina to take a page out of Schabarum’s book--with an important difference. Molina would have to look after the interests of big private and corporate developers even as she used a portion of their campaign contributions to build grass-roots movements that may challenge those interests. It is a delicate balance she would have to achieve, a challenge that few, if any, Latino--let alone Latina--populist politicians have faced, simply because few ever represented so rich a district.

Molina can reduce the temptations for political patronage by directing these surplus funds to one or more independent nonprofit endowments. These endowments would then be free to invest in groups that push for any of the following needed reforms:

--Candidates and causes dedicated to voter registration and rainbow-coalition-building.

--Redistricting campaigns that challenge the effects of economic as well as political gerrymandering.

--Efforts to lessen the growing disparity between rich and poor school districts.

--Groups seeking solutions to the San Gabriel Valley’s daunting environmental problems.

--Groups bargaining to recoup the $350 million in property taxes currently diverted to redevelopment agencies countywide.

Whether Molina adopts this or that proposal is unimportant. What is important is the rare opportunity she has for stimulating a free-ranging grass-roots dialogue on these issues. The Latino struggle for economic and social justice will require the marshaling of new political forces committed to structural economic reform. The benefits of such Latino empowerment strategies could be enormous. Molina could lead the way.