Group Says Remap Plan Would Hurt Latino Vote : Politics: Supervisor John K. Flynn denies that the boundaries of his new district would fragment the minority community to aid his reelection.

Leaders of a Latino voting-rights coalition on Monday accused Ventura County Supervisor John K. Flynn of trying to create a new Oxnard-area district that improves his chance of reelection while diluting the voting strength of Latinos.

The County Board of Supervisors, including Flynn, last week tentatively approved a remapping of Flynn’s 5th District that would make it the first district in the county where a majority of adults are Latino.

But attorney Marco Antonio Abarca, a spokesman for the Latino voting-rights group, said the supervisors should reject that proposal at a second hearing this morning.

The plan does not place enough Latino voters into a single district and may even be illegal because two Latino communities next to Oxnard are left out of the new district, Abarca maintained.

“A key legal point is that you can’t fragment a Latino community in an effort to retain your incumbency,” he said.

Flynn is doing just that, Abarca said, by keeping predominantly white precincts in coastal and northern Oxnard in his district instead of including El Rio and Nyeland Acres, two Latino neighborhoods more typical of Oxnard.

Flynn, a four-term supervisor, denied the charge.

“The truth of the matter is that I get very strong support from Latino areas,” Flynn said. “I would probably run well in El Rio and Nyeland Acres.”

Indeed, when Flynn ran unopposed in 1988, he detected discontent only from the predominantly white, affluent beach community of Silver Strand, where he had voted to tax beach residents for public improvements. About 65% of Silver Strand voters refused to cast a ballot in his race, he said.

Flynn, up for reelection next year, has never faced a Latino opponent. He has run unopposed since 1980.

The supervisor said he favors the proposal to increase voting-age Latinos in his district from the current 48% to 50.3%, instead of the Latino coalition’s 54.4%, because he thinks that it is important to keep the Bailard Landfill and Channel Islands Harbor in his jurisdiction.

Both projects would be cut from his district under the Latino coalition’s proposal, he said.

“If I were to leave Bailard out of my district, that would reduce my power (to close it),” said Flynn, who opposes extending the dump’s use beyond its scheduled closing in 1993.

It also is important politically not to split Oxnard between two county supervisors, because that would create tremendous tensions, Flynn said.

“You can really get into some vicious problems when two supervisors are taking such a big part of a city,” he said. “And that makes it hard to make any progress.”

Abarca and Andres Herrera, a former Flynn aide and a coalition leader, said in interviews that whatever Flynn’s motivation, the county’s favored plan may violate the federal Voting Rights Act and result in a court challenge.

The act generally forbids governments from approving redistricting plans that would deny or abridge the right of a citizen to vote because of race.

“The Voting Rights Act says you do not split up minority areas,” Abarca said. “So our plan is the only one that is mandated by federal law.”

“Anything besides our plan would be unacceptable,” Herrera said. “And for them to rationalize the approval of any other would be self-serving.”

County Counsel James McBride said, however, that the Latino coalition has misinterpreted the law.

The supervisors’ preferred plan goes further than is legally required, since 50.3% of voting-age adults are Latino, he said. “It is absolutely legal,” McBride said.

The primary responsibility of the supervisors is to divide population equally among all districts, he said. After that, a number of factors must be considered, including the common interests of neighborhoods included in a district, he said.

While Abarca argues that El Rio and Nyeland Acres have much more in common with Oxnard than do coastal and northern Oxnard, that is only his opinion, McBride said.

Most of the predominantly white areas in Flynn’s district are part of the city of Oxnard, while El Rio and Nyeland Acres are in the county, he said.

The supervisors must approve their new districts by Nov. 1, making sure that they place about 134,000 people--one-fifth of the county’s population--in each one.

The board favors redistricting plans that make the fewest changes to existing districts. One criticism of the coalition’s plan was that it did not study how boundary changes in the 5th District would affect the other four districts.

The board may continue today’s hearing to Sept. 17 before making a final decision.