Wilson Cites 2 Valley Districts in His Veto : Reapportionment: The governor says they protect the incumbents. Legislative overrides fail. The issue now is expected to be decided by the courts.

Republican Gov. Pete Wilson on Monday cited the proposed boundaries of two San Fernando Valley districts as examples of gerrymandering while vetoing redistricting plans by the Democratic-controlled Legislature.

Wilson singled out the redrawn lines of Republican Paula L. Boland’s 38th Assembly District, running from Thousand Oaks to Sunland, and Democrat Gary K. Hart’s 18th State Senate District, stretching from Canoga Park to Santa Maria in Santa Barbara County.

In announcing that he was rejecting the once-a-decade remapping legislation, Wilson said “the districts have been drawn with the objective of unduly protecting incumbents, thereby largely preserving the results of the prior decade’s outrageous gerrymander and depriving the public of competitive districts.”

Wilson actually vetoed three separate measures passed last week, each with somewhat different boundaries, for the state’s Assembly, Senate and congressional districts. The Legislature is required to redraw the lines to reflect population shifts reported in the 1990 Census, and lawmakers are expected to seek election in the new districts in 1992.

Within hours of receiving Wilson’s veto messages, both houses of the Legislature tried but failed to override the governor’s action. The issue now is expected to be decided by the courts.

Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco) criticized Assembly Republicans for failing to write their own redistricting plan. He defended the Democratic reapportionment plans as fair and described Wilson’s veto message as “a phony.”

But Wilson maintained that there are “a number of egregious examples of misshapen districts, each drawn for the purpose of packing Democratic or Republican voters.”

The governor said Hart’s proposed Senate district “unnecessarily includes parts of three counties through the device of a narrow strip that runs from Santa Maria to Canoga Park to maintain a Democratic district.”

But Joe Caves, a Hart aide, said that with the exception of adding part of Santa Maria, the proposed boundaries would roughly follow the lines of Hart’s current district, which also covers parts of Santa Barbara, Ventura and Los Angeles counties.

“This is a competitive district by any standard,” said Caves, citing Democratic voter registration of 46.7% and GOP registration of 40%.

Wilson took exception to the boundaries for Boland’s proposed 38th District, although it would still remain a strong Republican seat. The district would start in Thousand Oaks, dip south into Calabasas, cross the Santa Susana Mountains into Northridge and Chatsworth and then stretch “two fingers, one into Castaic and the other into Sunland/Tujunga,” Wilson said.

Under that plan, much of Republican Assemblyman Tom McClintock’s Thousand Oaks hometown would be taken out of his district and placed in Boland’s.

Boland, a Granada Hills lawmaker serving her first term, applauded the governor’s remarks, citing the “jags and turns” her district would take, especially in neighborhoods just south of Northridge. She described the plan as an “almost block-by-block gerrymandering.”

McClintock also criticized the proposals and agreed with Wilson that the plans were designed to protect incumbents.

He suggested that legislative map makers ignore where incumbents live and instead “start in the extreme northwest of the state and start counting off census tracts without regard to whose house is in what district, and then let the voters decide.”

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