Board OKs Redrawn Boundaries : Representation: A Latino group accuses the county of strengthening Supervisor John K. Flynn’s reelection chances.

The Ventura County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday approved five new supervisorial districts, including the first in the county where a majority of voting-age residents are Latino.

Latino activists, however, said the new district for the Oxnard area is designed to improve Supervisor John K. Flynn’s chance of reelection and is illegal.

Though more than 50% Latino, the newly drawn 5th District only gives lip service to Latinos while actually diluting their voting strength in the Oxnard area, according to the Latino voting-rights group.

“If our experts agree with us, then we will file a lawsuit,” said attorney Marco Antonio Abarca, spokesman for the Latino group. “And if a lawsuit does come, it will cost Ventura County millions of dollars.”

County lawyers said the new districts are legal, and Flynn denied that he helped draw the new boundaries to strengthen himself politically.

“This is not an easy decision,” Flynn said. “It makes you look almost like you’re anti-Hispanic, and that isn’t the case at all.”

While the 5th District’s new boundaries prompted protest, there was no criticism of the relatively minor changes made in the county’s other four districts.

Overall, the new borders divide 669,000 residents counted in the 1990 census almost equally among five districts, while giving the county its first district with a potential majority of Latino voters.

“The least changes we can make and still achieve these goals, the better,” Chairwoman Maggie Erickson Kildee said.

Most affected was Flynn’s fast-growing 5th District, which was pared by 9,000 residents to put its population close to the 133,800 optimum for each district.

The supervisors voted unanimously to draft an ordinance incorporating the new districts into law. A final vote, which is considered a formality, is scheduled for Sept. 24.

But Abarca said that vote probably will not be the last word on county redistricting.

He said lawyers for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, which last year forced Los Angeles County to create a Latino supervisorial district, will review the Ventura

County case.

Abarca said the supervisors have ignored federal law in adopting the new 5th District boundaries. He called the redistricting plan “a deliberate act to fragment the Latino community” and boost Flynn’s chances of defeating a future Latino opponent.

The Latino coalition favors a plan that would increase voting-age Latinos in Flynn’s district from the current 48% to 54.5%, instead of the 50.1% specified in the proposal approved by the board.

Even the coalition’s proposal would not guarantee that a Latino would be elected supervisor, Abarca said, since thousands of residents in the 5th District are immigrant workers and cannot vote.

County Counsel James McBride assured the supervisors that their redistricting plan is legal and even goes further than is required by the federal Voting Rights Act and court rulings interpreting that law.

Even if the county had a history of dividing Oxnard Latinos to dilute their political power--and McBride said that is not the case--the remedy for such a problem would be to create a new district where more than 50% of voting-age adults are Latino, he said. The board has done that with its plan, he said.

The new supervisorial boundaries were also challenged Tuesday by former Oxnard mayoral candidate Scott Bollinger, who has announced that he will run against Flynn in 1992.

Bollinger charged Flynn with conspiring with county officials to cut neighborhoods that support Bollinger out of Flynn’s district. He asked the county grand jury to investigate whether the new boundaries were drawn “to insulate Supervisor Flynn’s incumbency from voters.”

Flynn, a four-term supervisor, denied gerrymandering boundaries to improve his chances of reelection.

Flynn said he had no idea where Bollinger, who drew 17% of the mayoral vote last year, had run the strongest until Bollinger complained publicly. Flynn said he does not consider himself vulnerable to a Latino candidate.

The supervisor said he has always run strongly in both heavily Latino neighborhoods and in the precincts near Oxnard College on which Bollinger has focused.

The Latino coalition proposed including heavily Latino El Rio and Nyeland Acres in Flynn’s district, instead of keeping predominantly white precincts in coastal and northern Oxnard in it.

Abarca said El Rio and Nyeland Acres, both next to Oxnard, have much more in common with blue-collar Oxnard than do affluent communities such as Silver Strand and Oxnard Shores on the beach and River Ridge and Strawberry Fields in north Oxnard.

“Historically, these neighborhoods have dominated Oxnard politics at the expense of the Latino community,” Abarca said.

Flynn said that while he cares deeply about creating a strong Latino district, he also had to consider other factors when helping to shape a new 5th District.

He noted that both El Rio and Nyeland Acres are in the county, not the city of Oxnard. “And I want to try to keep the city together as much as possible,” Flynn said before the hearing.

He said he thinks that it is important for the county supervisor who represents nearly all of Oxnard to also have within his jurisdiction such key community facilities as Channel Islands Harbor, Oxnard Airport and Oxnard College. They would have been deleted under the coalition plan.

And he said his clout in attempting to close the Bailard Landfill in 1993 as scheduled would have been diminished if he had let the north Oxnard dump be placed in another district.

The plan approved by the supervisors does have a significant effect on Oxnard. It moves several neighborhoods near Oxnard College and south of Oxnard Airport from the 5th District to the 2nd District.

The plan also moves two sparsely populated areas north and south of Ojai from the 3rd District to the 1st District, and it shifts an area near Newbury Park from the 2nd District to the 3rd.

Under the new plan, population in the five districts would range from 132,532 in the 1st District to 134,964 in the 3rd District.