City Spent $250,000 on Activist’s Voting Suit : Oxnard: Officials defend the costs. The recently dropped legal challenge sought to change council representation from at-large to districts.

Financially strapped Oxnard spent more than $250,000 fighting a lawsuit by a Latino activist that challenged the city’s system of electing council members citywide, officials said Monday.

In fighting the legal challenge--aimed at increasing minority representation by electing council members by district--the city hired one of the best-known voting-rights attorneys in the state, two researchers from the Rand Corp., a think tank with conservative leanings, a USC political science professor and a University of Illinois statistician, City Atty. Gary Gillig said.

Filed by John Soria, an unsuccessful candidate for mayor last year, the lawsuit was dropped earlier this month. Soria said he had to withdraw the suit after he realized that he and his attorney, Gerhard Orthruber, could not prepare the case in time for a scheduled June 18 trial in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.

The city to date has paid $228,000 to a defense team headed by attorney John E. McDermott of Los Angeles, Gillig said, and expects to pay at least another $16,000 in legal bills.

Employees from the city clerk and city attorney’s offices also put in about $11,000 in staff time toward the city’s defense against the suit, Gillig and City Clerk Mabi Plisky said.

Gillig said time constraints inflated the cost of defending the suit. “All of this work was performed under extreme time pressure created by the deadlines imposed by the court,” he said. “These time pressures caused people to work 14- to 18-hour days on many occasions.”

In April, only days after the city had hired McDermott, the City Council rejected a settlement offer that called for a binding referendum on the issue.

Such a referendum, which would have given voters the option of maintaining the at-large system or switching to a six-district system drawn up by Soria, would have cost about $50,000, city officials said.

The city’s rejection of the settlement was widely criticized by Latino activists and representatives of three city-employee unions. They argued that the City Council was spending an inordinate amount of public money to prevent voters from deciding the issue--particularly at a time when the city was facing an acute financial crisis.

In recent months, the council has slashed more than $2 million from its 1991 budget by drastically curtailing city services and eliminating about 70 full-time jobs.

Council members said Monday that the money to fight Soria’s suit was well-spent because it sent a message that the city, despite its tight financial situation, will not be bullied into settlements by plaintiffs who do not have a valid case.

“If we give in to every lawsuit the city’s faced with, we’d be in a terrible situation,” Mayor Nao Takasugi said. “The city needs to stand up and take a position which it feels is correct.”

Plisky agreed: “We have to stand for something and be counted, and not be bullied by people who are trying to intimidate us into a settlement.

“Hopefully we’ll be saving money in the long run, because once the word gets out, we will see a decline in frivolous lawsuits being filed against the city,” he said.

Moreover, Plisky said, McDermott’s team gathered valuable information that could be used if a similar lawsuit is filed against the city in the future.

Council members, with the exception of Manuel Lopez, staunchly opposed district elections, saying they would lead to Chicago-style ward politics.

Lopez, the only Latino on the council, said he has mixed feelings about whether district or citywide elections would better serve the city. But he added that voters should be allowed to decide which system they like best.

Most Latino activists in Oxnard and elsewhere in the state favor the district system because they believe at-large elections dilute minority voting strength.

McDermott maintained that Soria, a retired university administrator, was forced to withdraw because he could not prove his contention that the city’s system has prevented minority candidates from winning elections.

Soria, however, contends that he had a valid case. He said he was unable to compete with the city’s financial resources.

Soria’s wife, Catalina Frazer de Soria, also a plaintiff in the suit, blasted the council for rejecting the settlement offer. “They wasted taxpayer money, sacrificing services that the community badly needs. Their attitude was completely racist.”

The Sorias said they spent about $65,000 on legal fees and their own research time to prepare the lawsuit.

Gillig provided the following breakdown of the city’s outside legal expenses:

* $121,511.81 to Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, McDermott’s law firm.

* $24,475 to Peter A. Morrison & Associates for a demographics study conducted by Rand Corp. demographer Peter Morrison.

* $25,000 to Hamilton, Rabinovitz & Alschuler, a consulting firm, for USC professor Francine Rabinovitz’s analysis of the effects of the city’s election system on minority voting strength.

* $20,979 to consultants Gansk & Associates for a voting-pattern analysis by Stephen Klein, a Rand Corp. statistician.

* $15,380 to the University of Illinois statistics department for election data provided by consultant Jerome Saks.

* $5,428.38 to Lawler, Bohnam & Walsh, a Ventura law firm retained to do preliminary work on the case before McDermott was hired.

* $3,743 to Rand Corp. for computer services.

* $6,126.80 for various demographic studies, census data and photocopies.

* $16,000 for estimated miscellaneous expenses yet to be billed to the city.