Countywide : Remap Plan Gets Committee’s OK

A county committee Thursday adopted a proposal for redrawing the county’s five supervisorial districts, which Latino community representatives have said they might challenge in court.

The proposed map would divide the city of Santa Ana, with the largest Latino population in the county, between two districts.

The committee, made up of aides to the five county supervisors, adopted that plan after a series of tense meetings attended by community representatives who had their own ideas of how to split the county five ways.

The plan will now go before the supervisors for adoption Aug. 13.

“I just hope they use a little bit of wisdom and knowledge and not let greed and politics get in the way of rational thinking,” said Arturo Montez, a member of the Hispanic Committee for Redistricting.

“There are a lot of minorities coming into politics, and I think some people are afraid of that,” he said. “There was an intent to split us up.”

But Barbara Brown, aide to Supervisor Roger M. Stanton, whose 1st District now includes all of Santa Ana, said the district under the proposed map still includes the areas of Santa Ana with the highest percentage of ethnic minorities. Only a tiny section in the northeast part of the city would be placed in the 3rd District, now represented by Supervisor Gaddi H. Vasquez.

The plan, she said, also places the city of Westminster, now split between two districts, into one--Stanton’s district.

The proposed 1st District also will include all of Fountain Valley and parts of Garden Grove.

“There was not an intent to split up cities, but to maintain a high percentage of Hispanics and Asians and to maintain the city of Westminster intact,” she said. Under the proposed redistricting, the ethnic breakdown for the 1st District would be 47% Latino, 36% white, 14% Asian and 2% black.

A map submitted by the Hispanic Committee would have carved out a district that would have been 50% Latino, 13% Asian.